The Confession v0.3 Development [3]

Arc 3 Status

Completed:
Update [3]
- 60% renders
- Better shaders
- Better lighting
- Better field of view
- Character animations

Update [2]
- Draft
- Overarching story
- Music selection

Required:

- 40% renders
- 20% dialogue
- Closing scene

What I've been doing

I haven't updated because I didn't want to spam people with non-updates, but I have been working on this every single day.I've completely updated the art and have added in shaders with lighting. It looks much better in my opinion.

Shaders

Before

After

After I updated the shaders, I had to go back and re-render everything everything in this arc that was made using the default shaders. Then, I realized the lighting was off.

Lighting

Before

After

(The expressions and pose are slightly different since I had to repose this, but you can see how big of a different the lighting makes!)

In the first picture below, there's a light source that comes from the right side. I placed an extra light source for previous scenes on the left. But you can see that in this shot, the left light source does not light up Sara's face. This gives us a very flat and dark feeling on her face. Not very likeable!

In the following picture, I moved the light source to where the MC would be standing, but a bit further and higher up. I kept the intensity low so that it didn't feel unnatural and gives a brighter shot.

This required me to re-do every single scene in the library, so this was twice that I had done that now.

If you've been looking carefully, you'd notice that the bottom picture has a broader perspective than the one above it... If you didn't, don't worry - I also didn't think about that at all until it was too late.

Field of View

Field of view allows me to take a broader perspective from the same camera angle. Before I didn't know this was adjustable. And given that I use a disembodied head like this to take the first person perspective, it was really limiting to my capabilities.

As I was saying, in order to avoid my own head in the shot, I had to zoom in like this

But after discovering field of view and that I had the ability to standardize it with mods in the engine I'm working on, it gave me the freedom to take zoomed out shots like this.

Of course, this came at a cost... of redoing every single render again. I think I redid every single render in here 3 or more times.

Animations

This was my first time dealing with animations of characters. I have animated scenes in the game before this, but it was strictly messing with the camera perspective. This time I actually animated a character doing something! It's pretty minor because I don't want to mess up or change the style or pacing too fast (or do a subpar job), but I'm very proud of it. It took about 2 hours to do a 15 second animation but I'm certain next time I can do it 2-4x faster.

What next

Once I finish the scene I'm working on in the library, I have a few renders and possibly another animation to do before I'm finished. I'm hoping that this will be done in the next three days but it may take five to six depending on the quality I'm looking to put out. The development has been slow because I've been spending a lot of time researching, reworking renders, and practicing my skills. This includes learning Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, cinematographic concepts, anatomy, color theory, etc. Rest assured, everything is getting faster and better! Some things that initially took an hour can be done in about ten minutes at times <3

To anybody who's made it this far, thank you for reading!

I'm really loving what I'm doing and learning and love to share it with anybody who's willing to take a look.