Render Playblasts (Not Mobile Friendly) (Patreon)

With each day we're slowly nearing completion of the new animation! Right now the post production is halfway done and I'm slowly nearing the color grading process. Once this last visual step is done I'll do sound/music before preparing the release! It's realistic that things will still take a week, especially with the sound design still ahead. This period is usually the hardest since I tend to work 24h to get this out as soon as I can, so apologies if messages on here are a little slow!

I've prepared a few work in progress sequences in the meantime, which are pretty close to the animation's final quality!

This new animation once again comes with highly elaborate CG visuals that have once again taken yet another step up from the recent films. Both lighting and shading are close to a studio produced animated film, including computation-intensive effects such as fur, subsurface scattering, global illumination with skylighting, and volumetric lighting as the newest addition in the render pipeline.

Getting all of this to render properly was once again quite the challenge, as keeping an overview of all the render layers has become more and more difficult with the addition of new features and effects each time. The current render pipeline of 6 layers is broken up into a base pass, an extra fur sample pass, an extra SSAO contact shadow pass, simple fog, Z-Depth, and volumetric light. Most layers end up being merged in a specific order, while others are used for further calculations such as depth of field.

In addition to that there's a few post effects that are added in post production, these typically include depth of field, glow, and often times animation specific effects such as heat haze (used for Zoe's breath), and occasionally lens effects. I've started abandoning the later whatsoever since I lately tend to prefer a cleaner, more pristine image. FXAA is often required as well, sometimes a TAA solution is also added to get rid of the last jagged edges. Each of the recent animations is natively rendered at a total resolution of 4096x2304 that includes 4xMSAA, which is absolutely crucial when rendering high frequency detail such as fur and hair.

There's a massive amount of deformers in this animation since there's so much interaction between the characters. The prey model's skin actually deforms under Zoe's tongue and vise versa, which wasn't quite easy to pull off. There's some slight discrepancies here and there with the occasional clipping that I didn't spot, but overall I'm pretty happy with everything. Personally I'd go back to re-render some of these shots, but there isn't always the time to go back, knowing that some patrons here are eagerly waiting.

Big thanks to all patrons for their patience! I'll do my best to have the animation out as soon as it's ready! (: