Render Update (Not mobile friendly)

Rendering of Encounter 2 is still ongoing, but phew... saying it's been a bumpy road would be quite of an understatement, as the times I had to re-render certain frequences have been numerous. By now I've meant to be quite a bit further with everything, but there's been one particularly long sequence that's given me a number of headaches, which is due to Maya shifting Zoe's dynamic fur ever so slightly around when reopening the program and requiring me to render a lengthy sequence with multiple layers in one go, otherwise the fur on certain layers such as depth won't match up in the composite. I've figured out a solution to this by splitting up the sequence in "small" 1000 frame chunks and crossfading the shifted fur in After Effects later on, but doing this requires another pass of re-rendering.

All issues aside, the sequences that are finalized so far look quite amazing and a huge step up from the previous Encounter animation, especially so when you see them in full resolution. I however feel that I'm slowly approaching the kind of threshold where I'm in the need for a super computer, as optimization can only do so much to keep the render time reasonable, especially so at a native 60 FPS. I'll need to address frame rate again after finalizing this project, as producing at such a high framerate target has literally doubled the production time on this animation, especially in regards to the much more demanding visuals. Chances are that I'm going back to a native 30 after this and look into some of the new AI-based frame interpolation methods, which I heard have made leaps in the recent years.

My intial plan was to be done with rendering by the 20th, then rush through compositing and post production until the 25th, then tackle sound design and music and release the preview version around the 30th/31st. With rendering seemingly taking another week, things might take until early November whatsoever. 

Note that this version will very much be a work-in-progress and still have a couple of scenes missing, including a major one that takes place within Zoe. It's likely that some post production, sound design, and general polish will be missing for a lot of the scenes as well, but I'll make sure to take care of that in the final version. Right now I just want to get this preview out, so I can de-stress a bit and take my time to polish everything up, while animating the final scenes. Thank you guys so much for being so patient with this! Producing this thing has been quite the journey!