DarthAngelus

The full trailer for Star Wars: Heir to the Empire is here, along with a release date for Chapter 1: it's dropping Tuesday 2nd September, with a premiere as usual. A new chapter will follow every week and I'm excited for all of you to be able to see this new and improved version.

The early chapters in particular have seen a massive improvement but every chapter will get an upgrade even if it's just a higher resolution render.

Below I've written an FAQ with some questions I expect to hear a lot.

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Q: Can't you release them all at once?

A: Nope, I've not actually finished rendering them all yet. At the time of writing, 22 of the 32 are fully rendered and edited. A few others are in progress. I didn't do them all in order either because I wanted specific footage for the trailer. It's mostly the Myrkr chapters left to do though.

Q: Didn't you already do a special edition of Chapter 1?

A: I did! But that doesn't mean I can't do another one with a higher resolution render. I've also edited the sound again from scratch, the voices got drowned out in places before. In addition to that, I recorded Captain Pellaeon's dialogue again to sound gruffer like he does later on in the series.

Q: What other changes have you made for the Special Edition?

A: The main two changes are using NVidia Omniverse to render Chapter 1-17, since that wasn't done before and rendering at 1440p instead of 1080p. Other changes include putting the most recent character models in the early chapters so they look consistent throughout. Other changes include a more lore accurate Ysalamiri and Lando has a cape in later chapters (I now know how to make soft fabric effects work in Omniverse), tweaks to lighting and new building models for Hyllyard City.

Q: Why 1440p and not 4k?

A: 4k is incredibly slow to render, even with the new graphics card, I'd still be about quarter of the way through the series and I'd rather be able to move on to Dark Force Rising.

Q: You moved the premiere day from Thursday to Tuesday, why?

A: Christmas and New Years Day fall on Thursdays this year. The choice was to choose a different day of the week or have a two week break.

Q: What about the four hour movie?

A: That's still coming. Obviously I need to finish rendering everything first. The plan is to release it a few weeks after Chapter 32, with 1st May being the target date as the 35th anniversary of Heir to the Empire being published.

Q: Will the movie have the opening crawl?

A: As much as I'd like to, I will be keeping the opening crawl as a seperate video. As before, if it runs into problems with the copyright bots not liking the music, only the crawl gets taken down, not the entire movie.

Q: How is your health?

A: Still recovering from surgery. This special edition was a nice easy project though since all the hard work was done when I originally animated the scenes.

Q: How is Dark Force Rising coming along?

A: Still in the script writing phase, my recent surgery and recovery have slowed down progress there but my goal is to get something to the voice actors soon and get to work animating it once the last of the special edition chapters have been completed.

Q: How can I help?

A: Watch the new chapters, share them with your friends and family. You can also support my work through my Ko-fi page too (the current funding goals are complete but every donation is appreciated): ko-fi.com/darthangelus

1 week ago | [YT] | 111