Getting out of this forest - Playblast

After the animation preview ended with such a cliffhanger, I felt like I shouldn't wait too long with the next scenes preview!

First off, thank you so much on the feedback on the animation preview last week! Seeing so many positive comments has taken a lot of stress off my shoulders and made me even more eager to finish this. I was super nervous using a character that isn't Zoe, as people gotten so used to seeing her, but I was glad the reaction was so positive! It makes me quite excited to start working on an Encounter episode with Chloe after this animation is finalized.

Getting one scene per week done was probably a little too optimistic, as this scene here has quite a lot of animation that goes beyond this playblast, but I think that once Space Hero is "off-screen", things should be progressing a little faster, hah! Still a lot of clipping here that I need to get rid off, but for a preview this should already be decent enough! For some reason the gif is running a little faster than the actual video though, but that might just be related to my browser, oop!

Since I first need to animate the upcoming scenes I've been using the nights to re-render some of the previous scenes with a few lighting and animation related tweaks! As previously mentioned, some scenes were rendered in 3200x1800 to make the preview deadline, but I'm re-rendering most of them at full 4K resolution now. As part of my new post-production process, these scenes will additionally be AI upscaled to 8K, before being downsampled back to 4K. This might sound a bit silly, on paper, but in practice the AI algorithm provides a massive improvement in not just cleaning up any leftover noise, it also significantly improves the clarity and sharpness, much better than any sharpness filter could, thanks to using temporal image processing.

Next to those image-enhancement techniques, there's also going to be some color grading applied to the final animation. This has also been completely absent from the preview itself to save time.

Some of the render changes are a bit more subtle and more obvious when viewed at higher resolutions, but I thought that if I was about to re-render some scenes anyway, I might as well apply a few more tweaks here and there!

That's it for this preview! I'm going straight back to animating, so I hope you guys are liking the updates! Thanks so much for the amazing support, everyone! <3