HIGHLIGHTS
Anticipating the changeover to monthly subscription billing at Patreon, I wanted to get our episode finished. In my mind, it’s a terrible outcome if people were to get billed, but find we had never released what they signed up for. But if we can just release that episode, then the changeover isn’t that big of a deal.
And this would probably be okay, even if the episode fell a little short, even if it’s our best effort. And then I’d announce the change.
In fact, it wastn’t quite as finished as I wanted, and I did not quite manage to release it in 2024, but I did release a coherent, watchable pilot episode for “Lunatics!” which came out early in the New Year of 2025 (I was able to post it on January 2nd). This is, I think, good enough, as it will have to be.
PRODUCTION
I did not get started on production as quickly as I had hoped, but I did put in a total of about 68 hours of production (which combined with 11 hours in November makes 79 hours) in what I called “Crunch Time” to finish the New Years 2025 release for Patreon.
Production Timelapse: Crunch Time – New Year 2025 Release
A major part of this work was reconstructing and revising the animation in the TR3 “train interior character action” scene file. I had feared this animation might be difficult or impossible to recover, but it wasn’t really that bad, and I was able to get it cleaned up.
Lunatics S1E01-TR3 Character Animation Cameras
And then I retimed the TR sequence:
Draft S1E01-TR Train Sequence Reconstructed & Retimed
I put in a lot more work on final tweaks before rendering the version that I released on Patreon. I was not able to get much beyond this TR sequence finished, and I ultimately used the old version of the TR2 shot, because I had too much trouble getting the reflections of the camels to work right. This was a tricky thing about the TR2 shot, because Freestyle doesn’t support reflections in Blender, and yet I wanted the camels to be inked. So I implemented a “reflection camera” system to simulate the reflection. Since I had to rescale the exterior shot and since the interior of the train is also being composited with a mask, this became complicated enough that I could see I wasn’t going to finish it in time.
Other shots that I had hoped to update I also had to leave as they were.
All of this work would appear to be feasible to complete in February and March of 2025, prior to the planned April 12th release. So that has become my plan.
DOCUMENTATION
Anticipating being too busy to post regularly, I wrote the “Crunch Time” post showing where to find my Fediverse updates as I worked.
I worked on, but did not finish, an article about my plans for the Virtual Studio in 2025, and in particular, a simple business plan for shared hosting on our co-located server, once we set it up. I hope to publish this article in January 2025, with a definite plan for the migration and setup.
MAINTENANCE
I still had some nagging maintenance issues. The new car that my son purchased stalled, requiring an expensive tow, even though it was just a few miles. It required a replacement 12V battery, which is not an uncommon repair at its age and mileage. So the circumstances were uncomfortable, but the repair wasn’t that bad.
Video Log
Video Log 2025-01-05: Early Pilot Release! (For Patreon)
Happy New Year!
Looks like it will be memorable, at least. Let’s make the best of it!
