We're not proud of every piece of work we've done.
I guess it's part of being a creator, but sometimes the final product of a project is so... not good, that we'd rather it didn't have our names attached to it.
It's a depressing feeling.
Story time.
We worked on a project for about a year. It was a day job for us, making a historical-educational movie that was rendered in Unreal Engine 4. We created AI for big armies and individual characters. It was kinda hard – most of the small team wasn't really familiar with UE4, and the assets were not optimized for videogame technologies (and some weren't even PBR). But the team decided to go ahead anyways.
We finished the AI and most of the logic by May, but the rest of the team had to work on a lot of other parts of the production as well, and so they had no time to test crowd simulation, combat and such.
Mid-June, they started rendering clips for the final movie, but they had trouble with the untested blueprints (as expected of untested technologies). Since we were already pushing the deadline, instead of properly testing and taking a step back and refining the system, the team rushed work and tried to work around smaller issues. On top of that, we didn't have time to properly train them to use the huge and complicated system they described they wanted, so the majority of the features we implemented went unused.
For example, we created a face customizer, kind of like in The Sims. A character could have a randomized, custom face applied, so the crowd didn't look like an army of clones. But instead of using that, they left the crowd without custom faces, so yeah, it does look like an army of clones. Or, at a lot of parts, blueprints weren't even used, just featureless skeletal meshes (no custom faces, no mimicry, not even eye movement).
We also had to animate a lot of scenes in a few days; scenes that would, under normal circumstances, take a few weeks, maybe a month to set up. So you can imagine what the quality of those animations is like.
When we saw the final version of the movie, we were baffled. We suspected, based on our communications with them, that the final result wasn't going to be spectacular, that the team had to cut corners to meet deadlines, but we never imagined they would ignore features we spent months on developing. It was just sad.
After watching (that was a funny situation, trying to keep a straight face in the office for our coworkers while watching the video), we came home and tried to go back to work but it was just too hard. I mean we spent a year on this project, and it looks and feels like we created nothing. Were we this bad at communicating, or was it just too complicated for others to use? Guess we'll never know. But it just about killed all of our motivation for a few weeks.
We're gonna continue working together with them on other projects – they said the main problem was the miscalculated deadline – and we're gonna use the experience we gained to try to make things better. It's just hard to do work after a result like this.
Especially on our own projects.
We wanted to post another Sketchfab thing this month, but this finished movie just shook us.
We've had almost no free time to work on our own stuff, and all for this...
But we digress.
We actually went back to our old project, Project OLP, to see if what we made back then was any good, or if we just imagined it. And... it still works, and it's a lot more developed than any of our other projects... so maybe we should continue working on it.
We'll decide later. But as for now, it's fun to work on something that we have full quality control over.
Still trying to figure out if there's life on mars.
