Team Fortress 2 - Update #6

Good evening folks. And welcome to the weekend. Hope you're all smashing.

So it's editing day 35 of 35 on Team Fortress bullshittery. And I'm sorry to report that I wasn't able to complete it in the expected time. Sorry folks :(

It's near complete, but still in the quality assurance phase, in which tweaks are being made across the timeline. Here is a shot of it. The audio corrections remain unfinished at the end because they need some animation work finished first.

The pain point is really in one specific area - the Source Filmmaker animations. As whilst they're relatively simple to pose and animate, they are numerous, and are very difficult to properly shade and light. In addition to any normal finishing touches.

Here's the same timeline, but with timelines showing where the animations are:

So the problem I'm facing is juxtaposition.

Because my edit snaps between game footage and SFM so frequently, and the latter uses a much older version of TF2, the colour pallet and the shading can end up looking horrible. 

And compared to the modelling, the lighting tools of SFM are actually very primitive.

This means that every shot is a tedious task of adjusting spotlights and volumetric lighting. Trying to make the shadows look normal and make the reflective surfaces not look like water. And it's all an annoying time sink that involves posing, rendering, adding the render to After Effects. And THEN checking in Premiere. Only to find that it's wrong and you start over.

More or less every animation needs something done I'm afraid. Be it lighting, or just genuine mistakes you don't notice until quality assurance. Such as limbs clipping, or movement at the wrong times. Bogging the whole process down.

Additionally, I did decide to add one new animation to the whole composition. The third thumbnail in the top row with Harry's heavy lying down. I felt it improved the flow, as the comp went from SFM animation to game footage to SFM animation in quick succession. And it looked really weird with the aforementioned juxtaposition problem.

Better to just be in SFM and then stay there, I think. Hence an animation to bridge the gap.

So for now I'm afraid I just need to stay plinking away in Source Filmmaker. Slotting in the final animations one by one until it looks solid.

Sorry for the delay everyone. Thank you for your patience. I'm not entirely sure when I will have this done. Will keep refining and tweaking until it looks finished.