Render progress (Patreon)

First off, apologies for the long wait. Rendering this lengthy animation is taking quite a decent while due to the sheer amount of frames. ;-;

Right now two thirds of the main part with Zoe are rendered. There were a few complications with a certain scene that had issues with heavy shadow flickering occurring during one of the close ups. While I wasn't able to fully fix it, I was at least able to minimize it to a degree where it's not a distraction. Apart from that I finished animating all the three internal scenes, with two of them already rendered. There's still two more scenes I'm animating, but these only include fairly low-key animation and are more of an environment design job. It's basically an area that has an old-fashioned save point in it, serving as a respawn area for the player. This also exists as a bit of an intro environment for the film so it feels a little more fleshed out. It's not finalized yet, still lacking lighting and some veggies, but I'm hoping to get there in a couple days.

Work on sound design has started just a few days ago, with me implementing some music I wrote, various environment sounds, as well as some voice work, for which I've already received a number of samples. As you can probably imagine, the recent weeks have been heavy in multitasking, with me only sleeping when all my systems were busy rendering. Part of the reason for the delay in render time is an external GPU box I've ordered two months back. Back then the item was available, but delivery time kept getting pushed back with every other week until the thing was basically reported unavailable at every reseller here. I'm uncertain if this had anything to do with the pandemic, but it seemed like an odd item to go out of stock so suddenly. My second PC has luckily still been able to support rendering this film, albeit at a much slower speed.

I'm still planning to release a sneak-peak version of the animation before the month's end, which would show the first three minutes of the film. There might be some things missing such as the full post-production, as well as a couple samples in the sound design.

While rendering should definitely finish this month, I still need some time to slam all the frames together, do post production, and the full sound design. In the meantime I should have some new render previews available this coming weekend. Might as well show a snippet of the sound design, which includes ASMR-style binaural audio. In the meantime, thank you so much for your patience. I'll make sure this animation won't disappoint!