CakeInferno

Bellydance - Preview 2

A second preview of the upcoming belly dancing mini animation that Disregard animated last month, this time with the big tummy~!

Rendering this out unfortunately takes a tiny bit longer due to the two versions. Each one has three different perspectives, so it's a total of 6 short sequences. Unfortunately rendering these until the end of June didn't pan out and they require roughly another 1 - 2 weeks to complete, apologies! ;-;

In the meantime work on Encounter 3 has also continued, which will be the sole focus once this small animation is completed! I'll probably have another update on that by mid-July after this animation got posted! (:

Chloe Bellydance - Playblast

Disregard had some fun with Chloe and did a little belly dance animation with her! I've been polishing it in the recent days and set her up in her domain and now it's becoming its own mini animation that should be finalized early next month.

There's also going to be a big tummy variation. Alex actually provided me with one, but I ended up reanimating it since I needed everything within one scene. I used this opportunity to play with some more stylized lighting as well that I might reuse in the future!

Once this animation is posted, we'll continue with Encounter 3 playblasts! We're currently waiting on some voice work, so here's hoping this little animation will bridge the gap in the meantime.

Chloe's Tease - Alternative Angles (1080p/60FPS)

And here they are, the alternative night angles!

MEGA 1080p/30FPS: Link
MEGA 1080p/60FPS: Link

I didn't find the time to do the same level of post-production as on the main animation, so a couple of on screen effects are missing from this. The plan for this month was to spend most of it working on Encounter 3 to get some more progress done on it, so expect the next updates to be on that! (:

Chloe's Tease - Alternative Angles (4k/60FPS)

And here they are, the alternative night angles!

MEGA 4k/60FPS: Link
MEGA 4k/30FPS: Link

I didn't find the time to do the same level of post-production as on the main animation, so a couple of on screen effects are missing from this. The plan for this month was to spend most of it working on Encounter 3 to get some more progress done on it, so expect the next updates to be on that! (:

Alternative Angles - Preview 2

Here's another look at the alternative angles/lighting for Chloe's Tease, which will release here in a few days!

Making these wasn't a small tasks since it required re-lighting and re-rendering more than half of the original animation, which could only be done through a few shortcuts such as lowering the rendering resolution to 3200x1800 and reducing the amount of render-heavy volumetric effects.

 Give it a few more days and the angles should be good for a release! I'm roughly expecting post production to be finalized this weekend, so release should be early next week! (:

Endless Desert Walk - Playblast

After making it through the Endless Forest, Space Hero is now making his way through the Endless Desert, oh well!

First playblast for Encounter 3, animated by Disregard! I'll probably touch it up a little animation-wise and change up the camera work for the render, so expect this to look a bit different when completed. Alex has already animated a good portion of the intro, which means that once I'm done rendering the alternative angles of Chloe's Tease, the overnight renders will continue with this. Feels great doing things in such a streamlined and efficient manner for once! :D

Note that rendering of the alternative angles is still taking a bit as these zoomed-in, high-detail shots are fairly slow to render. I'll have another update by the end of the month though, with the release of them roughly coming up here in early June.

Super happy you enjoyed the first tease of Chloé by the way! There's a lot more of her to come! <3

Chloe's Tease - Public Version

Here's a new animation with out new girl Chloé! Originally this thing was supposed to be just over a minute but I got pretty carried away, oh gosh!

Le Link: Link

This animation is a prequel for the much larger Encounter 3 animation to test the waters with the rig that Disregard made for Chloé and iron out some of its flaws. It's also my first animation that makes use of fully path-traced fur, which was insanely heavy to render, especially with Chloé's fur being rather short and mostly relying on glossiness. Oh well! It's a POV animation that mainly revolves around mawplay and object vore with emphasis on the more sensual aspects of the kink. It's a relatively short and simple plot that is also supposed to cross-transition into Encounter 3 with its outro. Here's hoping you enjoy this small... ish animation! :D

Le Credits!

Acidic - Sculpting, Retopo, Texturing (Chloé)
Disregard67 - Rigging (Chloé)
Darkwitt - Sound Design, Additional Voices (POV Character)
Cakeinferno - Animation, Environment, lots of extra stuff on Chloé, etc.

The Voice Vixxen - Voice of Chloé
Baritone Vocant - Voice of Space Hero (Can be heard in the distance at the end)

Chloe's Tease - Alt Angles Preview 1

The alternative angles to the recently released animation are currently rendering, so here's a small first look at them. I've also taken the liberty to change the time of day to night and change up the scene lighting quite a bit!

Rendering of these will take a hot minute, which is why they probably won't be done until the end of the month. I'll however make sure to squeeze in another preview of them in 1 - 2 weeks, depending on how far rendering has progressed by then!

The public release of the main Chloe's Tease animation will also be in roughly 2 days if everything goes well, woo!

Friendship ended with Loneliness

With the ongoing increase of production values with each new animation, it has become increasingly more difficult to produce these things on my own. This has manifested in constantly rising production times in especially the more recent animations, which didn't only make use of a modern rendering pipeline, but also significantly improved on the character models, their rigs, and their animation.

The character creation phase was already supported by Acidic and Disregard (Alex) who played a substantial part in Chloe's creation. We compliment each other pretty well, which is why I'm planning to keep working with Cid and Alex on future original characters. Since Alex also specializes in animation, we've decided to take this collaboration a step further and involve him in future major animations now as well. This means that Encounter 3 will be animated by both Alex and myself to parallelize the animation workload a lot better. At the moment it's mostly a part-time thing since Alex still has his own projects on the side, but knowing there's a second animator already takes a massive burden off my own shoulders.

As an example, while I finalized the recently released Chloe's Tease animation, Alex had already been animating on the first Encounter 3 scenes, which will be shown some time in the upcoming weeks. Alex is quite fast with animating, admittedly a good bit faster than I am, which is why we've had a bit of an exchange in regards to my work schedule, where we managed to nail it down to me using a fairly dated laptop as a daily driver. My laptop is fairly slow by now and it requires me to export every animation before viewing it, so I'm hoping to get rid of that bottleneck by getting a new desktop this week with a powerful modern processor that I'll be using to animate going forward. Being able to animate and preview animations in real time sounds like the dream to me and should hopefully make my own animating a good bit faster. Once I'm done with the alternative angles and this new computer is also good to go, I'll join him with the animation. Note that I'll still handle all production-related aspects such as simulation, lighting, rendering going forward.

Encounter 3 plans

Knowing I have Alex aboard with this animation gave me a lot of liberties with the script, as I didn't need to write it with the limitation in mind that I need to animate everything on my own and release it in a somewhat timely manner as well. As a result of that, the whole animation will be more comparable to a TV episode and have a supposed runtime of up to twenty minutes. The plot revolves around Space Hero trying to get the Ankh of infinite wishes from Chloe, who of course isn't just going to give it to him. It's supposed to be divided in three parts, starting with Space Hero meeting Chloe, the actual bossfight, and a smaller part afterwards that takes place at the Tiki Bar at night. Before joining Alex on the animation, I'll likely do a few improvements on both the environment and Chloe herself, as I want to look everything as good as I possibly can.

Future long term plans include the introduction of new original characters, including the revamped Zoe 2.0 model sometime after the third Encounter episode is completed.

New Patreon Release Schedule

With Encounter 3 being such an absolute chonker of a project, I thought it would be a good idea to deviate from the typical release schedule of only showing playblasts for so many months and then only release an animation when it's completed. The idea for the new release schedule is to post the animation as far as it's rendered and do that every few months until completion. I figured this has already worked pretty well with the Bunsen, as well as the Chloe's Tease animation, where I posted them in a partially completed state. For the future I want to double down on it and post major update milestones more frequently, especially as it probably works a lot better with these long form animations.

I want to thank everyone on Patreon for their ongoing support! Not only has this enabled me to dedicate so much time to producing these animation with state-of-the-art soft and hardware, but it's also making it possible to collaborate with other artists and fairly compensate them for their work. Knowing there's now a second animator helping me with these huge animations is a massive stress relief as well since I've often found myself overburdened from making these animations on my own. c:

Chloe's Tease - 4k Version

And here it is, the first animation with Chloé! <3

MEGA 4k/30FPS: Link
MEGA 4k/60FPS: Link

Some users reported that Mega has a daily quota of 2GB, which is why the 60FPS version has been split into two 2GB parts.

Youtube 4k/60FPS: [Check back later]

The 60FPS versions should be up in a few days! I'm currently experimenting with a new interpolation algorithm that promises some pretty amazing results.

I'll also have another post up in a few days that discusses future plans, mainly concerning Encounter 3, as well as a preview to the alternative angles/lighting version of this animation, so stay tuned! :D

Chloe's Tease - 1080p Version

And here it is, the first animation with Chloé! <3

MEGA 1080p/30FPS: Link
MEGA 1080p/60FPS: Link

Youtube 1080p/60FPS: [Check back later]

The 60FPS versions should be up in a few days! I'm currently experimenting with a new interpolation algorithm that promises some pretty amazing results.

I'll also have another post up in a few days that discusses future plans, mainly concerning Encounter 3, as well as a preview to the alternative angles/lighting version of this animation, so stay tuned! :D

Chloe's Tease - March Preview (1080p)

Here's an updated preview of the updated animation! Apologies in advance for the very incomplete sound. I know my sound designer is a bit further into it than what this preview suggests, but I didn't get him to send me an updated version yet. I admittedly forgot it's Easter and most people are spending their time with their family. Speaking of which, Happy Easter! :D

Mega (1080): Link

Visually, this updated version is roughly 80% complete. It's only missing the last scene where Chloe confiscates the spyglass, some post, and the credits overlays. I used most of the day to make some fairly simple music for it, but it's fairly subtle since this is mostly supposed to be carried by ASMR-ish sound design. The latter will be the main focus for the final release!

Right now the final scene is already rendering and will add another 50-ish seconds to it. Seeing how it's progressing I'm aiming for a mid-month release of the final version, so roughly two more weeks, give or take a few days (probably give). This will also have full sound design and probably a bit of extra polish here and there, likely some more samples for Chloe as well since I'll also be poking her voice actress again. For now I'm hoping you enjoy this new preview! <3

Chloe's Tease - March Preview (4K)

Here's an updated preview of the updated animation! Apologies in advance for the very incomplete sound. I know my sound designer is a bit further into it than what this preview suggests, but I didn't get him to send me an updated version yet. I admittedly forgot it's Easter and most people are spending their time with their family. Speaking of which, Happy Easter! :D

Mega (4K): Link

Visually, this updated version is roughly 80% complete. It's only missing the last scene where Chloe confiscates the spyglass, some post, and the credits overlays. I used most of the day to make some fairly simple music for it, but it's fairly subtle since this is mostly supposed to be carried by ASMR-ish sound design. The latter will be the main focus for the final release!

Right now the final scene is already rendering and will add another 50-ish seconds to it. Seeing how it's progressing I'm aiming for a mid-month release of the final version, so roughly two more weeks, give or take a few days (probably give). This will also have full sound design and probably a bit of extra polish here and there, likely some more samples for Chloe as well since I'll also be poking her voice actress again. For now I'm hoping you enjoy this new preview! <3

More Render Previews (Not Mobile Friendly)

Rendering is still ongoing and currently at 3800 of roughly 6000 total frames, admittedly still lacking behind in progress a bit, which is mostly due to me having made the decision to re-render some previous shots. 👀

I was a tad unhappy with the previously shown lick sequence, which is why I partially rendered it again. I thought I went a bit overboard with the tongue displacement shader and slightly dialed it back, while also increasing the wetness look of it a little. The sequence has also been rendered out with an additional pass where her tongue is flat, which is being to better sell that tongue-on-glass effect at the contact area. I think the entire sequence looks significantly better with full post production now as a result!

I'll have to see how far the render gets until the end of this month, and should it still not be completed then I'll likely have to post a second preview of the animation. I'm super sorry for this cluttered release schedule, but render times have increased significantly since making the jump to path-traced visuals. Note that this second preview will however have sound, post-production, and will likely be almost complete in runtime. 🙏

Chloé's Tease - 2 minute preview (1080p)

As promised, here's an early look at the upcoming animation! This preview is admittedly a bit rougher that usual and lacks sound, music, and a lot of post production, which is in part due to the render going quite a bit slow. The last 30 seconds are basically fresh out of the render rig and have literally been added in the last hour, which means that there's been no image treatment done for this. It's also missing all the screen effects such as the tongue on glass, water droplet and lens fogging VFX, which means that things will look a bit sterile.

MEGA (1080p): Link

Throughout the recent weeks I thought I had been particularly slow with animating this, as I assumed that the full animation was just shy of 3 minutes. However, after laying out all the scenes today I realized I was quite reserved with this estimate, as just comping all of the current scenes together already resulted in a total runtime of 3:40, and that is without counting the additional hand in mouth scene I've yet to animate or the credits. With these two additions this will probably end up as a 4-minute animation. And here this thing was supposed to be a small teaser, oh well...

The main animation is pretty much done. I'll spend two additional days polishing the remaining scenes up a bit and then animate in additional inside maw scene, which I'm estimating to animate in a couple of days. After this the render will be going non-stop, while I'll focus on other stuff such as post production, music, and probably getting a few more samples from Chloé's VA. The sound design will mostly be done by Darkwitt again and carry some strong ASMR vibes. It'll be quite detailed and sensual, which is why cramming in a preview of the sound wasn't quite possible yet.

Seeing how this animation has turned out so long I'd say that late March is looking more likely for the full release. There's still well over 3000 frames left to render, and while I'll see if I can optimize the render speed a bit further, I don't want to compromise the quality of the second half, especially since it carries most of the juicy parts.

I'll have another update in 2 weeks, likely with some render playblasts of the later scenes, though I probably won't be spoiling anything I haven't shown yet!

Chloé's Tease - 2 minute preview (4k)

As promised, here's an early look at the upcoming animation! This preview is admittedly a bit rougher that usual and lacks sound, music, and a lot of post production, which is in part due to the render going quite a bit slow. The last 30 seconds are basically fresh out of the render rig and have literally been added in the last hour, which means that there's been no image treatment done for this. It's also missing all the screen effects such as the tongue on glass, water droplet and lens fogging VFX, which means that things will look a bit sterile.

MEGA (4K): Link
MEGA (1080p): Link

Throughout the recent weeks I thought I had been particularly slow with animating this, as I assumed that the full animation was just shy of 3 minutes. However, after laying out all the scenes today I realized I was quite reserved with this estimate, as just comping all of the current scenes together already resulted in a total runtime of 3:40, and that is without counting the additional hand in mouth scene I've yet to animate or the credits. With these two additions this will probably end up as a 4-minute animation. And here this thing was supposed to be a small teaser, oh well...

The main animation is pretty much done. I'll spend two additional days polishing the remaining scenes up a bit and then animate in additional inside maw scene, which I'm estimating to animate in a couple of days. After this the render will be going non-stop, while I'll focus on other stuff such as post production, music, and probably getting a few more samples from Chloé's VA. The sound design will mostly be done by Darkwitt again and carry some strong ASMR vibes. It'll be quite detailed and sensual, which is why cramming in a preview of the sound wasn't quite possible yet. 

Seeing how this animation has turned out so long I'd say that late March is looking more likely for the full release. There's still well over 3000 frames left to render, and while I'll see if I can optimize the render speed a bit further, I don't want to compromise the quality of the second half, especially since it carries most of the juicy parts.

I'll have another update in 2 weeks, likely with some render playblasts of the later scenes, though I probably won't be spoiling anything I haven't shown yet!

Spyglass Confiscation - Playblast

Oh well, I had actually hoped to be done with all the animation already at this point, but I'm somehow still posting playblasts as this thing becomes longer and longer.

Yet again, this spyglass scene was supposed to be a short, casual scene to transition into the animation's outro, but seeing how much longer this animation had already become I decided to expand this one as well and make it a bit more showy, so much so that it justified having its own playblast. The runtime is already well over 3 minutes, but I'm hoping to wrap up the rest of the animation within the next weeks. 

I deeply apologize, but I think I'll have to move the full release to March, as especially the rendering has been going quite slow. I'm however planning on compositing together a preview version of this animation until the end of this month to show you guys everything that has been rendered so far.

Rendering Woes

While I'm close to the finish line with animating everything, the scene rendering hasn't quite caught up yet. The culprit is the part where Chloé lies atop of the viewer and noms/licks over their face, as both her elaborate fur and mouth shaders are basically filling out the entire frame with her being so close. The entire animation has been optimized to comfortably render at 10 - 20 minutes per frame, but in this particular scene, rendering a single frame takes a whooping 30 - 60 minutes. I already tried to optimize things as much as I could, but have mostly been getting diminishing returns. A simple solution would be to decrease the render resolution to 1440p like I did with some parts of the Bunsen animation, but the details on Chloé's fur and mouth come out so incredibly well at native 4K that I don't want to compromise the visuals.

I'm fairly certain that once we're past this part the render time will speed up significantly. Also note that right now the render only goes for 12 hours a day, as I'm still animating whenever I'm awake. Once all animation is wrapped up, rendering should go twice as fast on its own as the render can go 24/7.

Apologies for the delay on this again. 🙏 The next post here should showcase an early preview version of what's to come, even if it will probably be missing a good third of the animation still.

Hand Nom - Playblast

The feeding of our queen continues, this time a bit more sensual than last time around~!

This scene will be accompanied by a small cut that shows the inside of Chloé maw as she suckles on our protagonist's hand. I'm going to tackle this scene once the main animation is done however, which I'm estimating to be somewhere in February! At the moment I'm animating the last third of the animation, while the second third of it is being rendered overnight. Fingers crossed that I'll get it all wrapped up until the end of next month! x_x

In the meantime I'll continue posting playblasts here! Gotta see how far these overnight renders come in the next two weeks, so I can show some rendered previews instead. Stay tuned! :D

A little more sensual - Playblast

Chloé continues with her instructions, though this time wants our POV protagonist to be a bit more sensual, which will lead to their hands getting stuck in her mouth, oh dear~!

This little bit of Chloé drawing her finger over her tongue wasn't actually in the script, but since the animation is turning out much longer than expected I've decided on adding a few more teasing bits here and there! I'm already a bit further with the animation, but the scene I'm currently working on is still fairly unfinished. Once it's done however, I'll setup the next render batch and animate the last third of this animation, which I'm expecting to be the shortest part of it. I'm fairly certain however that this will push the animation somewhere beyond 3 minutes, oh well! <:

Since the month has 31 days, I should be able to get another update out before the month's end!

Feeding Chloe - Playblast

Chloe obviously hasn't gobbled up her grapes yet, but luckily you're here to help her with that! :D

First post of the new year! Apologies for still being a bit behind with the regular posting schedule, I didn't quite get as much work done as I'd have liked throughout the Christmas holiday due to some family shenanigans! However, since the beginning of January I've back to my usual working schedule!

After giving the viewer a few licks, Chloe decided to get up with them. Looks like even when she's kneeling, she's still much taller than a human, hah! There's still a good deal of stuff to come here, even though I've already passed the 2 minute mark, oh dear! I'm hoping to have all the animation finalized until early February, but I'm somewhat worried about the rendering taking quite a bit more time to finalize. To my surprise, the scene inside Chloe's maw is taking quite some time to render, mostly due to her complex mouth shader that when filling out the entire view, takes longer to render than her fur. The results are looking quite amazing whatsoever and I think that even without any post processing, the bare renders already look significantly better than anything in the previous Zoe animations. 

Here's a little preview of the previously shown maw sequence in 4k: Link 

The preview just shows the bare rendered frames, so note that the final animation is still going to look a bit better due to post production, denoising, and some AI image treatment.

With the render lacking behind so much, it's unfortunately more likely for the animation to not be completed until mid, or even late February, but I'll see how things progress this month. Since things might be taking a little longer anyway, I might be adding an additional in-maw scene that shows the viewer's fingers being suckled on by Chloe's tongue, but let's see how things progress in the next two weeks! Here's hoping progress is a bit faster than I'm currently assuming, but most of the time the opposite is the case, oof! 

Sensual Licks - Playblast

Oh wow, Patreon finally comes with a dark theme! Looks like the gods have listened. My eyes certainly are thankful! <3

Here's another playblast with one of the recently animated scenes! As announced in the last post, I didn't get quite as much animation done since I spent the first week of the month preparing the last sequence for rendering. It can now render while I'm asleep for maximum progress efficiency! :D

I managed to optimize the scene enough to render at a full native 4K. Getting all the wind dynamics right ate most of the time though, as it required some extra rigging on the tent for it to flap in the wind. There's both fur and particle simulation here as well, something I'm hoping to use more extensively in future animations.

Note that the licking sequence is still exposing some clipping here and there, but I'll make sure to have all of that fixed. I know I originally said that this would only be a 1 - 2 minute animation, but I'm crawling pretty close to the 2 minute mark already and there's still quite a bit of animation to be done, so... 2 - 3 minute animation it is. Ah well!

The rendering is roughly progressing at 30 frames per night, which comes out at one second. I'm thinking that late January/early February is a somewhat realistic date to aim at, especially with the runtime being a tad longer than originally planned. There are also a couple of Christmas shenanigans coming up for me, but I'll try my best to still post another update by the end of the year! I hope you all have a super neat Christmas until then and get to spent some time with your loved ones! <3

Face Slurp Playblast & Teleport VFX

Even after all this time animating, I still get the occasional sequence I struggle with and in this case it was something rather simple like Chloé leaning herself down over the viewer. While I got it to look good in third person, it somehow looked off from the POV perspective. I was able to fix it by exaggerating the movements and making them a lot snappier, which in turn made it look weird in third person, but right from a POV angle. Well, I think I'm going to keep it like that!

Looks like we're finally getting to the good stuff! Chloé has decided to "punish" the viewer for spying by sucking on your face a little, oh no~! This seemed like a good moment to show off her extended gullet and its rig as well. Everything can now be animated, which makes her maw look more dynamic than ever. I've added a plethora of blend poses to her tongue as well, so it can morph between various shapes. There's also some additional sculpt deformers at work here, which are using Maya's new-ish component tags, but the use of them is fairly subtle here, as the excellent mouth rig that was provided by Disregard already enabled me to animate it with a high level of polish!

Most of the intro scenes have already finished rendering, so I can also give you a preview of what the rendered animation is going to look like!

This also shows Chloé's teleportation VFX, which was achieved using nParticles with a decent amount of per-opject motion blur. Since she's desert-themed djinn character, I wanted her teleportation to look like a burst of sand that then reassembles in the same manner. We're only going to see it twice in this animation, while in Encounter 3 it's going to be used quite often for her to move in and out of the shot! :D

Note that the next playblast might be a bit late, as I'm first going to polish up the sequence shown here to have it render over night. I lately try to get a lot of the rendering done during the animation phase since it has gotten a lot more time consuming with these new path-traced visuals.

An admirer? - Playblast & Chloe Voice Preview

Looks like Chloe wasn't particularly happy being spied on, but finding a potential new admirer her anger vanishes rather quickly!

This sequence has admittedly taken quite some time getting right, mostly retiming things and making sure she isn't clipping through the tent. I actually had to make the tent a little taller since Chloe's nearly 10ft size was quite hard to cram in there, but luckily for the major part of the animation she'll be down on the ground and close to the viewer. I'm still getting used to her mouth rig, so animating her lips to the voice samples is still a little slow, but I'm certain once I've gotten the hang of it things, everything should be moving forward a little faster. Once I'm a bit further in the animation I should also be able to copypaste a lot of the vowel/consonant lip poses, so animating the longer sentences shouldn't consume as much time anymore.

Chloe Voice Preview (Youtube)

I know some of you are curious about her VA, so here's also a little preview for the samples that were recorded for this animation! Chloe's voice will be provided by The Voice Vixxen, which is a talented VA that I've found via Twitter. She's also planned to voice Chloe in all animations going forward! Her voice is somewhat reminiscent to Chloe Fraser from the Uncharted series, which was pretty much the vibe that I was looking for in regards to this character. I hope you like her! :D

I'm hoping to post another preview to the first nommy sequence by the end of the month, from there we should already get to the good stuff~!

Spying on Chloé - Playblast (Rough)

First time I'm animating Chloé and it had to be a walkcycle, oof! Here's the very first playblast of Chloé Tease, the first animation that will feature our new anubian jackal!

The premise is fairly simple. There's a POV character spying on Chloé from a nearby cliff outpost. She'll be quick to realize she's being spied on, prompting her to do a *teleports behind u* and join the peeping admirer under the tent. This is going to be a fairly short animation with only a runtime of 1 - 2 minutes and will mainly revolve around sensual mawplay and object vore. The protagonist will also be silent this time around and let Chloé do most of the talking. Chronologically this all happens before Encounter 3, which is why this is basically a prequel to Space Hero arriving at the scene.

There's still a couple of rough spots with this animation, but I'm hoping to iron them out and finish animating the whole intro until the end of this month. There's a good bit of animated material that can be reused for Encounter 3 later on, such as Chloé's walkcycle, which was the first thing I've animated. 

This is also the first animation where I'm following an improved workflow by using animation layers and some additional animation plugins that add a ton of useful tools to Maya. Just using animation layers alone has made my life a lot easier and made it possible for me to quickly animate over her walking animation and add details such as breathing and keeping it all on a separate layer. I still need to improve the camera work a bit for this shot since she's quite small in it, so here's a closer view at her animation for the time being.

Once the intro scene is completed, I'm going straight to rendering with it, so it can take its time rendering over night, while I'll be animating the next shots while I'm awake! Expect the usual playblast posting schedule from here! :D

Chloé - Showcase

Took a little while longer, but the work on Chloé has finally been completed! I've used the time to make a couple of wallpapers to test out the model and its features, and see how her fur and materials react to various lighting conditions. The wallpapers were all rendered at 8K resolution and can be downloaded at the bottom of the page, just like Disregard's animation.

This expression test should already show a good deal of her functions, including her more furious state, where her eyeballs turn black and her markings start to glow through her fur. Fancy, isn't it? :D

Chloé once used to be a genie who had been tied to a lamp by a curse. That was at least until one day, where she crossed paths with a prince whom she granted three wishes. Little did the prince know that speaking out the third wish would free her from the lamp and allow her to roam freely, all while retaining her might. Chloé however was relatively modest, only demanding a relatively small section of the prince's kingdom for her own, which has since been titled Chloé's Domain. The anubian goddess has settled there ever since, spending her days around an idyllic oasis with a number of loyal subjects.

Every now and then, travelers enter her domain and often fall victim to her mischief. The common outcome is that they end up as one of her subjects themselves, as Chloé would often enchant them with one of her spells, at least if the usual methods aren't effective enough. Being an actual goddess, the anubian queen has a persistent interest in growing her following afterall!

If Chloé actually takes a liking in someone, she'll even try to win them over with conventional methods and occasionally even grant them wishes. Everything to make them stay a little longer...

Being once a wish-fulfilling genie, Chloé will be able to see right through Space Hero and see his deepest desires. Space Hero has a few plans on his own whatsoever, requiring Chloé's Ankh as a key item to open a certain door. He'll eventually agree to fight the powerful genie over it and will be granted several tries. Should he be able to put a scratch on Chloé, she'll be lending him the artifact. However, should he lose and run out of tries then he'll end up as yet another one of her many subjects.

I think that should sum up her lore, as well as give you an idea of how Encounter 3 will play out. Note that before I start working on the animation, I'll be doing another much shorter POV one that I'm actually hoping to finish until Christmas. I already want to get started on animating right in the upcoming week, so it's likely you'll still see a first playblast of this later this month!

Chloé herself still needs a few final touches, but I should be able to apply them in the upcoming days. I can't even put into words how enthusiastic I am to finally work with a model that doesn't have a million bugs, while also being quite fast to animate. Even in this 1.0 version, Chloé already has all features of Zoe's late model, including more complex things such as dynamic fur, which already works better than ever.

I also went the extra mile and made wet variants of her fur, making her pelt extremely clumpy and glossy. Something like this had actually barely been possible with Zoe's fur shaders, as they didn't actually have specular values and only a fake gloss effect that didn't factor in the actual light sources. I think the way I managed to fake it still made it look somewhat believable, but it's no comparison to Chloé's physically-based fur shader.

I want to use this moment again to thank everyone who's been involved in this, starting with Acidic, who did the base sculpt for the model that was later going to become Chloé! He did an incredibly fine job of giving her torso and head proper definition, also entirely modelling her hands and feet into something proper, while also sculpting her amazing teeth that I haven't touched ever since. He's also been responsible for making her bra and loincloth, while also taking care of the retopology and UV processes that I dread so much.

Secondly I want to thank Disregard for rigging her and keeping up with my requirements for this rig. He's still been ironing out bugs until this weekend to make this a highly functional rig that goes far beyond what my previous Zoe model could do. Thanks to him, Chloé is incredibly expressive and has extremely detailed controls!

Lastly, I want to thank you, my patrons for making it possible for all of us to invest all of this time into making such a polished model! I'm hoping that this will be the first step to a small roster of characters, which should make it possible to offer a bit more variety in future animations!

Lastly, here are 8K versions of the wallpapers, as well as a 4K version of Disregard's expression test!

8K Wallpapers/Expression Test: Link

Chloé's Domain - Encounter 3/Prequel Environment

Well phew! This admittedly took a good week longer than planned, but I think the environment came out quite alright!

What you're looking at is Chloé's Domain, the environment where most animations with Chloße will take place. This environment will be used for the upcoming prequel animation, and both parts of the full Encounter 3 episode. Furthermore I've planned on using it for a number of bite-sized bits that Disregard has already animated, including the expression test you saw in the last post. I'm going back to working on Chloé today to do some last polishing touches such as dynamic fur and some saliva strands, before touching up Disregard's expression test for a fancier render. I'm planning to fully reveal Chloé by the end of the month as well.

(Main Room)

Unlike most of the previous environments, Chloé's domain actually has multiple locations that can be used as scenes from pretty much all angles. There's the main room in her temple that acts as both a dining hall and playground, with a balcony that offers a view over the oasis. A staircase in the building leads to a treasury in the basement, as well as the rooftop, which will be where the fight with giant Chloé will take place later on.

(View over the oasis)

(Rooftop/Battle stage)

Outside of the temple, there are multiple other locations that can be used for scenes. From the oasis itself, to a small bar with stools surrounded by palm trees, to a lookout tent on the cliff next to the temple, which is where the prequel will play out. Among there main locations, there are also a number of B-locations that aren't as detailed. These include the large pyramid, a construction site, the temple in the back, as well as various desert locations around the main perimeter. The desert and mountains span a fair bit into the distance, making it both the largest, and most detailed environment so far.

(Bar next to the Oasis)

The environment is using a mix of custom made assets, Megascans, and a lot of Kitbash stuff. The latter was used for most of the buildings around the temple to significantly speed up the environment creation time. It also helped quickly populating the main temple with scene assets and even decorate the structure with a number of adornments. I admittedly even tossed away my own pyramid models that I've made for the Halloween Encounter Outro. While they were quite detailed with brick rows that I had individually modeled, they didn't fit in so well anymore around the white brick buildings, but who knows, maybe I'll reuse them for distant scenery later on!

(Lighting studies for various times of day)

Lastly, I've made a number of lighting studies for various times of day and scene moods. How much of these will be used will be something I've yet to decide, but since Chloé is a djinn, she's pretty much a goddess who's able to change the weather at will, and sometimes through her temper. :D

Those interested can grab the full renders (7680x4320 native) here: Link 

With the environment being out of the way, I'll use the rest of the month to do the last touches on Chloé and see if I can render out some of Disregard's animations. Fingers crossed that I can still squeeze a clip in before the end of the month, otherwise it will be early next month. Also planning to get going on the prequel animation then, so stay tuned! (:

Polishing Chloe and more environment progress!

I'm happy to report that Chloe's model is almost finalized! At the moment I'm doing the last finishing touches, which include setting up her fur to be dynamic, while also adding some saliva strands to her mouth, for uhh... reasons. :D

I rendered out Disregard's animation test once more to test how the fur behaves and everything is working as intended, which is quite the relief after having to deal with the previous fur plugin's constantly flicker. Unfortunately I had to significantly reduce the density of her fur since it completely filled the 4090's VRAM. I guess the problem is the sheer amount of hair particles here, especially with her clothes covering so little of her body. I guess cranking up the density would require the usage of actual professional workstation cards. Oh well, maybe one day!

I've taken the extra time with her fur and made sure that it actually wraps around her clothes this time. I've also made pressure maps for her clothes, so rather than having no fur under her clothes, the clothes actually push it against her body, means it still looks good in those edge cases where you can peek under her clothing!

After finalizing her fur I've taken some extra time to revise her maw since I wasn't particularly happy with it just yet. Her tongue got weirdly thinner towards her throat, which has now been fixed through some corrective blend shapes!

While her throat goes into her body a good deal deeper than Zoe's, I thought it still looked a bit flat, which is why I made a non-destructive displacement map to bring out some additional rings of muscles. Teeth and lips have also been touched up to look a bit more even and smooth!

Detail Displacement Map

Render with displacement

For the recent two days I've been working on the environment again with the main focus being the temple in the foreground in which most of the animation will take place. A lot of it has to be custom modeled, so it's taking a little bit longer. I'm still using some Kitbash stuff where ever I can to speed up the process as much as I can. My plan is to focus on the environment and hopefully finalize it until next weekend, so I can implement the last touches to Chloe and start animating with her. Disregard has also prepared some additional animations with her, so here's hoping we have a good deal of animated content with her for the final release!

Watery Tummy - Mini Animation (1080p60)

Here's something a bit more experimental that utilizes fancy fluid simulation on multiple levels! I always wanted to do an animation that places the camera within the stomach water to show what it looks like below the surface, something I might actually reuse in the future Encounter animation!

I did a couple of variants of this, including a blue version, as well as one that has the regular low amount of fluids, though this one is using smoke simulation instead! All of these also utilize translucent lighting, although in this particular animation most of the interior is still lit from the entrance. There's unfortunately a couple of unwanted polygons clipping since I didn't get the time to re-render this scene, but should I use this idea in a full animation, I'll certainly make sure to fix these!

Red stomach: 1080p/60FPS (MEGA)
Blue Stomach: 1080p/60FPS (MEGA) 

Steamy Variation: 1080p/60FPS (MEGA)

Chloe Progress

Oh dear, this was admittedly quite the ordeal, but after starting from scratch with Chloe's fur four times over and eventually switching to a completely different middleware solution after a few frustrating weeks, I'm finally getting results that don't completely fall apart when the character is animated. I finished her eyelashes yesterday and have started doing her body fur just a few hours ago, which I'm expecting to finalize by the end of the weekend.

Unfortunately my schedule for her was a little too tight and didn't factor in that I'd get stuck with problems that required an investment into different software, but I'm happy to say that it paid off at least and we're now approaching the finish line with her!

Once her fur is done I'll probably polish up her maw a bit more with some corrective blend shapes and possibly some displacement maps to add a bit more detail in her throat. I'll keep you posted! :D

Watery Tummy - Mini Animation (4k60)

Here's something a bit more experimental that utilizes fancy fluid simulation on multiple levels! I always wanted to do an animation that places the camera within the stomach water to show what it looks like below the surface, something I might actually reuse in the future Encounter animation!

I did a couple of variants of this, including a blue version, as well as one that has the regular low amount of fluids, though this one is using smoke simulation instead! All of these also utilize translucent lighting, although in this particular animation most of the interior is still lit from the entrance. There's unfortunately a couple of unwanted polygons clipping since I didn't get the time to re-render this scene, but should I use this idea in a full animation, I'll certainly make sure to fix these!

Red stomach: 4k/60FPS (MEGA)
Blue Stomach: 4K60FPS (MEGA)

Steamy Variation: 4k/60FPS (MEGA)

Chloe Progress

Oh dear, this was admittedly quite the ordeal, but after starting from scratch with Chloe's fur four times over and eventually switching to a completely different middleware solution after a few frustrating weeks, I'm finally getting results that don't completely fall apart when the character is animated. I finished her eyelashes yesterday and have started doing her body fur just a few hours ago, which I'm expecting to finalize by the end of the weekend.

Unfortunately my schedule for her was a little too tight and didn't factor in that I'd get stuck with problems that required an investment into different software, but I'm happy to say that it paid off at least and we're now approaching the finish line with her!

Once her fur is done I'll probably polish up her maw a bit more with some corrective blend shapes and possibly some displacement maps to add a bit more detail in her throat. I'll keep you posted! :D

Encounter 3/Prequel - Environment WIP

Next to Chloe and another mini animation I've also been working in a new environment where Encounter 3 and it's upcoming prequel will take place. This is going to be quite a change in setting, as we're taken away from the lush forests and into an Egypt-inspired desert landscape!

There's still a lot of work that has to be done here, but I'm mostly done with the blockout of the sandy landscape! The building to the front left will be the main location where most of it takes place, where in the pyramid and oasis serve as the backdrop. There's still going to be a bit of vegetation around the oasis itself, but for this week I'm going to be focusing on the main building on the left, as it needs both a decent in- and exterior!

So far this is the progress of roughly one week of work with most of the rough layouting being done! The hardest part is probably going to be the main temple on the left since it's going to need a lot of custom modelling work. I'm still taking some shortcuts by implementing some kitbash stuff for background buildings, props, and other stuff, so here's hoping I can get the environment done until the end of August.

In terms of scale it's probably the biggest environment yet, but it was required to be this large due to there being very little vegetation to obscure things.

I sadly didn't get any progress in on Chloe's fur due to hitting a roadblock with the fur plugin I've been using. After making the last post, I was about to have her fur tested in a test animation, but it was terribly unstable and flickered whenever she was moving. I've been in touch with the support, but they've not been able to help me with the issue. Over the recent week I've been trying various settings and came to the conclusion that I might have to abandon Ornatrix altogether and give Yeti a shot instead. Not only is it developed exclusively for Maya, but it's also been around longer, has much better documentation and tutorials, and a supposed premium support for studio license holders. 

The bad news is that I have to remake the fur from scratch with software I have no experience with, but I already bought a fairly extensive workshop that I'll be going through tomorrow. Luckily I've made texture maps for all the fur parameters, so a lot of them can be reused to quickly get back to the result of the last post.

So yeah, bit of an in between update, but there's still decent progress with the environment! Note that I'll also have a new stomach mini animation that will be posted at the end of this month. (: