The Normandy's Bitch Update 4 (Patreon)

An earlier update to make up for the other ones! I've made some great progress so this is a full update report.

As mentioned, I have all audio in from the voice actors. It's been added into SFM and paced out to the scenes. The audio actually extends out the scene with Jack and the finale. On the flip side, I think I'm going to cut the two really short Grunt scenes. Mainly, with the audio in place, they don't really fit the pacing well. It's not that significant though since they only add up to 4 seconds total. The scene with Jack is 8 seconds longer, and the finale is 7 seconds longer. In total, the movie gains a little bit for a 101 second run time.

As shown off last week, scene 1 is nearly done. It just needs some polish. Scene 2 mainly needs facial expressions.

Scene 3 is the major update. Over the last few days I crunched out basically the entire 26 second scene from scratch. Aside from the intro, it was the only scene that didn't have any base animation done since I needed the voice acting to lead it.

I didn't mention before that I had to port an XNA model of Jack. The only version I had didn't have any eye posing. When I went to recompile to fix it... I realized it actually didn't have any face bones. For continuity sake, I wanted to keep with her ME2 model, so I ported an XNA version. My blender experience paid off and I was finally able to figure out how to properly port with it to SFM. Mainly, it had to do with applying scale changes and assigning materials to the proper names. All this just so I could do her lip sync with two lines of dialogue. I still had to use face bones for lip sync, and that is incredibly tedious. And just for fun, even though she has 2 lines to Miranda's 5, she actually has 29 spoken words to Miranda's 22. Some real great planning here lol.

I think that's all worth it though because Gina's audio is great. The scene has very little looping motion, so it is probably the hardest one in the movie. Aside from Jack's fingers and some polish, the scene is basically done. At 26 seconds, it is the longest in the movie. Only the finale is about that long at 25 seconds. And at 26 seconds, that is also about a quarter of the entire movie right there.

The next few scenes should be a breeze in comparison since they already have the base loop motion done. Most of them are much shorter too. I can probably post some WIPs of the other scenes for the end of the week.