Law School Episode 2 - Progress update #19

Hello everyone! I'm back from my holidays, and despite how short they were, a lot happened, so let's dive right into it.

First off, my main goal was to finish writing the last scene of the second episode of Law School, and I did it! While it’s not a huge win, at least I’m right on track with my goals. Now I’m working on creating the renders for that last scene. I say last scene, but it's actually two scenes. The second one is just very small.

Anyways, the good news is that, after wrapping up the writing, I could finally count how many lines of dialogue this episode has: we’re looking at around 5,500 lines. Not too bad, considering the first episode had around 6,200, if I’m not mistaken.

Now, onto something not as positive.

During the 9 days I was away, I had set both of my computers to render the static story images that had been piling up in the queue while I prioritized animations. Each computer had about 580 images to render, making a total of 1,160 images. I planned to check the progress daily from my laptop, and I did for the first two days. But, since I was quite exhausted during the holidays, I forgot to check after that. Even though I call them holidays, it was only my mind that got a break—each night, I went to bed early and woke up early for the day’s activities. Five days later, I finally checked the computers. One was working perfectly, but the other had been stuck on the same scene for 135 hours. Needless to say, the software had crashed, and I didn’t catch it. I restarted everything from my laptop, but that’s 135 hours of lost rendering, nearly 9 days now that I'm back, since my computers run for 15–16 hours a day.

I’m disappointed, but luckily it hasn’t caused too much harm, and that leads me to the second point.

Over two weeks ago, I sent 14 animations to the animator I work with. I told him to take his time since I was going to go on holiday, but I haven’t heard back yet. The silver lining is that I still have static images to render due to the aforementioned hiccup, so my second computer is handling those. However, I’m worried that by the time I finish rendering these images, I still won’t have received the animations, meaning my computers will sit idle, which would waste valuable time.

On the bright side, I have about 480 images left in the queue, plus I’m working on the images for the last scene and two (or maybe more) animations. So, I have about 7–8 days of rendering left, and once I finish the animations and remaining renders, probably another 8 days or so. If I don’t receive the animations within the next two weeks, I’ll start to worry, but for now, everything’s under control.

Now, about the last scene I’m working on.

I started it on Friday, as I was too tired to work after returning on Thursday morning. I’m roughly 40% done, so I’m confident I’ll finish before Saturday, which is the deadline I set for myself since I’ll have visitors for a few days.

After that, I’ll need to create about 20 Facegram images and fewer than 10 custom images for the game (secret rewards). This should take less than a day. I’ll also review all the images I’ve created to catch any clipping, lighting issues, eye problems, etc., and figure out which ones need to be reopened, fixed, and sent back to the rendering queue. This usually only takes a few hours, as less than 5% of my renders typically need fixes.

Once that’s done, we’ll move on to the next phase: post-work.

Funnily enough, I had a small wave of anxiety yesterday thinking, "Wow, we’re getting to the post-work phase." Subconsciously, I think my body and mind both know how exhausting this phase is. It’s always packed with a lot of work, emotions, and unexpected challenges. I can’t even remember the last time I felt anxiety—if not fear—about starting the post-work phase. I think this one feels monumental because of all the changes I need to make to Episode 1, both the new renders, but also the Facegram and the GUI.

That said, I’m still excited because it means we’re closer to the release date. If everything goes smoothly this week, and I get news from the animator, I’ll be able to announce a release date next Monday.

I also had a small surprise lined up for you all, but it’s taking longer than expected, so I’ll need to keep you in suspense for a bit longer!

Now, let’s talk numbers:

• 2,112 static story images

• 78 animations

• 34 scenes fully written

As you can see, between Friday and this morning, I created 187 story images. I’m pretty proud of that. It seems the holiday did me some good! Unfortunately, I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, but hopefully, it won’t slow me down too much. By the time I’m done with this last scene, I think we’ll be looking at nearly 2,400 renders for this episode.

That’s it for today’s progress update. Time to get back to work. Wishing you all a great week!

MisterMaya