UPDATE 01/04/2021
Happy new ... o.k
Maybe I just wish you a good and safe new year 2021 and I really hope things get better with this pandemic situation during this year.
On December 6th I started the open casting for my new series "The Tavern". I used a popular website which is called "www.castingcall.club". I really hoped to get some attention with it, but I wasn't prepeared for this kind of traction. To this date I have received 1346 auditions for all the roles I offer. This is absolutly insane and great too, because there are really good voice actors among them. Just to give you a perspective. The casting call for my last project "Alien - The message" had received 178 auditions.
The casting will stay open until january the 6th. After that, the tedious part will kick in. I have to listen to all the auditions, meassure them, listen to the voice demos, or searching the website of the particular actor. I have already reviewed almost 450 auditions, so I still have a lot ahead of me ...
WHAT ELSE AM I DOING?
Within the holidays I worked on a short fight scene. It's a exterior set and we all know how hard it is to get good looking day light sets within iClone. I really needed to see where the problems are. Also I wanted to setup the final look and the final mood for the whole series. It took me several days to finish this scene, because I had to redo most of the animations, because I wasn't satisfied with the first version of the fight. Here are some screens to show you the result.
iClone has one of the best character creation tools in the biz. The characters will look really good if you put some work in it. But I have to say the vegitation system is really behind right now. back in iClone 6 the trees looked good enough in comparisson to the characters, but this was a long time ago. The grass and the conifer trees still hold up, but the broadleef trees are really a downer this days. So my buddy and I tried to get a solution for this problem. We found a company which provides tree models with a build in animation system. You know, I could buy a lot of low poly trees at "cg trader" or the "epic" store, but those trees can't be animated and that's not what i wanted. The company is "e-onsoftware" and they provide such 3d models. The good thing is, you can switch all the textures so you can have PBR ready trees in iClone which are ready to be animated. I will use those trees in close ups and fill the scene with the iClone trees for the background.
I also invested some money in some really good orchestral music which I can use in my series now. I also licensed a Boris FX sapphire post effect library to have the best film effect, you can buy right now. The reason is, I wanted to have the mood of a late 70s B movie for my series.
Here is the mini teaser which shows the new look and feel ...
O.K. That's it for today. Stay tuned ...
Direx