CakeInferno

Encounter 2 - Even more environment progress

Added 2020-11-30 06:00:24 +0000 UTC

With the new mini animation finally rendering, I've been able to get back to the environment of the next Encounter episode. Note that what you're seeing here is still not final, but definitely pretty close to it. The remaining work I still need to do is rigging/animating the bushes, ferns, and smaller plants to sway in the wind, animate soft drizzle/rain, maybe do some small tweaks to lighting, and then optimize the scene to reduce the VRAM footprint a little.

Unlike the last shots, these ones are showing all the layers to give a better idea of what the environment will look like in the final film. I'm still not 100% happy about the look of the background, as the lighting detail is insufficient to get that sort of depth shadowing you see in the close environment. Chances are I might end up using a different renderer for it, as ray tracing would solve all of these problems. The only challenge would be making it blend with the foreground in the end.

In terms of sheer polycount, this is likely the most detailed environment I've ever done for a nommy animation. Most surfaces use highly detailed 8K textures with displacement, I've then constructed another layer of small plants over particularly mossy areas to add a bit more depth to them. The ground area uses slightly larger plants in addition and is also decored with sticks, branches, stones, and other detailed objects to further increase surface detail. In combination with Zoe's new improvements, this should easily become the most visually appealing animation yet and be another step upward from the previous films!

As previously mentioned, the new mini animation is currently rendering and will be posted in the course of the next days as well! (: