This is what a sword fight looks like...

Inside of my computer....

Oh, you probably expected like an image from a film or something eh?

Yep, that’s a fight scene from “M doll” from inside of Unity using the cutscene sequencer asset Slate- that is what IDGAF filmmaking looks like-

There are two sexdoll samurai in that scene fighting two obscene giant monsters- running, jumping, swinging swords, melee attacks AND I didn’t have to animate even one character shot 😆

The only thing I have to animate is the camera really BUT there’s a steadicam system built in for the fancy stuff- I prefer to do that by hand though as I’m not animating anything else.

There are animation layers so you can blend several animations into a single one isolating body parts for each animation if you choose- its a really flexible system-

I started working on the last sequence of the film today- I’ll take my time with it though and give myself self two weeks to complete it- I’m way ahead of the audio/music team for the film so I’m in no rush-

Ok, ok… people like photos with cool looking stuff and not just the geek stuff eh? Here’s a photo from a scene I was doing a few days ago.

I’m rendering the film in 4k and most all of the character/object textures are also in 4k so scenes can get pretty clunky sometimes- I’ve pretty much got the fastest PC you can get right now (Rtx 3090 + all M2 drives + 64gb ram) and these movie scenes still choke my PC up now and then 🤔

I even run the output + all the textures at half res while I’m working(they switch to full res on export with a little script I made) and they still get slow- It’s just some shitty Unity code that causes the slowdown as the cpu/gpu/memory rarely gets near max usage when I’m working-

I know I’m spoiled now with the speed of things as I used to work in Cinema 4d for my animation/rendering and that was SLOW AS FUCK. The viewport was slow so previewing my animations had to be done with everything turned off and it still ran slow- rendering had to be done overnight for just a handful of shots because cpu rendering took so long.

I’ve been keeping track of a lot of workflow data for M doll but I haven’t been keeping track of export/render times- probably because its so fast-

If I had to approximate- I’d say most scenes export at realtime(24 fps) and slow ones export at like 2-5fps- for the longest renders I walk outside and stretch and do some breathing exercises and I come back in and its done- its really nice.

So yeah- 95 minutes of the film is done so I’m still working hard but I’m making sure not to rush and run through some shitty shots/scenes I’ll regret-

One of the biggest differences in this film vs my others is that the speedy workflow gives me time to revise my shots- if something isn’t clear or sort of sucks I’ll keep tweaking/re-exporting it until its good- I wouldn’t really do that in the past because shit took so long as I was worried about finishing it in less than ten years.

95 minutes in the can for the best looking and best animated “animated” film I’ve made yet and its only taken a little over three months to do- I took weekends off and a few weeks off in that time as well- its really exciting to be able to work this fast at such a high quality-

As I said before I’m not using Unity’s highest quality render/visual engine as I tested it out and it was too much new shit to learn at the time- I just wanted to make a film not fuck around with a new render pipeline-

So now I’ve made a feature film with Unity and I have a good filmmaking workflow in it- so yeah- next film I’m going to using Unity’s highest quality render system-HDRP-

The HDRP thing also comes with a “visual effects graph” which is an artist friendly tool for making effects- I don’t like node based stuff and that’s what it is BUT I’m sure I can find lots of cool presets people have made and use those.

I’m a movie director here maaaaaan I’m not tryna rebuild the world and all the tools if I don’t have too- I’m not that autistic 😆

Actually these days after programming for like the past six years straight- my approach is a much more creative/intuitive one- tweaking over technical stuff doesn’t feed your soul maaaaaaaaaaan

I’m thinking my next film will take place in an icy/snowy environment- I’ve made so many films and things in the dark and it will be fun to play around with visuals created in a snow blind environment-

I’ll probably change my mind but that is what I’m thinking right now-

White screen with dark red blood- things with black eyes and long black hair-

I have a screenplay for this animated sci-fi feature crap thing I wrote years back- it was like my homage to Vampire Hunter D as I’ve read all the novels- I’ll probably borrow stuff from that screenplay for the next film-

Anyhow- feed your spirit and don’t lose your soul. Be creative. STFU and MAKE.