Polishing and Render Prep (Patreon)

Render prep for the new animation is almost done, which means that I'm planning to start rendering tomorrow! Throughout the last weeks I've been improving the animation, revising the entire environment, got rid of all the remaining bugs, optimized the per-frame render times and exported a draft render version of the film for the voice actors and the sound design I'll be doing later on!

To my surprise, the time of the draft render version already clocked in at 7-minutes, already making this the longest running animation yet. Considering I'm still animating about six scenes for the extended version it's not unlikely that this one might end up somewhere around 10 minutes. Phew... guess there really wasn't a whole lot else to do during the quarantine. This run time sounds quite awesome in theory, though I'm afraid it might make rendering this film in a somewhat timely manner a bit of a challenge, especially so at 60FPS. Right now it's difficult to give a clear estimate on how long the total render time will be, but considered there are already over 25.000 frames to grind through it will likely be longer than anything before that. The lengthy Halloween animation for example only had a meager 7.500 frames in comparison, but that one was also rendered at only 30FPS. Should this film take over a month to render then I might do a little swap and push out a new mini animation next month to shorten the waiting time a little. That's only in case that rendering will take an obscene amount of time whatsoever!

Feel free to enlarge these 4K pictures and zoom in all the way, as the detail still holds up with everything completely blown up. I've replaced every photo-scanned asset in the close vicinity with its high poly source file. Of course I reduced their poly count a little to optimize the render time, as I realized that not every asset needs to necessarily have over a million triangles. These photo scans are all from the Megascans library by the way, which was also heavily used in the Unreal Engine 5 demo during yesterday's PS5 showcase.

In addition to better assets I've also made sure to completely rework the ground and cliff textures for the custom objects I've made, including an overhaul of the background landscape, which now has proper texturing, as well as efficient custom billboard trees that make it look a little less barren! Oh, and look at all this new vegetation as well!

The following target renders are quickly put together to show what Zoe looks like in the environment with her full fur density. I've made it so the quantity of her fur is reduced when she's a little further away from the camera to cut down the render time a bit. Sadly I didn't manage to implement the claws I've made for her, as it would have required to redo her entire hand rigs, which would've also required me to animate her fingers all over again for the entire animation. Ah well, something to do for next time. I've however managed to include paw pads that make a nice contrast with her furred parts whatsoever. At least one thing that worked without having to do any major changes!

As mentioned, rendering will likely start tomorrow! I have rented a RTX 2080Ti, and another RTX 2070S that is my own to get the job done, even though the later card will probably just sit around and do nothing during the first weeks, as the external graphics card box I've ordered for my laptop weeks ago was now delayed indefinitely, likely due to Corona O'Brien. As always, I'll let you know how things are progressing! Expect some render clips and possibly 60FPS sequences throughout the upcoming weeks. And once again, thanks for sticking around during these tough times! ;w;

Omnomnom! O:<