Small setback

Hi guys, I hope everyone's okay.

I just want to give you a quick update because I know release of the next update is supposed to be any day now.

If you read the post title you're probably expecting good news... Not.

I had an issue over the weekend that's cost me some time. The AI frame interpolation software I use to make the animations smoother decided to have a stroke or something on certain images. Normally it creates small artifacts in the generated frames, that's to be expected. What I was getting was much worse, bad enough to be unusable.

I wasn't about to give up on the smooth animations so I spent a bunch of time in Gimp and daz using the spot render tool to fix the areas where the AI had messed up. All in all I think I did an okay job. You might see parts of the scene judder a bit but hopefully not enough to distract from the action.

That was until I went to interpolate another animation and it just went off the rails. Here I can give you an example.

This was basically beyond salvaging, I tried splitting the image up different ways and feeding it to the AI, but it was having none of it. I finally bit the bullet and just went ahead and rendered all the intermediate frames in daz. I really didn't want to because I still had and have other renders that need to be done. I cheated a bit and rendered at lower resolution and abused an AI denoiser. It's not so noticeable because it's an animation and a lot of the image is out of focus and blurry anyway.

Needless to say I was frustrated and then concerned that all my other animations were going to have this issue, I jumped ahead and started doing them and they all turned out okay thankfully. I don't know what the exact issue is, it seems to be the AI doesn't like close ups, large areas of repeating patterns and apparently huge swinging breasts. I guess it wasn't trained on those :).

To get to the point it's cost me time and it means the update is gonna be delayed another day or two. It sucks, all I can say is sorry, it's coming guys, it's gonna take just a bit longer.