[Episode Fomalhaut] Progress Update XXI

Greetings,

I've continued to work on the last scene and I'm more than half way through I think. The most time consuming at the moment is posing the animations in order to prevent clipping and jittering. I had more poses for animations planed, but I may skip a few to not pro long the update cycle even more. However, I still underestimated the time I need for the last scene and the animations and presumable need a bit more time, sorry.

The preview image is a bit random, as I don't want to spoil images from the scene I'm currently working on.

AI

As the update cycle is already way longer than I'd like it to be and I'm still not finished, I was looking for a way to decrease the render time for the animations. I decided to take another look at some AI's that could help me. I found the tool Flowframes which is an AI tool that interpolates between images, generating new frames. This means I could reduce the frame rate for the actual rendering and use the AI the generate more frames in between to get back to a smooth frame rate. Most times this works quite good. The AI has some troubles if there are patterns in the background or the movement is to much between 2 frames. But those occasions where rare and I could fix most of them with a little bit of manual work. I'm also looking into other tools, because Flowframes appears to use slightly outdated AI models and the newer ones should handle this problems better. However, the other tools are either command line tools or donation based tools which may be worth it. So I'm evaluating to make another.

Reducing the frame rate in octane from previous 45 or 30 fps to 15 fps now, lowering the sample rate in octane and relay more on octane's AI de-noiser reduced the render time significantly. Last update it took 18 - 24h to render a single animation while I'm at the moment at 6 -7h. Now I can quite easily render one animation per night, if I managed to pose it accurately enough the day before.

My fear was that the animations would post-pone the update even more than it's already now, but I think this is quite a good solution. The results with 30fps hold up in quality to the rest of the images, which is quite a relieve.

Poll

Quite simple, the unanimously winner of the poll is the image with Selene and Stella in the sauna.

Current status

~ 890 rendered and edited images

~ 95% scripting done

- 3 animations

- 2 high res vertical scroll images