The time is near…
A lot of painful processes, but a lot of learning along the way. Working on and finally finishing Satan was ultimately rewarding. Even though there are some things I think I will ultimately change in the future, I am glad that he’s done and better than expected.
Just before working on him, I was talking to a friend who also models and is working on a game. She said that there are some characters she still has to work on, and lamented that it was going to take a long time. I told her what I use, and that I could have a working demo in a couple hours with CC4, based on the drawing provided. Don’t know if she actually said to do it, but I saw it as an opportunity to get more practice in with the software. It went from demo to working on it for a few days. I ended getting obsessed, and was ultimately going for the best that I could. I’m glad I did, because it gave me much needed experience that I would need for my own character. There were some struggles, but it came out looking good. Like really good. I was very pleased with the result, as was everyone else whom I showed it to (I’ll make a separate post when I have time).
That experience paid off, as I felt much more confident working on the Satan model. I think it looks quite good, and it also animates really well. It was yesterday that I decided to feature lock it so I could work on setting up for videos.
Speaking of which, what’s next? I’d found out late about a challenge hosted by Rokoko to create a short video that’s supposed to mimic a dating app profile with a 8 second video, animating the body using their new Rokoko Video for animation. Simple, right? Plan was to use the new Carl and Satan models, animate them separately, and bring them into a scene to render. With less than 20 hours until the deadline, this isn’t happening. Current roadblock is just getting the models imported into UE5. Making them higher quality increases file size (duh), and dramatically increases the time to import. It doesn’t scale linearly. What normally takes seconds for a “normal” game character model can now take many hours. One character I played with was almost 30MB, and the Carl model alone is over 1GB. So yeah… Given all the unknowns beyond that, I decided to cancel my entry since there would still also be mo-cap, lighting, rendering, editing, voice over, etc…
Which brings me to what I can work on, and that’s continuing my original plan of shorts and a recurring show. The set for the show is over 90% complete, and hopefully once the characters are properly imported and setup I can work on the actual production. Also, will be building scenes to make other short films that I’d like to make with a higher quality visual aesthetic.
One more thing… I know I need more hardware. Hardware that I know isn’t cheap, so I decided to try my hand at creating characters for other people to make some extra cash. Will give me some more needed practice, and maybe I can crank these out to help fund what I need.
