New improvements!

Hi! I've been quite busy over the past 2 weeks working on stuff and even took some leave from work haha. So let me quickly brief you on what I've been up to and what's coming.
There are 4 things I'd like to talk about:

• New and sharper technique for volumetric videos

• Upcoming Quest 3 releases

• My new job scheduling manager

• Quality control measures
  

New Volumetric Technique
Starting with the new method which I'm using for the Juno animation - the winner of our recent post. Well, it's sharper and retains more detail which is great. It also better handles angles that have had a little training data in the set, and finally there's a small reduction in flickering. The flickering is still gonna be there, just less noticeable. Above, I've provided few images, one from a sweat spot, two from awkward spots (first images are using the new method).

Upcoming Quest 3 Releases
Yes, you read it right! I've been experimenting quite a bit with Quest 3 recently and managed to get a working version. The fidelity will be similar or at most slightly worse due to AI upscaling, depends on the animation. The biggest limitation for Quest until now was the APK size which can at most be 1gb with 3gb expendable file and with my animations being in the range of 3-10gb this is a problem. The solutions was to provide the animation as an in-app downloadable content. I'll provide a small APK to be installed using SideQuest and from within the app you'll have to download the animation once and only once. I'm planning to release the first 'test' Quest apk within a week 🙌

Job Scheduling Manager
I absolutely love this! It's going to save me soooo much time but let me first explain to you what problem it solves. My volumetric videos are being rendered on 3 machines, one with RTX 4080 and two other with RTX 4070TI and keeping these machines constantly busy was a huge PAIN because the pipeline for generating these animations consists of 5 steps some taking days to complete other just a few hours and one even minutes. All of these steps would get triggered MANUALLY with custom scripts on all those 3 machines and if I were to forget about one, well, it's rendering time wasted. So I've automated the entire process :3
All I have to do now is to upload the file to my server and it splits the rendering into smaller chunks called "jobs" which my machines complete and the best part is that I can monitor it at all times on my phone. If anything fails I'll know. The big benefit of splitting it in tiny jobs is that if another cyclone comes and my power dies or power fluctuates for some reason the corrupted part (this happened twice already) is going to be just one job which is a chunk of only 10 frames, quite easy to redo. So yes, just thought I'd share this because I'm so happy about it and how it turned out haha. Also I've provided a screenshot of the UI if you're interested.

Quality Control Measures

So I noticed that some animations like 2B and one of Lara's had issues due to being rendered incorrectly which was something that could be caught before hand. I implemented measures to help me catch these issues early. Hopefully, this should decrease the amount of fuckups I sometimes make lol