Still rendering

Welp! Rendering of the preview version is still ongoing with there being 5 scenes left to go. Luckily 4 of them are fairly short and shouldn't give me any real headaches, so I'm somewhat confident that rendering shouldn't take more than an additional week, fingers crossed. 

I've already done the processing for most of the rendered material, so the majority of it is ready to go! For the preview version itself, I'll likely not include the full post production pipeline due to the rendered material already looking pretty good on its own. The post production for this will mostly include subtle touches such as smoke/steam coming out of Zoe's mouth, camera water droplets, as well as color grading, which will make the final version pop a little more in terms of colors. Depth of field and motion blur will however be fully included, as they largely contribute to the overall presentation I feel.

I must admit I went back to polish up some previous scenes that had already been rendered. I was specifically unsatisfied with the shading in Zoe's maw, as it looked a tad flat due to the rasterized diffuse sky lighting missing a lot of ambient shading in the more shadowed regions. I first tried to improve this with multiple passes of SSAO that were applied to her mouth, but there were a lot of issues, including haloing, as well as areas that were improperly lit (such as her throat appearing brighter than all the rest). I then realized that I could just toss Zoe's maw into Redshift to render an additional pass of proper ray-traced ambient occlusion, which immediately brought fantastic results. There's a particular scene where our hero gets dragged into Zoe's maw, which was the most problematic scene so far, as the rasterized shading completely fell apart there. RTAO supplied some proper darkening in all the right areas and made for such a substantial improvement that I'm currently going back to apply it to all the other scenes where her maw is more prominent.

The preview version might still take until mid-November to finally drop. I apologize for everything taking so long again. I want to ensure everything looks the best it possibly can, since I almost spent an entire year animating this. ;w;

Here's also another small 60FPS render sample, though note there's no color grading on it yet: Link