Soon!

With the release of the new animation being just a few days away I wanted to make another post to provide some additional information. Apart from that I want to thank all patrons, old and new, for their generous support here! I'm still stunned every time I log in here, especially considered how quickly the support rose over the few months!

At the moment all visuals are done and I'm now rendering a slow motion bonus sequence, which is an alternative camera angle of the swallow sequence that was first considered for the film, but then scrapped for another more frontal perspective. Once I have Monsterchow's sound design I'll put it together with the still uncompressed image sequences. 

For the first time I'm also considering to export the 4k version of the film in HDR, as the rendered source material was exported in 16-bit mode, rather than 8-bit like the previous animations. This would technically allow rendering the film in 10-bit HDR, or the even more visually appealling 12-bit Dolby Vision. If my video compressor will allow me that is one question, furthermore I'm not sure how many patrons have an expensive HDR display connected to their PC, but for now it's nice to this option available since it might become more relevant in the future. For a proper HDR mastering I'd first need to invest into an HDR screen myself to begin with, so at the moment it's mostly just a gimmick, as the only reason for the 16-bit export was to prevent color banding.

In terms of visual fidelity I consider this film another step up from The Apartment animation that was released a few months ago. There's a decent amount of new techniques to find here ranging from volumetric light fog, TAA for a much smoother image, as well as an increase in base framerate from 25 to 30 FPS. Zoe herself was given some little improvements such an additional specular pass for her pupils, as well as more dynamic saliva strings inside her maw. With the finalization of this model I'm already considering modelling a new character over the course of the next year. It might take a while until it will be ready for animation though, which is why it probably won't make an appearance in the next animations yet, at least not until it's on a similar standard like Zoe.

For now I'm mostly trying to work off my backlog of messages here. I have to admit that with almost 250 patrons supporting me I'm slowly having a hard time keeping up with all the comments and messages coming in on a daily base, which is why my response times have been a bit slow lately. I might have to see for a solution on that on the long run sometime soon! o.o