May 5th, 2024 Update

Hello, just want to give a brief update on what we're up to:

Full Circle

We did not anticipate Full Circle blowing up in the way that it did; we quadrupled our subscriber count, gained 60,000 views, and finally became eligible to join the YouTube Partner Program. We also gained a significant amount of new patrons (welcome, by the way). Thank you all for pledging your support!

We plan to release some bonus content for Full Circle; we already have most of the frames rendered for a drum-only camera; just need to re-render a few frames that didn't play nice while rendering. We also want to create a set construction style video. No ETA on when we'll put those out right now.

MIDAS

I'm currently in the process of completely revamping the entire music animation engine (aka MIDAS). For years now I've been putting off a third version of the software; with Full Circle's popularity and not very many active projects relying on V2 anymore, I've finally decided it's time.

The goals of the third version are:

• Separation from Blender: Not to say we'll be switching any time soon, but in the case that we do end up switching to some other software, that's now an option for us. V3 is now its own executable separate from Blender, and sends data via inter-process communication to Blender. This data can be interpreted by any software that implements some kind of plugin capabilities, so if we wanted to switch, all we'd need to do is write a plugin for reading the data and converting it to that softwares keyframe structure.

• Clean the Codebase: V2 is a mess of random experiments and bad decisions from the last four years. I've basically never removed anything to keep full compatibility with scripts since August of 2020; so a massive restructure has been needed for a while now.

• Different Scripting Language: I am not really a big fan of Python. I like Lua a lot more as a scripting language, and C# as a programming language. V3 implements a slightly custom subset of Lua as the scripting language (only a few changes, such as single-statement conditionals, string interpretation, etc), with the ability to use objects from the C# layer very easily. I've made it so it's stupid easy to expose functionality to the Lua layer as well, which was something I was scared I wouldn't be able to make work as smoothly.

What's Next

Zach right now is in the process of creating the next animation, which right now is named "Mushroom Crisis" (subject to change). V3 is being tested on Mushroom Crisis as well. All art here is VERY work-in-progress, and doesn't reflect anything final.

 - March