Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Update #6

Good evening everybody. I hope you've all had a nice weekend. Once again, another update on progress for the latest bullshittery.

Pasting the same weekly breakdown, as it seems to be a fairly neat way of summarising things:

• Week 1 - Pre-production work. Trying to plan a decent comedic structure by watching the vods and taking notes.
• Week 2 - Principle cutting. Producing a 25 minute rough cut from those notes.
• Week 3 - The first week of animation work. Getting from 0 to 5 minutes with text and animations.
• Week 4 - More animation work. Getting from 5 to 8 minutes. Then I became stuck!
• Week 5 - Rebuilding a horrible broken (and crucially important) dialogue scene from the single player. Animating it from 8 to 13 minutes.
• Week 6 - Queuing up all artwork for commissioned artists so they have time to do their work before the end of the project.
• Week 7 - Editing the 17th minute to the 22nd.
• Week 8 - (This week) Editing the final "fight" sequence between the party and Alexander. The 13th minute to the 17th.

Insofar as what's happened in the last week (which was week 7), having spent the prior week giving commission directions to artists, I felt like I wanted to hit the ground running. For this reason, I intentionally skipped the next section of the video and went straight to the end.

This is because the middle section is a little awkward. Being cut to a track from the Divinity soundtrack. And consisting of segments from multiple attempts at this particular boss fight (which kicked our collective arses over the course of 3 different streams).

Cutting it is going to be a bit of a head scratcher. Yet it needs to be finished.

Here's a shot of the timeline:

The effort last week wasn't particularly tricky, truth be told. Consisting of the standard keyframing work. I was able to get through it nice and smoothly.

Mercifully we're reaching the point of the playthrough where the party started to stick together more. As we're 6-7 sessions into the game now and have figured out how it works. This stands in sharp contrast to prior sessions where we would split up and accept quests willy-nilly.

As an editor, this lets me place text above peoples heads, which are naturally quite close together. Making it seem much more natural. A trend that should continue till the end of the game.

Additionally, the artists I regularly commission are beginning to come back with finished (or near finished) assets for the various cut-away gags. Such as in the above, where Quebec mocks my 'high strength, low intelligence' character Lump Beefbroth. Who seems to solve every problem with "Lump smash".

Stuff that is better shown, rather than annotated.

As the project continues and enters the quality assurance soon, I expect I'll be able to slot art in piece by piece. Hopefully it should all fit in.

Of particular note, on Friday I received the draft assets for the cutscene I'm looking to replace. Drawn by the exceedingly talented BewBewDingo. For those out of the loop, I mentioned in the last update that the existing Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 cutscene is pretty lacklustre. And I would like to replace it with something a bit more flashy.

Here is the games cutscene. Consisting of little more than some badly synced text on a piece of paper.

And here's what I had in my brain. A more appropriate transition. Showing the heroes being taken out to The Lady Vengeance (the party's ship) by the mysterious character "Malady" (voiced by Amelia Tyler)

On going through the draft assets that BewBew has sent over, I decided to spend Friday and today doing another previsualization. Just to make sure I get everything right in my head.

Doing so proved wise. As I was able to spot a dozen things worth addressing before BewBew spends hours on finishing touches. But do a look and see what she's done (in link form, as turning it into an embedded gif mangles it):

Comparison 1 - https://i.imgur.com/V4rkOcY.mp4 

Comparison 2 - https://i.imgur.com/UUA8HgJ.mp4 

I mean it's night-and-day when compared to the cutscene from the game. BewBew is a wizard. And in making a second previs, I was able to identify some important animation lessons ahead of the final animation work.

The first lesson - Breaking waves look excellent in a static image. But when placed against a moving background, the frozen spray is awkwardly highlighted as artificial. Hanging in mid air.

Lesson 2 - The waves themselves require exceedingly well-defined boundaries, else more distant and slower moving currents break the illusion,

And lesson 3, using larger wave swells can make it look as though the gaps between the waves are quite cavernous. Letting me identify where additional  layers might be needed to make it look convincing:

Also the animation has presented another minor problem that requires forethought. How is the launch being propelled? Especially since Malady arrived solo prior to the cutscene. And it's a pretty chunky boat. I doubt its steerable by a single person and one set of oars.

My idea would be to have Malady's left arm extended. And I'll use After Effects to make it look as though wind is moving through her hand and her cape is flapping in the breeze. As though she's using sort of spell to draw us out to The Lady Vengeance. Which would also fit with the dialogue. Since the narrator explains that the party is exhausted. Meaning we can be slumped down in the boat.

So TL;DR for this week? I need to finish that middle section from the 13th minutes to the 17th. And hopefully by the end of this week, all the pieces should be in place. And I'll be entering the quality assurance renders. Polishing the video ahead of its completion.

Once again, sorry that this sort of thing is taking so long. Thank you for your patience.

Have a lovely week everyone!