Hyena Sandwich (Main Release!) (Patreon)

Phew! I'm glad that I finally managed to finish this, haha. While admittedly it didn't quite turn out the way I had originally envisioned it, I gave it my all.

One difference with this one is that I'm actually not using any hair dynamics on any of the characters. After rendering it overnight, after which it was only 1/3rd through, I watched back what was there and discovered that the hair dynamics looked really terrible. So as much as I had wanted dynamics, and despite the fact that it took me 2-3 hours to bake those dynamics for each character, ultimately I had to turn them off.

There's also more noise here than usual. I did end up doubling my usual amount of samples, but because it's an interior scene, there's pretty much no way around it (aside from setting it to a crazy sample count and having every frame take like ten minutes, lol). So that slight "shimmering" effect you see is a result of that.

As a side-note, this animation gave me WAY more trouble with overnight rendering than any other. Just happenstance really, but I'd leave it going overnight to find that Blender had crashed, or there would be a power outage and my computer was off, or I'd leave it going while at work and come back to find Blender had crashed, again, haha. So, ultimately the process of rendering was interrupted maybe 4-5 times.

I really do like the way the lighting is though, and having it come through the slats of a curtain was the main reason for designing this scene the way I did, rather than placing the characters in a natural environment like I usually do. I really enjoy playing around with light and shadow, and you can even see that in the outdoor animation "Foxes In Love" where there's subtle shadows being cast by "clouds" overhead.

Not a lot of fluid sim in this one. I had a choice between having a crazy amount of splashy fluid or a smaller amount of sticky fluid. As I generally prefer realism, (aside from the whole animals from different continents all on some random bed, rofl), I went with the latter.

Some other miscellaneous info: Once both foxes push their knots in at the same time, there's a good 'ole dolly zoom effect. Also the pillows don't have any sort of dynamics on them whatsoever; I just sculpted out a few different shape keys using the cloth brush, and activated those whenever a character was leaning on them.

I think that's all for now! I'm still trying to figure out how I want to do the different angles, but I expect that they should be released in a few days to a week.

Enjoy. :D And as usual, the higher quality video is an attachment!