Published: April 2nd 2025, 4:50:35 pm
Hey everyone!
After posting the variants to Filling The HuggerVerse last Friday, I was finally able to move on from Gwen's scene to the next project. On Sunday, I successfully moved to Blender 4.3 and updated my addons. Thankfully my most important models are still functional. I spent some time testing the new features, and I am quite thrilled with Eevee Next. It is the upgraded rendering engine in the software, and it should bring my scenes closer to the "prettiness" of the absurdly time-consuming Cycles renders.
The focus is now Jill Valentine and Ada Wong's scene. As promised, I am returning to prioritizing pushing out content monthly. I know how long it takes to animate specific things, which makes it difficult to write the script while hoping to provide complex storytelling. I've been thinking about it a lot, and what I'd like to do is begin the scene with still images coupled with narrated voice-over by the voice actresses. Using this method I can add much-needed context, then jump to the action without spending days and days animating things like locomotion, conversation, etc. What do you guys think? With a one month production window, would you prefer 100% animation with brief exposition and then action, or complex and believable story context (using still images) before the animation action begins? Please let me know in a comment on this post, or on Discord.
Speaking of the story, my plan is to have Jill Valentine investigate a dubious location while Ada Wong directs her via comms. Ada will sound distracted while giving Jill orders to scrutinize a room with egg-like objects claiming to hold important Umbrella assets. The consensual nature of this scene will feel questionable, since it delves into trickery, but ultimately Jill is accepting orders from a higher-up, and then dealing with the outcome. Ada's primary objective is to encourage Jill to test Umbrella's new form of specimen transfer via oviposition. Ada will already be quite enamored with the feel and thrill of facehuggers and tentacle ovipositors made by Umbrella. The goal for this scene is to bounce the action between Jill and Ada, since they will be in different locations.
That's it for this week! Next week, I'll reveal the more fleshed out synopsis for the scene. Once again, please let me know what you think about the idea of using still images to "set the stage" before the action begins (as a way to save time for these one month productions).