The Normandy's Bitch Write Up

The Normandy's Bitch project is finished, and there's a lot to go over. It's going to be a wall of text for anyone interested in that kind of stuff.

I'll start with reception. While it's done as well or better than expected around twitter and such, it has only hit about the minimum of exceptions for additional patreon support. It's been a relief to see it received quite while with a lot of great comments. I still worry for the financial sustainability of more projects. The bright side is that this is the first time in months that I have a net gain in patrons. The downside is that most of those are temporary, and it's not brought me much higher than the start of the month. My only option is to stick to the plan and hope I can continue to build things up with the next few movies. I have some ideas to beef up the $10 tier with alternate outfit versions. I only haven't for The Normandy's Bitch so far because body morph sliders caused lots of clipping issues, so I have to fix those before rendering.

The rest of the post is going to be dedicated to the project itself, and all the things I learned along the way. For workflow, I'll start by charting things out.

Previous workflow: 

posing-> recording audio-> lip sync-> base animation-> additional animation/ polish-> lighting

The Normandy's Bitch workflow: 

posing-> lighting-> base animation-> recording audio-> lip sync-> additional animation/ polish

After initial posing, nothing else is in the same order. A lot of the workflow happened this way for The Normandy's Bitch without trying but actually helped the project immensely, and I think it can help with future movies going forward.

Lighting:

I think this one is actually pretty huge. Ordinary, I'd save it for last. That made plenty of sense. It's faster, performance-wise, to leave lighting off while animating. Lighting has to be done to fit the scene, so save it for when everything else is finalized. The problem is that lighting is important even when setting up the basic pose at the start. Often times, issues with the model and pose are only really visible with lighting, so it makes more sense to do them together.

Lighting also sets the mood for the whole scene. It was actually hugely motivating to work on scenes with near finished lighting from the start. It meant that every step of the way I could look at the scene the way it should look finished. By the time the animation was finished, the lighting took almost no tweaking. It was such a relief to be able to call a scene done when I was done animating. I didn't finish animating only to have multiple hours of frustrated lighting to go. Such a change in workflow made a pretty massive difference.

Lip Sync:

This is something I did earlier in workflow before. It made sense to do before animating because it's easier to lip sync the character when they aren't moving. It's also an easy place to start a scene. The problem is that it's also pretty tedious, and on its own, doesn't add much to the scene. At this point in the project, I'd have spent hours posing, pacing out the audio, and lip syncing, but it would feel like I'd have almost nothing done. It'd be barren with no major animation or lighting. I was unintentionally demotivating myself. It made already huge scenes seem even bigger.

For The Normandy's Bitch, I had little difficulty adding in Miranda's lip sync after she already had her main animations done. The face flex sliders made it pretty much just as easy either way. Jack was more difficult because she had face bones. In her case, I actually used a second, unposed model. I animated her lip sync with that one and copied it over.

Base Animations:

This is part of the workflow I usually did later but tried slightly earlier in The Normandy's Bitch. Base animations are the foundation of any scene. As such, there's always a weight to setting them up. For past projects, I'd put them off to the project's detriment. For The Normandy's Bitch, I did them earlier and flew through them pretty quickly. In addition to the lighting, they gave life to the scenes. This was a motivating factor because later details like lip sync felt like they were adding to already significant scenes.

Additionally, I wanted to get the base animations done before any recording to give the actors a better frame for their acting. I think this definitely helped with audio pacing. While this stalled the project about a week and a half as I waited for the audio, it actually had an unintended bonus. It forced me to walk away from the initial animations and come back to them fresh. I often get stuck with base animations trying to refine them. When I continued animating after distancing myself a little, I actually had very little I needed to change.

I also did all parts of animation in a row before. I'd do the foundation and then immediately blend that into adding variation, details, and polish.  This made animation into a slog by doing all of the facets consecutively. The process for The Normandy's Bitch helped break up the animation process into more manageable parts.

Conclusion:

It's funny to think that mostly all I've changed is just shuffling the order of the way I did things, but, mentally, it made such a huge impact. I look back at the ways I used to do things, especially for Undercover ASSignment, and I realize how decisions made for efficiency were actually not that efficient and were drastically demotivating. It took just one short movie to learn so much. I'm disappointed in myself that I had not managed things better. After all this, The Normandy's Bitch is the first short movie I've released with proper voice acting! Undercover ASSignment was not something I was ready for, and I can't help to think how far it has set me back. At the very least, I've learned a lot from The Normandy's Bitch, and I look forward to applying this to movies going forward.

The Normandy's Bitch is a small step, but it does seem like the first right step I've taken in a while.