What I'm Working On #024

Hey all! I'm back with another update on how I've been spending my modding time. I completely skipped last week, so this week's is arriving early. Today's update has probably fewer sneak peaks and more details on how I made things work.

Ballet Mod

Y'all, I'm exhausted. 😴 I know this is a recurring theme, but things always take longer than I expect. I had most of last week off, and I think between Sunday and Thursday I spent at least 50 hours on this mod alone? Idk. I had more to do to finish it than I expected and I'm learning I really need to pace myself and be gentle with myself with expectations.

One breakthrough I made - though again, better animators have probably figured this out a long time ago - was editing a script to use in Blender when converting animations for children. These animations travel a lot, and they take adult sized steps. The arms, the spine, and other bones all scale to size when you first transfer the animation, but the foot targets (which help me keep the feet on the ground) and the root bone (which controls how far the whole rig moves) do not. It's not always immediately noticeable, but you can see the changes in the picture below.

Editing this manually could take forever. The Clara animation was 1000 frames long. Most of the practice ones were anywhere between 200-400, and there are 10 unique ones each for practice and the barre. When I run the following Python script, it does it for me automatically!

But figuring it out took a bit of time. :) What the script does is essentially scale the keyframes around the starting bone location.

But enough about the Ballet mod for now! I have so many future updates planned, and now that the core is there - things like duets, trios, more variations - all possible in the future. But I need a bit of a break to catch my breath and work on other promised mods and updates!

Grandfather Clock

I've been working on the Grandfather Clock a bit this week too, and my most recent happy moment was figuring out how to get it to tell time (or, the hours at least!).

I also made the rig and animated it, but ran into some trouble porting the animation into the game. I think I'm somehow misunderstanding the idle component of objects... but I haven't sunk too much time into it yet, so I'm hopeful it will be an easy fix.

Excited to see this one done! I love the sound of clocks chiming.

This Month

Finally I wanted to talk about what the upcoming month is going to look like, and I'm sorry to say that this might be disappointing news to some - but I am going to push the Regency content update to May. The next update will include a fully fleshed out dancing skill, and based on how long the Ballet mod took me, there's just no way I can get it done to my satisfaction and include all of the other details users have been suggesting in time for April.

However that does not mean I am postponing work on it - in fact I've already started investigating how group dances and line dances can work. Solo dancing practice will be included too! There will also be other new content around estate ownership, an expansion of the servant mechanic, and an update to Lady Whistledown.

That does mean that I owe y'all another skill mod for this month though! Because it's simpler and I know I can get it done in time, I would like to make another instrument. :). There will be a poll out today to help me choose which one. The voting period will be very short on this one because I need to get started right away.

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That's it for now folks! Thank you so much to everyone who's shared excitement, support, words of encouragement! I mean it when I say I couldn't do this without you. <3

Until next time, ~ Jane