BlueLightSFM

Year in Review

Added 2018-12-07 21:48:48 +0000 UTC

Welcome to the roller coaster that is my SFM work, this new low brought to you by the Tumblrpocolypse. I think most points in this post have been mentioned before, but this is a more comprehensive post, and I think that I can articulate a few things better.

I'll start with Tumblr. It certainly sucks that 10k+ followers are going down the toilet. Twitter doesn't seem like a great alternative, but it's also the most popular one for now. It's possible that branching out to other sites could be beneficial, but I'm pretty worried this could be a hit to exposure.

Next up, my main project, Undercover ASSignment: Omega. There's a lot I can talk about here, but I think I can articulate it better with the title. Undercover ASSignment: Omega. I've got nothing about the undercover assignment, and it barely looks like Omega. So what the fuck am I doing?

Well, that's because the movie was only ever going to be 5 minutes long, and only use audio from the games. The scene build actually predates having any voice actors on the project. It was actually a re-make of another scene build inspired from the Citadel's Purgatory. Otherwise, the only Omega inspirations are the center hologram spire and the skybox (which you can barely even see, lol). Okay, so that's the scene buildings. Even if I could fix that, there's still the story.

The story was kept short to keep animation time and voice acting costs low. Yet the movie still ended up being 15-20 minutes to include a good variety of scenes. So now I have an overly lengthy movie that somehow still isn't good enough. Can't cut stuff without reducing quality. Can't add stuff without money. Can't make money when nothing is finished. Can't finish shit when everything is so long. Can't do other projects if I've got the movie. Outside of the movie and some posters, I've completed 5 whole loops, oh boy.

So what have I completed this year? Well, 4 minutes of animation towards the movie should be pretty impressive. Except even that is incomplete in terms of lighting, transitions, sound work, and editing. So the most I've completed is still too unfinished to see any public release. And quite frankly, I don't think it's good enough either. I suppose that's the problem with working on something for so long. If I get better, the beginning will be worse. On top of that, I have to sacrifice quality for length of the movie. So I've sunk most of the year on something I really want to make, yet I'm not really please with.

The disappointment of having to consider re-working or adding to an already huge yet unfinished project is crushing.

I've also tried blender. That was actually pretty fun to learn. I've gotten reasonably used to it, and I like being able to directly manipulate stuff. The quality work other people have put out is pretty amazing. But it sure seemed like hitting a brick wall once it came to performance. My aging GTX 770 just isn't cutting it. Trying to play around with lighting and shaders was awful. Rendering was so slow. So now I'm disappointed in SFM yet can barely manage to utilize Blender. Perhaps 2.8 will help.

There's probably more to say, but this turned into such a rant. Thanks to anyone who bothered to read it all. I'll summarize:

I want to create more stuff, loops or whatever, and I'm really disappointed with how few things I've made this year.
Undercover ASSignment: Omega isn't cancelled, but damn if I haven't almost convinced myself once I typed this all out.
Blender could be cool but I've struggled mainly because of performance.

I'd really appreciate feedback. I don't want to disappoint anyone, but I don't really know what to do. I don't really know what people want me to do.