Handheld Slurp - Extended Playblast

Aaaaaand here's a slightly extended version of the previous playblast! Lighting has been slighly improved but is still a bit so so. I'll have to tweak it that for the final render later down the line!

Phew, I'm making some decent progress, but there's still a decent amount of scenes to go! At least rendering has advanced quite nicely, with half of the background layer already rendered out for the first (and longest) scene. Once that's done I'll render the foreground and will leave that rendering. Then with some luck a major part of the animation will already be done once all animation is completed and I'll get a headstart at rendering.

In addition to a few selected scenes that will feature ray tracing, I've also been trying my hand at a new AI upscaling algorithm that I'll be using in this animation, mainly to improve the quality of the anti-aliasing, while also upscaling the fully ray-traced scenes, which won't be rendered at a full 4K resolution. The few tests results I've made have been quite impressive! Not only does the image appear significantly higher res, but the algorithm also takes care of aliasing and noise, making for a much smoother image, without losing sharpness.

To my knowledge, the algorithm works by looking up information from neighboring frames and using it to reconstruct detail and smooth the image. This is then combined with an AI image upscaler, which is somewhat similar to how NVidia's DLSS works. We've used to have temporal reconstruction in video games for quite a while now (usually known as TAA), so it's nice to finally have this available for offline-rendered animations. If you're a CG artist yourself and you've always struggled with AA and noise, then I'd definitely recommend to check out Topaz Video Enhance Ai, whose algorithm I've been using for this test!