Status Report - HERO: Week of 12.29

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Hey there, travelers! How are y'all doing? Here at Sasuga Studios, we're just a couple days shy of turning fourteen years old. And what a fourteen years it has been. Preproduction on HERO began with our birth in 2011 and ran for about six years into 2016, which included the base 3D modeling of the entire world represented in background art. Outlining and storyboarding the script then took a year, from mid 2016 thru mid 2017. I began writing the script in September of 2017, and finished in March of 2022, a total of fifty-five months. From then to September of 2024 was background art production, twenty-nine months worth.

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Now, we're well into character art production. This is actually the third attempt at drawing characters; the first two occured in the preproduction phase. While those served to give me basic character designs, they weren't good enough to be final assets, so here we are now, ten years more advanced.

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I'm using the online service posemy.art for the base bodies, which is a 3D tool like the wooden/plastic articulated models you can purchase for figure drawing practice. I posed and exported all the bases I needed so I can draw on top of them in Illustrator. I'm about two-thirds through drawing the base bodies with flat color as shown in the images. This will proceed forward in phases; adding shading, adding outfits, adding expressions. I've learned to stop trying to make estimates, but let's say that it'll take roughly as long as the background art to complete.

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Follow the various Sasuga Studios social accounts for occasional screenshots and other bits of info: mastodon, bluesky, twitter (@sasuganick and @sasugastudios), and tumblr (sasuganick and sasugastudios). Thanks for keeping up on the long journey!

Nick