Spyglass Confiscation - Playblast

Oh well, I had actually hoped to be done with all the animation already at this point, but I'm somehow still posting playblasts as this thing becomes longer and longer.

Yet again, this spyglass scene was supposed to be a short, casual scene to transition into the animation's outro, but seeing how much longer this animation had already become I decided to expand this one as well and make it a bit more showy, so much so that it justified having its own playblast. The runtime is already well over 3 minutes, but I'm hoping to wrap up the rest of the animation within the next weeks. 

I deeply apologize, but I think I'll have to move the full release to March, as especially the rendering has been going quite slow. I'm however planning on compositing together a preview version of this animation until the end of this month to show you guys everything that has been rendered so far.

Rendering Woes

While I'm close to the finish line with animating everything, the scene rendering hasn't quite caught up yet. The culprit is the part where Chloé lies atop of the viewer and noms/licks over their face, as both her elaborate fur and mouth shaders are basically filling out the entire frame with her being so close. The entire animation has been optimized to comfortably render at 10 - 20 minutes per frame, but in this particular scene, rendering a single frame takes a whooping 30 - 60 minutes. I already tried to optimize things as much as I could, but have mostly been getting diminishing returns. A simple solution would be to decrease the render resolution to 1440p like I did with some parts of the Bunsen animation, but the details on Chloé's fur and mouth come out so incredibly well at native 4K that I don't want to compromise the visuals.

I'm fairly certain that once we're past this part the render time will speed up significantly. Also note that right now the render only goes for 12 hours a day, as I'm still animating whenever I'm awake. Once all animation is wrapped up, rendering should go twice as fast on its own as the render can go 24/7.

Apologies for the delay on this again. 🙏 The next post here should showcase an early preview version of what's to come, even if it will probably be missing a good third of the animation still.