Today’s work was encouraging, some of it at least. For the 30/30 I can’t say that I actually got very far, I watched my videos and spent a lot of time trying to sculpt a game asset with little success. I feel like it’s starting to come together, but there’s got to be a better way to go about it. Hopefully I’ll get to that video sooner rather than later.
The encouraging part comes in on the overall project front. I think I may be getting close to being able to begin at least some test work on my Let’s Talk About Games review series. After the issues I was having getting a render out for the Day 35 video I needed to rethink my plan for animating the game tutorials. It’s just not going to be feasible to produce those in blender at this stage. It was already pretty dicey, even if I get good at the animation it was likely going to be too much work in for too little result out to be worth making them that way, but throwing on render times on top of it makes that whole scenario a complete no go.
Even so, the reason I started considering animating the game tutorials in the first place goes back to the difficulty I was having getting viable shots when filming in person. I’m moderately certain I’m going to have to get a better camera option earlier than I wanted anyway, but even with a decent camera being able to quickly shift view between card closeups and table layouts and anything else I need to show to really bring home the game play is just going to be next to impossible to pull off, especially if I need to have my hands free to manipulate the game components as well. Going digital gives me a free roaming camera with as much zoom as I want and exactly the angles I want, and makes it easy.
With Blender out of the picture for that kind of work I’m turning instead to the Tabletop Simulator. I’ve worked out a decent workflow for getting enough cards from a given game scanned and imported into the simulation to do a decent demonstration with a minimum amount of prep time. I should be able to do the same fairly easily with game boards and dice. As my modeling skills improve I should be able to bring in unique game assets as well, like the Ascension honor token I was practicing with tonight. Put all of that together with screen record software and some fancy post-editing work in Blender and Photoshop, and I should have myself a pretty decent quality training video. And the beauty of using TTS is that the physics of it is already baked in, so there’s no real animation work required.