Project Forlorn

Did some animation tests on the face this week.  So far I'm happy with the results.  There are a few minor updates I need to make to some of her skin materials in unreal, but that's the biggest thing I saw at the time.  I won't really know for sure how it's working until I get into the thick of it, and maybe coming back to it in a few months I'll see more problems, but it's in a place right now where I can set it aside and work on the layout for Part I. I still anticipate Part I to be an easier task than the current released episode or any of the following.  The set is built and ready to go, all I need to do aside from animation is build a couple of simple props and rig a couple of set pieces.  I'm hoping it's just a simple and straight forward process. I made some aggressively terrible boards just to block in the major ideas and to make sure all of the angles and shots I had in my head would flow together well.  I made these boards during a lunch

Facial rigging continues mostly smoothly.  I've had to a lot of facial rigging for professional jobs in the past, and it's never been one of my favorite things, mostly due to the complexity of facial shapes and linking them together.  I finished the first round of blend shapes for Kaelis and created a control panel to run them.  It's not much to look at, but the best part of working on a project alone is nothing has to make sense to anyone but yourself.  I ran through hours of testing and tweaking to ensure that all of the shapes work in conjunction with one another. I plan on doing a proper facial animation test in the coming weeks.  I have an old animation I can use for the body animation, so that saves me some time there.  The facial animation aspect of the project won't come into play in earnest until Part III, so once I do the test and determine nothing is broken I'll set aside this aspect until a later date.  I imagine I'll continually add to and tweak

Now that the first episode is out, it's time to go back to the rigging stage and give the main character her facial controls.  That is so far presenting a whole slew of challenges.  Pro tip - Unreal does not care for weight painted blend shapes, so make sure each shape is self contained.  In the mean time, why not divulge some information about her origins. Forlorn's main character's name is Kaelis. She's a character I sorta had in concept for a long time, though, like many of my ideas, it existed in a wishy-washy, ethereal state.  It wasn't until I decided to make Forlorn that her design and character finally materialized.  Her look is one of those things that sorta came to me all at once.  I don't remember ever having any kind of iterations with her design.  Once I knew the story her costume just kinda popped into my head.  I love it when that sort of thing happens, it saves me a lot of trouble.  This crappy scribble is the first thing I put down on paper:

It's only been a few days since the release of the first episode of Forlorn but the response I've received is more positive than anything I could have anticipated.  It's incredibly relieving to hear that people enjoyed the short and are interested in seeing more.  Thank you everyone for your kind words!  It truly means a lot to me that you enjoyed my little experiment, and I can't wait to show you what I have coming up! The most exciting reaction to the release was also the most unexpected.  It turns out I was featured in this weeks official Unreal Engine showcase! Not only was it featured, but it was also the thumbnail!  I found out by scrolling through the new videos tab on Youtube, only to find a familiar image staring back at me.  It was one of those wave-like reactions, where I thought "Yep, there's my video... wait, I didn't post on youtube... wait, what?"  I'm so incredibly grateful to the folks over at Unreal for their support! I&#

It's finally here!  After... what day is it... one year and three months of fairly steady production I have finally finished the first segment of Forlorn!  It's been a long and arduous road, but I'm happy I came out the other side with something, at the very least.  It may not be much, but it's something I've wanted to do for a very long time and I'm going to continue with this project until I feel it's truly complete.  So I present to you, Forlorn - Part II: I truly hope you enjoy it! You may be asking me, "Why are you calling it Part II?  I don't see a Part I."  Well, originally I was going to make a whole short film, but it eventually dawned on me that the scope of the project was well outside of my means without being my full time job.  But I didn't want all of the assets I had made to go to waste, so I stripped down the story significantly and decided to make a section in the middle with more action so I could use it for my r

In the original version of the story, the prize the main character sought was a spear.  In the expanded version, the spear was an artifact used to pierce the tree of life, laying waste to the world around it and creating a horde of monsters with too much life, so to speak.  I thought it would be fun for the object to be a possession of the antagonist.  Eventually that spear would have been stabbed into a big monster and there would have been a big, exciting chase that would take me years to finish.  But in this current, stripped back version that proved to be too much to ask.  Without the time to make a horde of monsters with too much life, so to speak, I had to resort to a more traditional macguffin.  So, what better way to retain that idea then to make the monster the prize?  So I came up with the idea of an embryonic creature trapped in an otherworldly amber, which was held and guarded in a chamber.  I have lore reasons for all of this, but it's a lot to go into and that's b