Situation Report

Hey friends,

Today, I would like to inform you about how things have been going lately. I'm sure you've noticed a few projects delays in the recent months. They may not seem critical just yet, but the problem has been gradually piling up and remains somewhat manageable only thanks to lots of overtime by the team. Simply put, we were barely prepared to create 4 models a month and then we almost immediately switched to 5, biting off more than we could possibly chew. This put a lot of strain on non-sculpting parts of our work: fixing, splitting, rendering, pre-supporting, test-printing. That's not to mention the increasing difficulty of our projects; Godfrey alone took two full weeks to fix, split, and support. This has led us to a new situation where we have sculpted projects sitting for weeks, waiting to be split and supported. Take Milana, for example. She's been so busy with renders she barely has time to work on her own models, so we are slowly considering to either outsource renders or switch Milana to a single project every two months. That said, while it's not set in stone yet, but be prepared for Fern being delayed as well.

We are trying to work on several angles to resolve our current predicament. The first step has already been taken and I'm currently training two more people to work on our pre-supports. When it comes to supports, my standards are quite high, so it may take a while before the training is complete, but the primary focus right now is on making supports passable. Once that's reliably achieved, we'll work towards making them good. This month, we already had two models supported by our trainees under my close supervision: Dio and Reina. Eventually, I plan to personally work only on the most impactful projects (i.e. all BG3 models), while the rest will be handled by my helpers. Same for test-printing - most projects will eventually be outsourced to help us with the workload. Next order of business is to find someone to help Elena with fixing and cutting models, which should take the load off of our artists who wouldn't have to split their own models like they currently do. Alas, the irony of offloading some of our work is that it takes a lot of time to train someone else to do it; time that we don't have precisely because of the work that we want to offload. So, a fair warning, things might get worse before they get better.

Unfortunately, the current situation also forces us to put a hold on the guest artist program until things improve. That means we will no longer be inviting a new guest artist each month, simply because everyone's workflow is different and it always takes us some extra time to adjust to someone else's way of doing things, which, frankly, isn't always worth the effort for a one-off project. Instead, for now we will work with a few artists we know and trust, since we are already familiar with their workflow and can integrate it into our own. In other words, in the upcoming months you can expect more guest projects by Ulysses Finamore, Augusto Castelo, and Kai.

This is all I wanted to share on this subject. On a more positive note, you can expect Reina to be released tomorrow without any delays!

Cheers!
Des