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MNL Progress Report #78
Hey there, nudies! Really busy but exciting week for us this week! We're now officially in our cutscene-building phase! Invertex and I have been hard at work building the intro of the game, and the big thing this week was going in and setting up camera angles. We ran into an issue with the cafe though, and what you're seeing in the above gif is this eventual solution we came up with. You see, originally, the cafe was placed at an awkward spot in the map.
This is how the cafe was originally placed in the map. At first, the placement made sense... but when it came time to set up the camera, it proved a lot more cumbersome than we thought. Everything in this map is visible and accessible from a single camera angle... everything except this cafe. To get inside the cafe, the camera would have to pretty violently whip around a full 180 degrees to show you inside of the cafe. If you've never heard of the 180 degree rule when it comes to cinematography, here's a quick little explanation from a great movie. We couldn't get a shot inside of the cafe without the camera cut feeling jarring and disorientating, and I spent almost this entire week in blender just trying to find this magical angle that would fix it...
The solution? Don't rotate the camera. Rotate the cafe!
Instead of fighting the camera to make the transition work, it was easier to just rotate the entire cafe. And it looks so much better this way, too! It actually ended up fixing a lot of problems. It makes the cafe feel more open and inviting, and we were able to put some trees in to both help make the space feel cozier while also blocking out the end of map. And because of this, everything is now visible and accessible through one clean, tracking camera shot!
It can definitely be a pain to work in 3D, but in times like this, it's so nice to find a simple solution that fixes so many problems all at once. It also helped me get more acquainted with Blender! Invertex taught me how to edit geometry, so the actual rotating of the cafe and some of its model tweaks was done by yours truly! Invertex prettied it up even further with more props and foliage. It looks SO good now, I teared up a bit seeing it all in action. We actually have more HD footage, but we can't upload it here. Please check out our discord to see more!
One last thing - Work has begun on another one of the mall shops! This time it's the combination hair salon and tattoo parlor, Bubblegum Tombstone!
Once again, another store jam-packed full of love and details! Sweez has really been going all out on these. Don't worry, I help out on this too with colors. I can't imagine trying to color something like this all on your own... So many small details...
That's all for now, though! Back to cutscene-building! Thank you for your support, and see you next week!
