How long did it take you guys from the moment you got the actor into the studio until you were done with the final version of the video? And how much improvement do you see the pipeline seeing by the time 3.0 is just over the horizon?
TL;DRThe quest giver shoot was put together in about three weeks including testing new tools, but with the pipeline now in place a similar clip might take about two weeks at most.
It didn't take very long. We shot the Quest Giver stuff at the end of the last PU shoot, or the last shoot, right? And then we literally had three weeks to put everything together for Eckhart and the Hawkers. And Mekin, too, actually. The other guy that waved flag soon or whatever. So that was within three weeks. And then on top of that, we were testing the system. We hadn't run that system. So we're using an OptiTrack system that was getting solved in-house. And then we were syncing all the faces, which we've done before, but we did it old school, manually. This time is the first time we actually used the tools. So we ran into a lot of issues, actually, within those three weeks. We're updating our facial real-time runtime logic, right, for the faces? So we're going to use more of a facial board so we can have more control over Look IK and turning that on and off and all that stuff. But for Eckhart, we actually had to revert to the older system, because all the NPC heads haven't been completely updated to the new one, only the three of them.
So it'd be hard to gauge the actual time then. If you had to do it today, with what you know and what you've learned, and now that the pipeline's in place?
I don't think it would take us long. It was pretty straightforward. He had maybe less than a minute of time. I would say maybe two weeks at the most, start to finish, if we had somebody specifically on solving, and then an animator right off it, and all the tools were working properly. And that's being very generous.
And usually in the estimates that we give out on the production end, and even when we ask other leads to, we also have to understand that we need to put a little bit more time into those estimates as well, to foresee if there are any issues that come up, right? So if we say two weeks, we may go, oh, well, we think it'll take us seven days. But you need to allow for that time just in case something comes up, or other tasks come in that may take some priority and so on.
It's weird too, because there are some things that you think will take two weeks and they only take two or three days, and then vice versa. You think something's going to be easy...