Your Phone - Rough Playblast and other WIP stuff (Patreon)

Here's a super duper quaduper early playblast of next month's animation, which will probably have Zoe devouring your phone in front of your very eyes~! The animation is currently still rough and has no lighting, as I literally only started work on it last week. I'm hoping to have it finalized by the end of next month whatsoever! I'll make sure to keep you updated with another preview sometime next month that should be a little more fleshed out! (:

Next to this animation, I've also been doing some more experiments with the new version of Maya, as well as the new renderer I'm planning to switch to in a couple of months, both versions are still running in trial mode for the time being, but I'm hoping to upgrade both to the full version after being able to test the speed of the newly released RTX 3090, which I sadly couldn't get my hands on during launch. As a test, I've migrated the entire mountain pass scene from Encounter to the new renderer to better illustrate the visual impact that raytracing can make to the look of my animations.

The background layer with the mountains is still missing, but this should already show how much of an improvement the lighting and materials are getting. Furthermore the working speed with it will be tremendously faster, as I won't have to manage a massive checklist of things I need to oversee to bypass the vast list of missing features of my current renderer. Things like volumetric light, fur gloss, or animated lights would just work out of the box, without me having to spend hours trying to fake these with ultra complicated scene setups.

The hardest part is still migrating Zoe and her fur/hair to the new software, which will have to be done entirely from scratch. But once that's finalized she should look better than ever~!

At last, here's a little WIP model of a Piranha Plant I made earlier this month. I'll probably still rig it in the old software to ensure full compatibility in case the migration takes a little while longer, but I've been planning to have these in a future episode of Encounter as a sort of regular enemy! It sadly won't be the next, but hopefully the one after that~!