Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Working on a side project for a bit

Good morning folks. Hope you're all having a groovy start to your week.

I'm back having taken a week off. And I'm feeling very much refreshed and relaxed. I went fishing a couple of times, played around with Blender for the funsies. And generally did very little of any real consequence whilst drinking beer.

It was great :D

Before I crack on with the next bullshittery proper, I hope you won't mind if I detour into a beleaguered side project of mine whilst my brain at its most recharged? The floundering Random Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery.

Floundered is the wrong word. Beached is a better one! For I fear I have genuinely bitten off more than I can chew with this one.

For new patrons/Twitch subscribers, several years ago some of the ZF clan members played a game of D&D. It was pretty funny. And it became an audio-only cut of a potential bullshittery. And I was hoping to outsource the fully animation work.

For this purpose, a previsualisation guide was crudely made. And is actually viewable as it's own bullshittery right here, if you fancy it:

Random Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - https://youtu.be/diU78WxVnqg 

As it turns out though, commissioning such a lengthy and complicated cartoon was obscenely expensive, based on the quotes I had back. Being 25 minutes long and involving 9 different characters against about 50 different backdrops. I quickly found out why animation on Youtube consisted of short clips.

Therefore I resolved to instead try to animate it myself, whilst commissioning artists could draw the assets. Providing swappable face shapes and limbs that I could move.

It seemed so simple on paper. Just take the previsualisation assets and upgrade them one by one. And then animate them whenever they're talking or moving. With just repeatable idle animations when they're standing around:

The problem is the amount of faff that is. Animation is fiendishly difficult.

And since the video is 25 minutes long (more than double the length of a normal bullshittery) with nine different characters, even if some of them simple idle in the background, that's still time I need to spend putting them in the scene, adjusting them, duplicating them, adjusting them again. So it's still about still 6-9 bullshitteries of effort. All layer caked on top of each other.

You can see that layer caking in progress, as the previs changes with each batch of work. 

Crude looking previs assets are just hanging out next to near-final versions. With some random jawline just...lurking..in the lake behind them. God only knows which composition that's a part of. Genuine mistakes start creeping into the compositions due to mounting complexity.

My point is the same one I make every time I talk about this project.

Animation is fiendishly difficult.

The good news is though, of the nine characters, only two remain. So it does feel as though progress is being made, despite how long this project has been on the back burner.

Maddeningly those remaining two are the characters of myself and Cyanide. Who share the overwhelming bulk of the dialogue, as you'd probably expect. And dialogue is by far the most complicated part the animate.

The commissioned artist has managed to near-finish one of the most common assets for my character Lump Beefbroth. And over the weekend I was able to animate about 1 minute of test footage to verify that it works. I'd like to spend some time animating more so I can push this project forward.

So that's the plan. See what I can do to push this forward, if that's alright with you guys? Not sure how long. Really a case of trying to do as much as I can because, it would be really nice for this to see the light of day.

I think some folks might enjoy it.