Extended Playblasts 2 (Not mobile friendly) (Patreon)

Round 2 of the extended playblasts is here! Here's some prettier versions of the previously posted ones with some of the heavier effects enabled, albeit at farily reserved settings. Unlike last time I also brought in the trees, so the scene looks a lot less baren in comparison to the old previews. Only thing that is still missing in terms of environment effects are the 3D mountain backdrop, hipoly assets, as well as atmospheric fog that will create a proper sense of depth.

Zoe's fur is rendered in a simplified manner and only using 1/5 of its actual density for these previews. The shadowing on her is already looking pretty solid whatsoever and somewhat representative of the final lighting. I had to figure out a new way of having her lit by the sun, as my entire lighting is 100% based on shadow maps. Since the shadow map of the sun needs to cover the entire area, the shadows cast on her would turn out very blocky up close. Having her lit by her own exclusive light that would only stretch the shadow resolution over her own model would give sharp shadows, but she'd consequently not cast shadows on the environment. I managed to solve this by using an exclusive sun light source for her model, while also having a second model of her that is not primarily rendered, but still linked to the environment sun shadow map, this way she casts low res shadows on the area, while the self shadowing on herself is handled by another light source, allowing beautiful depth shadowing of her fur without causing any flickering. There's no real purpose for anyone to know this, I just wanted people to know how difficult that was. :D

I'm still considering having this rendered at 60FPS later on, but I'm still a bit uncertain if I can pull this off with the supposed target visuals. It also looks like this animation is going to be quite lengthy in runtime, with the currently finished animations already clocking in at almost 2 minutes of runtime. I'm just approaching the halfway point of the script, so the final animation is likely going to be somewhere in the ballpark of the longest running films such as the Halloween animation I made a few years back, only that the 'animation density' is significantly higher here. I still have a hard time giving an ETA on when this will be finished, but considering that I can reuse some of the animations you're seeing in these playblasts, the progress from here on could speed up significantly. Then on the other hand I'm just getting started with all the more complicated nomming scenes, of which there will be quite a few more!

Here's another bonus playblast to show that there will also be the occasional 3rd person scene thrown in here and there. While this player rig has been significantly updated from the last animations, there likely won't be anything that identifies them, which should make it easier for the viewer to see themself in that role. There will also be tiny bits of dialogue from the player, but it will be rather short and likely done with gibberish sound samples. Note that despite all the nomming, I'm actually planning on having this end in a bit of a happy ending where the player gets the suitcase back and makes peace with Zoe. How it comes to that is something I don't want to reveal just yet, but who knows! Maybe both of their mother's name is Martha~

Again, a HUGE thank you to all of you for your amazing support! If it weren't for you then I couldn't even put a fraction of time into animating this. Here's hoping that these extended playblasts will shorten the waiting time once more.