Progress Report - September 18, 2020

Hello everyone!

It's been another 2ish weeks since the last update, and I apologize for that. However, hopefully I will be making more regular posts going forward!

As you can tell by this post's image, I have returned to working on Liziverse. I had a manic episode last night, and was on the fringe of abandon-releasing it - but just as I was about to publish a 9-Tweet thread about how much of a worthless waste of space I am, my dinner finished and I had to take a break to eat.

Upon returning, my frantic mind had cooled down, and what was left behind was a steely resolve to get this project done to the best of my ability. And that is exactly what I am doing for the next few weeks.

The first thing I tackled was properly scenebuilding and lighting the office sequence. Compare to the last time I showed it off:

And I think we can all agree this is a massive improvement in quality. While the bulk of the work done is in regards to the lighting and scenebuilding, you'll notice a few shots were added for pacing, and a few others adjusted slightly. But otherwise 95% of the shots are the same as they were before.

With this renewed vigor in tow, and riding on the coattails of getting the automatic lip-sync workflow done (albeit that wasn't actually used for Liziverse - I had already lip-synced it all by the time I had the tool written!), I decided to dust off my Kinect and try motion-capture again.

The initial test is very encouraging. I am planning to use motion capture as a basis for the narrative / dialogue / idle animations in Liziverse. If I can get them to behave well, it should massively speed up production.

I won't provide any ETAs. But I am going to be suggesting my sound designer kick it into high gear over the coming weeks.

Beyond the Liziverse work, I have been working on a few other things. Rachaos is still eyeballed to be my next project (I am hoping to use some motion-capture for it, too - motion-capturing the four-armed Chaos will be... interesting to figure out); D.Va will be having a new outfit, put together for Rabbit.Hole Episode 4 (production beginning sometime in mid-2021), released to the public (I won't explain what the context of the outfit is for, though!); and I have been slowly investigating a visual-novel prototype as my first foray into Unity game development in early 2021.

That's all I have for now!