Glamor hole: more progress again (Patreon)

I started working on the next part, where it shows the dragon getting slammed. It still needs a bit of work, but it's coming along.

I was also testing the fluids and ran into a weird bug with alembic playback. When using alembics at a high frame range, it duplicates a frame every two frames. So it looks horrible:

(The simulation and the alembic)

I did a lot of testing, trying to figure out what was going on, and eventually found a solution while writing a bug report for the Blender folks. If you want some more detail on that (idk why since it's pretty boring) you can read about it here:

https://developer.blender.org/T98310

The workaround I discovered is to just set the frame offset to -0.5.

I do have some good news though. I decided to finally get some new hardware which has been really nice so far. Buttery smooth and extremely responsive viewport, which is such an amazing benefit when animating. It's much, much easier to animate when you can get playback in the viewport that's as fast as the speed your animating at.

The fluid sim is much quicker too for the most part. It can still take multiple hours for longer sims where fluid is constantly being added (the preview here took a couple hours to bake) but that's to be expected. It's quicker to preview small parts of the sim for testing which is the biggest help, since the final bakes can just bake overnight.

Rendering is faster of course (this computer has an RTX 3070) but I haven't tested it on anything besides rendering a few frames of this at 1080p yet.

Anyway, that's it for now! I've also included an updated version of the animatic with more recent previews.