Animation done: Post-Production Begins!

(ABOVE) Painterly clouds in Blender3D! Although I'm far away from using 3D in character animation, I'm becoming very comfy using it for backgrounds

The following post does not contain any major spoilers.

Hey Patrons!

Good news: The animation for Story #7 is complete! This includes the battle choreography and the couple of minutes for the ending sequence. 

This is a big step towards completion, since I can now focus on polishing scenes and "filling in the gaps":

• DONE: Animate Battle Scenes
• DONE: Ending Animatic & Animation
• In Progress: Final background & ink*
• In Progress: Compositing
• In Progress: Scoring
• Patreon Cameos & Credits

*We still have a big task of rendering out the detailed backgrounds, so adding in those Patron cameos is just around the corner. I've been doing some serious R&D into achieving improved perspective and smoothness via 3D animation + painted textures. The results are very promising, for this animation and future ones too!

One of the many background scenes rendered by Rebonkulous

I've attached some of the 3D WIP tests and scenes to this post (spoilers).

Etsy Shop Rebooted

Thank you to all of you who purchased from my website's Gumroad site as part of the recent figurine sale. You've helped me recoup the production costs and I have been able to increase the pay to the team. Designing and creating physical merch is very fun for me, so I believe it's worth it to keep doing. 

One downside is that packaging & shipping things around the world is pretty difficult, even with help from family. To improve things, I'm switching back to my Etsy shop instead of Gumroad since it better calculates the delivery cost. I will likely be handling the delivery of Patron keychains through Etsy via an exclusive coupon to you guys. I also dig the layout of Etsy, even if it's not directly integrated with my website.

The shop is OPEN right now if you'd like to browse the existing selection, along with preview images of some unreleased items!

Not out of the woods yet:

We're certainly in the final stretch, and I'm incredibly excited to share the result of hundreds of hours of work.  Especially so since the patrons, stream viewers, and production team have been very supportive of the project this past year.

Despite all that, I will be taking care not to rush the finishing touches on the animation and premiere. Something that the Fortnite delay taught me was how valuable an extra few weeks can be for not only the art, but for general well-being and health. I was plenty prepared to release Story 0 early, but I can't imagine how stressful it woulda been! 

So as always, I'm thankful for your patience.