Project D.Va: 2nd Mission

Airport

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Recap!

So last time, I had laid out three goals. Mercy import, voice groundwork and scripting, and placeholders for important objects in the scene. As you probably already know, voice stuff burned me out hardcore. That said, everything went swimmingly otherwise for the most part. I'll do a quick overview of what went down and what I've got.

Mercy Import

This part went a lot more smoothly than the D.Va import. Ironically, I got her from the same source as one of the busted D.Va models, but this one's issues were much more minor and easily fixed. Just a minor weight painting asymmetry on her face that I had to touch up, plus changing her metallic materials from a separate model to a texture on the main one. This gives things like her halo or the bolts on her outfit shine.

Here's what the fucked-up vertex weights look like. This is the map for how her upper neck/head bone affects her face. Red moves exactly wherever the bone takes it, while dark blue isn't affected at all. The rest of the rainbow is in between.

See the asymmetry/spiky lip? A little paint touchup did the trick. It's not 100% pixel-perfect, but it's far from noticeable excluding awful, stretched-out poses like this. Here are the results:

So with that problem out of the way, I gave Mercy a quick ahegao expression just to make sure her face looked right when posed. It did, but...

Some major reflectivity problems. Eyes look weird and dead, halo looks like a mosaic, and the wings look like a black-and-white circuitboard. That's not intentional, by the way. Fortunately, it was an easy fix as I mentioned before. For whatever reason, her model's metallic segments were implemented as a second model with identical shape to the first one. Moving this texture onto the main model and hiding the duplicate made for much better results.

I moved her head back down just to show off the wings better. Maybe not quite as shiny, but definitely better than the alternative. I can always tweak it more later, but for now it looks acceptable.

Voice Lines

Lots of boring file renaming. Let me give you a sample:

You read that right. 548 files for D.Va alone. I renamed every single one from hexadecimal garbage like 00000000ABCDEF12 to human-readable names indicative of what was being said. Then I listened through both sets of sounds, plus all of D.Va's HotS sounds (another 500 or so) 3-4 times to figure out what would fit my storyboard. I'll put the complete storyboard in a separate post so as not to clutter up this one, but here's my text file showing how I aligned sound files with the appropriate panels of the storyboard. Keep in mind that these are tentative and subject to change.

The literal text (non-filename) is stuff I couldn't find a good line for, or in some cases a scream that I wanted to just test in the animation itself to see which one would fit best. 51+ was some tentative, vague stuff that could be useful, funny, or relevant. Since I do want the dialogue in-place as I set up the animation, I'll likely use placeholders like text-to-speech or the like until I actually get down to animating the lip syncing and pacing, just to make it flow reasonably well while testing and adjusting things.

Placeholder Objects

As I mentioned last time, we needed a couple of placeholder objects to set the scene: a couch, a table, gum + its packaging, a controller, and a TV on a stand. Well, so far so good:

This shot captures most of my work in that regard. I think it looks pretty nice for placeholder material! I just wanted to show off what I did with the controller and gum, since those are smaller details.

Controller:

I didn't quite fine-tune D.Va's pose, so she's not really holding the controller. This will obviously be fixed down the road.

Now for the gum. Wireframe:

Here's a quick demonstration of the moving parts. I actually flipped the normals (direction Blender considers the polygons to be facing for lighting purposes) on the "bubbles" of the packaging by accident. They're supposed to obscure the gum when the packaging, as the bubbles will be made translucent later. This allows you to see their reflectivity while still being able to see the gum through them.

Here's what it "should" look like. Again, these will be see-through and more detailed in the final animation, not opaque. I've lifted the wrapping out of the internal tray and selected it to show this off better.

The one small thing I haven't done yet is the chewable version of the gum that D.Va (and eventually Mercy, spoilers) use to blow bubbles with. There's a good reason for this: it needs to be tailored to the shapes of D.Va's and Mercy's mouths during the appropriate parts of the animation. In other words, doing it beforehand would be a waste of time, as it's a pretty shape-change-heavy object. Not a particularly hard one to make, but it does mean I can't just make it floating in space without having to tune it later anyway.

Next part of the plan!

Our goal for next time is pretty simple and straightforward: plot out the animation. Long story short, I'll be making a "slideshow" of sorts in Blender. It'll give us a framework to work with for inserting dialogue, and for getting a good pace and flow in for the animation. It'll also be way more interesting to look at and read for you guys, so I look forward to getting it done. Since this is where the actual fun stuff begins, hopefully it won't be as long between updates as last time. Again, I understand that not everyone may have been pleased with that long wait, but I needed the mental break, and that's that. Anyway, I'm ready to get back on track and actually have some fun with this now that the awful parts are over! Woo!

By the way, as mentioned earlier, I'll make a quick post with the entire storyboard. Tentative of course, as I do have plans for a second, non-popping ending. Stay tuned!

As always, stay frosty brobobots, and thanks again for your support! Cheers!