For anyone who has been curious as to what we're up to behind the scenes. Basically, we've developed a way to load motions relative to a character's position/orientation in 3d space. This is something that has, until now, been impossible for us to do in Lightwave.

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There is still some behind the curtain work to do, but I think things are really shaping up. Sometimes a little blood, sweat, and programming is required to take production to the next level.

By the time I'm done, Dijard is going to be an expert contortionist!

This is my 1-click mocap adapt script... still working out some bugs though as hinted by the pic.

You may have noticed I haven't been updating the comic as frequently and let a few weeks skip by without an update. In this Delura blog post I explain...

"I’ve been doing a ton of work related to standardizing the content (especially the rigs) of Delura. In order for things to go as smoothly as possible, everything across the board needs to operate in a manner that is predictable and easy to edit. This will also make it easier for other artists to jump on board. The not so fun thing about this is that it isn’t particularly a process I think people would find interesting and it involves things like bone naming conventions, endomorph sets (previously, not all characters had the same sets of facial controls/morphs), transferring my library of pre-made animations to IKBooster motion format, and other dull stuff that, while it will greatly enhance our workflow, doesn’t provide any immediate benefit to our fanbase while this process happens.

The other major thing is that I need to finish my “mocap adapt” script that will allow me to pair motion capture animations to Delura characters with 1 click. I have the base script made, but there are several more elements that it needs to be a fully automatic solution… such as auto-positioning the motion capture skeleton and generating the “null” guides needed to store position data and transfer it accordingly.

I’m really kicking myself for letting this week’s comic slip through… that’ll teach me to spit out deadlines I can’t make. After I finish the last of these standardization/background tasks, I’m going to be jumping right into making some cool behind the scenes content. Again, thank you all for your patience and understanding!"

So, that's basically whats going on... if only I had the foresight to do this stuff BEFORE I wound up with hundreds of models, props, and tons of other content. Meh!

The first track linked below was originally made by user Wolftacular, and MetalRenard (the guy who does the music/audio mixing for Delura) decided to give the piece some additional mixing and polish. So, check em out!

Skyline (original)

Skyline V2 (remix)

There's just some amazing work here on Newgrounds and I figured I'd plug these talented artists.

Part of being a 3d animator means developing your own tools and functions to assist in the often work-intensive process. This time around, I discovered that if I want to take advantage of motion capture animations available for download online and pair them with our Delura series and other content... I needed a way to rapidly review them. Unfortunately, practically nothing exists that fit my requirements so I ended up having to take an existing viewer and modify it to fit the bill. Not an optimal solution, but it works.

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http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/623922

Mr. Splats wants your hugs. And your 5 and blam votes!

I've been doing research into mocap applications. There are tons of free mocap animations out there and I want to start taking advantage of those to provide a powerful new tool to Delura's production arsenal. Obviously, any results used in actual content would need to be cleaned up a little, but these results are very promising. Because I have access to tools that can determine animation in a relative sense (IE: loading the animation offsets it from the characters current position in 3d space), it could mean many, many hours saved for things that don't really need to be hand-animated.

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I have recently uploaded articles on Relictech and Galactic Transport Technologies on the Delura website. The transport article is actually derived from my earlier writings published along with EP 004, but I decided it needed its own place on the website and a facelift.

"It reads your brain patterns to determine what it does." ... and then some!

I am currently working on some webpage updates involving the lore available about the Delura galaxy, more updates to come!

Instead of re-writing the blog post here, I'll just provide a link. It basically outlines some news updates regarding the Delura project people may find interesting.