Encounter 2 - Environment Progress (Patreon)

It's probably no secret anymore that I invest a lot of time making custom environments for my animations, which in my oppinion are always a substantial aspect of any animation, as they usually fill up a lot of screen space, even when there's a towering vixen present on screen. Since the Encounter series is supposed to look and feel like a videogame, having a believable stage in which the characters can interact is ever so important, as it will set the mood for the entire animation.

The second episode of this intended series takes us down into a coniferous forest area that will mostly feature lush green colors during rainy weather. I started working on this at the beginning of last month to have most of the rough layout finalized. I'm still going to add more details to the areas that are a little further away from the camera, before modelling and designing all of the close details, on which I haven't started working just yet.

While I was quite happy with the stage design of the first Encounter, I wasn't so keen on the first area at the safe point, which was admittedly a bit rushed, as by the time of making it I was already rendering some of the main animation, resulting in a bit of a chaotic schedule.

This time I want to do enough pre-production work to ensure that every aspect of production is considered right from the start, so I don't need to go back and forth between scenes that hadn't even been properly planned yet. That being said, I might still take November to prepare all the necessary things such as the script, environment, models, and voice overs, which I'm planning to have pre-recorded this time, as animating to sound samples is a tad easier I've learned.

Note that the scenes I'm showing are just quick viewport screenshots, as lighting and rendering isn't even set up yet. The close environment shown here only shows the rough landscape that will still be decorated with highly detailed assets and foliage, just like in the previous animation. Most of the original assets for this film were newly made, but I reused some of the modular cliffs I've made for the first Encounter, which definitely sped up the layouting process of the environment.

With this animation I'm hoping to provide a significant visual upgrade from the previous ones not just in visuals, but also in dynamics as well. One of the biggest issues with the last animation were the trees, which consisted of almost a million polygons each. This made any sort of dynamic transformation quite costly in terms of CPU translation time. So much that I ended up swapping between two different scenes during rendering, one that had static trees, and another one with rigged ones, all just to animate the branches of one tree as it got hit by Zoe's tail.

Since this new animation was supposed to have a lot more trees than the previous one, I opted to using game-ready tree assets and made various LODs for them. The new trees only have 2.500 - 20.000 polygons, which not only made it possible to have a massive amount of them, but also to animate them as well.

To have the trees sway in the wind I set up a super simple rig that is being instanced and merely time-shifted, making the trees' animations asynchronous among each other. This saves a huge amount of CPU translation time, while substantially contributing to the animation's dynamics. Zoe's new dynamic fur will also be made use of, as I'll be setting its dynamics up to sway subtly in the wind. Animated fur that moves along with wind was always something that absolutely impressed me in CG movies, so I'm happy this is finally becoming a possibility in this new animation.

Since the pre-production of this new animation is still taking a decent amount of time, I might release another mini animation this month. This time it would actually just be a mini animation though, as the one from last month ended up eating a lot of time I had planned to invest into the making of the Encounter sequel.

Note that I'm currently facing some problems with my PMs, which I'll address in another post I'll make soon. Until then, thank you so much for your ongoing incredible support here! I'll keep working on increasing my own quality bar with each new animation, which certainly wouldn't be possible without you guys! <3