CakeInferno

Chloe - Rigging & Fur WIP

As of yesterday, Chloe's rig has been completed! Big kudos to Disregard67 for taking her on and bearing with me and my lengthy lists of revisions!

Her rig is far more complex than Zoe's, while still remaining easy to use. The latter was especially important to me after animating the extremely complex Bunsen model that easily took more than twice as long to animate than Zoe. Despite the easy to use nature of the rig, it still has controllers where it matters the most, including controls for lip sections, eyes, cheeks, nose, ears, and of course, detailed mouth controls, which are going to be crucial. Disregard already had a blast doing some test animations that show her general body movement and expression range!

Something that I'm quite satisfied with is the hand rigging, as Zoe's fingers were exceptionally hard to work with due to a topology so bad that even the best weight painting couldn't save it. I'm expecting to perhaps use her feet a bit more in future animations as well, especially after Acidic did such a great job remodeling them from the old Zoe rig, which had something that could best be described as bunny feet, hah!

Disregard was also so kind to include a few controllers that are a bit more nom-specific, such as a controller that brings out her tummy. Definitely good to have these features included right from the start, rather than them being an afterthought.

Disregard is also working on a dance animation since the lure of animating her to the Ankha dance was likely too hard to resist! I'm hoping that I can do a proper render of these at some point of the future, as they're pretty good material to have her fur tested once it's done.

Speaking of which, I've started working on Chloe's fur earlier this month, which is entirely being done in the latest version of Ornatrix, a fur middleware solution for Maya. I've had my fair share of experience with the software for a year or two already, which was direly needed, as the software is a lot more complex than the more simplistic plugin I used for Zoe. You already saw some Ornatrix fur in action on Zoe's rig, mostly in the big tummy 2 & 3 mini animations, though it has some issues with the old model due to its topology, causing her fur to flicker at some of her parts. I'm however expecting to have none of these issues with Chloe, as her model is perfectly clean!

Unlike Zoe's fur, Chloe's is supposed to be a lot shinier and glossy, not only due to her species, but also to underline her royal heritage a bit more. Her hair is using Redshift's new-ish physical hair shader, which takes actual gloss and translucency into account. I think the result speaks for itself, even just on her face alone. Note that I've only started creating her fur a few days ago, so right now only her head has fur attached. I'm still tweaking things here and there and will also have to add eyelashes to her later, something that we removed earlier since her previous polygon eyelashes really clashed with other elements.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results so far whatsoever. Making her fur takes admittedly a lot more time than Zoe's, but the good news here is that it won't fall short in complexity and even surpass it. It's going to have proper direction, clumps, and flyaways as well!

Since Chloe's fur is supposed to be more silky and glossy, I couldn't go nuts with the clumping and flyaways, but I think once I'm redoing Zoe's fur, I can use these features a bit more prominently since her fur is supposed to be a bit more rough and diffuse.

I'm hoping to have Chloe's entire fur done within the next two weeks! There's still some tweaking to be done on her face, but I'm certain that once I'm past that, doing the rest of her body should be a lot quicker, as it won't require so much detail-tweaking as her face did.

Note that I still have a mini animation coming up before the end of the month, which will be a revised animation of the internal stomach model! Please forgive me, as it was admittedly something I threw together quite quickly, but I do need the time to focus on Chloe and getting her production ready for next month, in which I'm hoping to start working on the first animation with her!

Anywho, sorry for the long post! Hope you're having a super fancy weekend! :D

Big Sloshy Tummy - Part 3 (1080p/60FPS)

Main Animation (1080p/60FPS): Link

Alternative Lighting (1080p/60FPS): Link
Alternative Lighting/Angle (1080p/60FPS): Link

Here's a new belly-play mini animation that has Zoe sloshing her big tummy some more! I'm admittedly not 100% sure on the rendering yet, which is why I'm currently rendering an alternative version that will compliment this post in roughly a week or so. This will also come with an alternative angle where the camera will be placed directly under her belly, ohohoho!

Apologies for this month's content being a little thin! Next month should be a little more packed with the alternative angles for this, as well as an inside stomach mini animation that I'm also doing in preparation for the next animations. Furthermore, Chloe's rig is almost done and Disregard is currently ironing out the last few bugs, so I'm going to focus on her fur in the upcoming week. I've already used the current mini-animation to get better with Ornatrix, which is the new fur middleware solution I'll be using from here going forward. The software is a lot more complex than the old program I was using and came with a steep learning curve, but after dabbling with it for roughly a year now, I feel confident enough to use it for Chloe, whose fur will be a lot darker and glossier than Zoe's. It will also be using Redshift's new physically-based hair shader, which is quite the upgrade over what I was using. Only downside is that's quite heavy on the GPU, but I can't remember a time where fur was ever quick to render, hah!

I'll be updating the post in a week once the alternative angles are done rendering! Here's hoping the notification system works for that. Oh well, we'll see! :D

Update: Happy 8/8! Alternative versions have just been posted! It's actually rare that I prefer alternative camera angles over the primary ones, but in this case I like the bottom angle so much that it might become the version for the official post, hah!

Big Sloshy Tummy - Part 3 (4k/60FPS)

Main Animation (4k/60FPS): Link

Alternative Lighting (4k/60FPS): Link
Alternative Lighting/Angle (4k/60FPS): Link 

Here's a new belly-play mini animation that has Zoe sloshing her big tummy some more! I'm admittedly not 100% sure on the rendering yet, which is why I'm currently rendering an alternative version that will compliment this post in roughly a week or so. This will also come with an alternative angle where the camera will be placed directly under her belly, ohohoho!

Apologies for this month's content being a little thin! Next month should be a little more packed with the alternative angles for this, as well as an inside stomach mini animation that I'm also doing in preparation for the next animations. Furthermore, Chloe's rig is almost done and Disregard is currently ironing out the last few bugs, so I'm going to focus on her fur in the upcoming week. I've already used the current mini-animation to get better with Ornatrix, which is the new fur middleware solution I'll be using from here going forward. The software is a lot more complex than the old program I was using and came with a steep learning curve, but after dabbling with it for roughly a year now, I feel confident enough to use it for Chloe, whose fur will be a lot darker and glossier than Zoe's. It will also be using Redshift's new physically-based hair shader, which is quite the upgrade over what I was using. Only downside is that's quite heavy on the GPU, but I can't remember a time where fur was ever quick to render, hah!

I'll be updating the post in a week once the alternative angles are done rendering! Here's hoping the notification system works for that. Oh well, we'll see! :D

Update: Happy 8/8! Alternative versions have just been  posted! It's actually rare that I prefer alternative camera angles over  the primary ones, but in this case I like the bottom angle so much that  it might become the version for the official post, hah!

Big Sloshy Tummy Part 3 - Playblast (Rough)

I'm a tad late, but here's a playblast of the mini animation for the end of this month, which will involve some more belly play with Zoe! As the previous two tummy mini-animations were extremely popular, it was somewhat of a given there would be a sequel!

Note that this still needs a bit of work, as there's still a decent bit of clipping here, but I think I should be able to polish and render it hopefully within a week! Still unpacking here since I just returned home after being abroad for two months, but I'm getting back into the groove! :D

Future Plans, Chloe Rigging, etc.

With the Bunsen animation being fully completed, I’ve already been shifting my focus towards the next projects, which I wanted to announce in this post.

July Mini Animation

For July, I’ve been planning on doing another mini animation, which is likely another continuation of the big tummy animations of which I’ve already done two. These two have been the most popular mini animations by far, so making a third variant of them was pretty much a no brainer. For this one we’ll see the return of Zoe with her room as the setting. I’m simultaneously going to work on other stuff, which is more middle and long-term related. This includes work on the new Chloe model, as well as environment work for her set piece.

Chloe’s Tease (Encounter 3 Prequel)

With Encounter 3 being such a massive project, I’ve been planning to precede it with a smaller animation that introduces Chloe beforehand. It’s also going to be a sort of test run for her model, as she’s going to be a completely new rig that I’d prefer testing in a smaller animation first. Encounter 3 is going to be a massive two part animation that is supposed to have well over ten minutes of runtime, tackling a project like this with a completely new, untested rig seemed like a recipe for possible disaster. Furthermore, I wanted to release another more compact animation before Christmas, and this would be perfect for it.

The animation would be a full POV experience where the viewer would slip into the shoes of one of Chloe’s servants, who had been caught stealing from her treasury. There would be no intro for this one, with the animation jumping straight to the action. It would basically begin with Chloe shoving the viewer down to the ground and laying herself atop of them, teasing them both verbally and physically. I’ve noticed that a lot of people enjoyed the scene in the first Encounter, where Zoe looms above Space Hero and licks him, before he briefly grabs her lip. This new animation would involve quite a lot of that, with the focus being mawplay, object vore, and teasing in general. Chloe would probably be a bit more dominant and growly since she’d be putting her servant into their place, it would however not involve any actual vore, as she’d only go as far as to take the viewer’s head into her maw, suckle on it and threaten to swallow them. It would be very sensual to say the least~!

Just like in the previous animations there’s going to be full dialogue, but it would be a bit more limited, as the focus lies more on the teasing than anything else. The planned runtime for this would be 1 – 2 minutes, it would however be quite dense with action.

Also, and please take this with a huge grain of salt, but once this animation is completed, I want to use this as a test project for possible VR shenanigans. Having moved to Redshift, I should now be capable of rendering 360° image sequences, and something as compact as this would be a perfect opportunity to test this out. The initial animation would release in a normal video format first before I’d give this a shot, though. It’s going to need quite a bit of internal testing and a substantial rendering effort to make a VR version, so it wouldn’t be something that I’d be able to release immediately afterwards. It would be more of a separate project that I’d sideline, and should it be successful and well-received, then I might do more with it in the future!

Encounter 3

Once this prequel animation is completed, I’ll move forward with the third Encounter episode, which is most likely going to be my most elaborate animation project yet. I’ve planned to split it into two, or perhaps even three parts. The first part would involve Space Hero getting introduced to Chloe, who would have a little chat with him in which she’d already tease him quite a bit. The plot would revolve around Space Hero needing an Ankh as a key item to progress. Of course this item would be in Chloe’s possession and she certainly isn’t just going to give it to him. Eventually she’d swallow it and challenge our hero to get it back, granting him a limited number of tries, which would lead is to the second part, in which Chloe would grow to the size of Zoe and get into a boss battle with him. Overall this animation is supposed to feel like a mix of the previous two Encounter episodes, involving a good deal of banter and teasing for the first part, and a full on bossfight with a ton of vore for the second part. Unlike Zoe, Chloe is supposed to have genie-like abilities, which gives her abilities such as size shifting, teleporting, hypnosis and a number of other abilities.

Note that the environment work I’m currently doing for the prequel animation will also be used in Encounter 3, as both animations basically play out in the same setting.

Chloe Progress

For the last 2 – 3 months, Chloe has been in the hands of Disregard, who I’ve commissioned for her rig. In regard to rigging he’s quite a bit more experienced than I am, plus this split of labour was quite necessary for me to focus on finishing the Bunsen animation and go straight to the next projects afterwards. The rig is pretty close to completion, and once I have it I’ll apply some last touches and get started with Chloe’s groom, which I’m hoping to sideline while making the July mini-animation with Zoe.

Here's a few tests that Disregard has given me in the recent weeks. He mentioned that he wants to do a mini animation of his own with Chloe to test the rig for errors!

I’ll be posting a free version of the alternative angles of the Bunsen animation in a few days, which will fully conclude this special episode. There have been a few people asking whether Bunsen makes another appearance in the future, but it’s very unlikely that he’s going to make more than a guest appearance in future animations. The exit surveys of the recent months spoke quite clearly, and adding the exodus of a third of my supporters, I can say with little doubt that this animation hadn’t been too popular, which is why I’ll stick to the regular format of female anthro characters going forward. Perhaps I had bitten off a bit more than I can chew with this animation as well, as Bunsen took significantly longer to animate than Zoe, which dragged out the production time of this animation way beyond its estimated window.

Here's hoping the current roadmap is to your liking! I really can't wait to get back to animating as I've been quite excited to get started with Chloe. I'll make sure to keep you updated! (:

Halloween Encounter - Alt Angles (1080p/60)

And here's the alternative angles!

I've ended up rendering two angles for the scene with Space Hero within Bunsen's throat since I vastly preferred it over the POV angle. Slow motion shots are included as well. Hope you enjoy this nommy montage!

Mega (1080p/60FPS): Link

Youtube (1080p/60FPS): Link 

Halloween Encounter - Alt Angles (4k/60)

And here's the alternative angles!

I've ended up rendering two angles for the scene with Space Hero within Bunsen's throat since I vastly preferred it over the POV angle. Slow motion shots are included as well. Hope you enjoy this nommy montage!

MEGA (4k/60FPS): Link

Youtube (4k/60FPS): Link 

Alt Angles - Preview 2

First off, apologies for the long silence since the release post! I've been traveling right after the animation release and the recent weeks have been incredibly turbulent, partially due to me being unable to properly become stationary with my setup.

Fortunately this hasn't hindered the rendering progress of the upcoming alt angles since my render server at home can still be accessed by me due to remote access. It's however going a little slow, as the alternative angles are mostly made up closer mouth shots that fill a larger area of the screen with the complex mouth materials I've made for Bunsen. Because of that, I've already reduced the rendering resolution to 1440p, otherwise there was no chance that any of this would finish within the current month. Guess the AI upscaler will have a little harder on this one, but I'm confident it will look good!

What I'm less confident about is the POV shot of the in-throat scene, which still looks a little hectic, despite me spending a whole day tweaking the animation. It will still be included in the bonus material, but I'm probably going to make a third angle of this shot that puts the camera at the opposite side of the action.

Note that all the video files of the 60FPS and 4K ultra high quality versions are up by now. There were admittedly some issues with me accidentally uploading versions without sound and a 60FPS version that wasn't 60FPS, but the faulty versions have been re-encoded and reuploaded. I'm doing my best to get the bonus angles out until the end of the month, before I'll get to some administrative stuff that includes catching up on my messages here. I'm also hoping to start working on Encounter 3 next month, along with a new mini animation I'm hoping to finish within July! Thank you so much for your patience in the meantime! <3

Alternative Angles - First Look

Here's a first look at one of the alternative angles I'll hopefully be releasing next month! These will mostly show off the nommy bits from an alternative angle and will either be POV or very close to the action!

Many thanks for all the positive feedback on the recent animation, everyone! I'm still unpacking here since I'm on a trip, but I'm hoping to have all the alternative angles adjusted soon, so I can start rendering. This should wrap up the Bunsen animation and I'll be going to work on Encounter 3 from there!

A Halloween Encounter - 1080p/60FPS

Youtube Links
1440p/30FPS

Mega Links
1080p/30FPS (h.264)
1080p/30FPS (h.265)

1080p/60FPS (h.264)

Due to patrons reporting issues with downloading files larger than 2GB from MEGA, I've tried my best to keep the file size under this threshold. For the best quality, make sure to download the h.265 versions!

Annnd it’s here! The Encounter Halloween Special… in May! :D

Admittedly, I was hoping to release this animation a few months earlier, but I somehow went overboard again and didn’t stick to my own 2 - 3 minute target for something that is now twice as long. To my surprise, Bunsen was quite a bit more elaborate to animate than Zoe, especially when his full body was in the frame. The rig that Gecky made for Bunsen was quite complex and offers a ton of control to make him incredibly expressive, but having more than 5 times the controller count of Zoe, the time it took to animate him properly was also significantly larger. Here’s hoping that the rig for Chloe will be a bit more streamlined and easier to work with. Just knowing she doesn’t have wings makes me feel a lot calmer already, hah!

Speaking of which, I also wanted to use this animation to announce the upcoming film as well, which will be titled Encounter – Wrath of the Anubian Queen (or Encounter 3). I’m quite excited not only for working with Chloe, but also for an Egyptian scenario since this is something I've always wanted to try! I’ll go a little more in-depth about this episode in an upcoming post next week whatsoever, once I got all the posting-related stuff out of the way.

For now I’m hoping you enjoy this new animation with all its path-traced visuals! Make sure to give the encoding some time as well, as the uploads will probably need a bit to trickle through. Note that the 60FPS versions will likely take until next week since I still need to convert all the sequences.

A Halloween Encounter - 4K/60FPS

Youtube Links
4K/30FPS

Mega Links
4K/30FPS (h.264)
4K/30FPS (h.265)

4K/60FPS (h.264 2GB/Low)

4k/60FPS (h.264 4GB/High)
Part 1
Part 2

Due to patrons reporting issues with downloading files larger than 2GB from MEGA, I've tried my best to keep the file size under this threshold. The highest quality version has been split in two parts for that matter!

Annnd it’s here! The Encounter Halloween Special… in May! :D

Admittedly, I was hoping to release this animation a few months earlier, but I somehow went overboard again and didn’t stick to my own 2 - 3 minute target for something that is now twice as long. To my surprise, Bunsen was quite a bit more elaborate to animate than Zoe, especially when his full body was in the frame. The rig that Gecky made for Bunsen was quite complex and offers a ton of control to make him incredibly expressive, but having more than 5 times the controller count of Zoe, the time it took to animate him properly was also significantly larger. Here’s hoping that the rig for Chloe will be a bit more streamlined and easier to work with. Just knowing she doesn’t have wings makes me feel a lot calmer already, hah!

Speaking of which, I also wanted to use this animation to announce the upcoming film as well, which will be titled Encounter – Wrath of the Anubian Queen (or Encounter 3). I’m quite excited not only for working with Chloe, but also for an Egyptian scenario since this is something I've always wanted to try! I’ll go a little more in-depth about this episode in an upcoming post next week whatsoever, once I got all the posting-related stuff out of the way.

For now I’m hoping you enjoy this new animation with all its path-traced visuals! Make sure to give the encoding some time as well, as the uploads will probably need a bit to trickle through. Note that the 60FPS versions will likely take until next week since I still need to convert all the sequences.

Autosave - Render Playblast

Here's a new playblast I finalized this morning! I sadly needed to cut a few seconds from the ending since the gif was getting a little large, oop!

This scene took admittedly a lot more out of me than previously expected. The long monologue was already a lot to animate on its own, but what really caused me to get stuck for multiple days was the interplay of Bunsen's hands and his belly. The rough animation was done pretty quickly, but once I got to the details like animating his fingers and toes it became quite the ordeal. I think in my next animation everyone will be wearing oven gloves, oof!

Despite a few hiccups, things are progressing pretty well, though it's not unlikely the full release will have to wait until early May since I had originally planned to be done with this scene a solid week earlier. From here there's only a few scenes left that should be relatively easy to animate, at least in theory. I'm hoping to at least breeze through two of them this week, then get everything to my sound designer, and animate the post credits scene and wrap all the animation up before the end of the month, so there's only editing left to do.

Once the animation is out I'll be going straight to rendering some alternative angles for selected scenes. Phew, feels good to finally see the finish line coming up with this project! Hope you guys can be patient with me just a little longer! <3

(Might want to give it some time for both gifs to load, oop!)

That really hit the spot - Playblast

Here's a new playblast of Space Hero hitting the spot! Bunsen's, to be exact. :D

Bunsen is quite a bit heavy and chonky, so I tried my best to show his weight in this animation by making him wobble quite a bit upon impact. Will probably have to animate the nearby trees to sway a little more, but that's an easy fix!

With over 30 seconds of new animation being done this month, I'm slowly starting to see the finish line! What's left to animate next month are one major scene, another simplistic one, as well as the post credits scene, which I all hope to get done within the upcoming weeks. The last major scene does have a bit of dialogue to animate, but I'm hoping I can get it done until the mid-point of April before animating the remaining scenes and releasing the full animation.

The scene I showed earlier this month is on the halfway point of being rendered, so I'm certain I can include an animated render preview of this specific scene next time! Only thing I'm worried about is the post credits scene, as it requires quite a bit of additional environment work. It's supposed to tease Encounter 3 as well, which I'm hoping to get to start working on after the release of this animation.

There's probably going to be another update before the full release, at worst two. I'm pushing myself to get this out until the end of April, so fingers crossed I can maintain my current pace!

Getting out of this forest - Playblast

After the animation preview ended with such a cliffhanger, I felt like I shouldn't wait too long with the next scenes preview!

First off, thank you so much on the feedback on the animation preview last week! Seeing so many positive comments has taken a lot of stress off my shoulders and made me even more eager to finish this. I was super nervous using a character that isn't Zoe, as people gotten so used to seeing her, but I was glad the reaction was so positive! It makes me quite excited to start working on an Encounter episode with Chloe after this animation is finalized.

Getting one scene per week done was probably a little too optimistic, as this scene here has quite a lot of animation that goes beyond this playblast, but I think that once Space Hero is "off-screen", things should be progressing a little faster, hah! Still a lot of clipping here that I need to get rid off, but for a preview this should already be decent enough! For some reason the gif is running a little faster than the actual video though, but that might just be related to my browser, oop!

Since I first need to animate the upcoming scenes I've been using the nights to re-render some of the previous scenes with a few lighting and animation related tweaks! As previously mentioned, some scenes were rendered in 3200x1800 to make the preview deadline, but I'm re-rendering most of them at full 4K resolution now. As part of my new post-production process, these scenes will additionally be AI upscaled to 8K, before being downsampled back to 4K. This might sound a bit silly, on paper, but in practice the AI algorithm provides a massive improvement in not just cleaning up any leftover noise, it also significantly improves the clarity and sharpness, much better than any sharpness filter could, thanks to using temporal image processing.

Next to those image-enhancement techniques, there's also going to be some color grading applied to the final animation. This has also been completely absent from the preview itself to save time.

Some of the render changes are a bit more subtle and more obvious when viewed at higher resolutions, but I thought that if I was about to re-render some scenes anyway, I might as well apply a few more tweaks here and there!

That's it for this preview! I'm going straight back to animating, so I hope you guys are liking the updates! Thanks so much for the amazing support, everyone! <3

Halloween Special - Patreon Preview 2 (1080p)

Mega link: Link 

Here's the second Patreon preview of the upcoming Halloween Special!

There's still quite a bit of work to be done here, with multiple scenes still missing from the animation. Unfortunately this includes a good deal of the vore stuff, which is concentrated at the end of the animation, but I got a tight schedule for the upcoming weeks, in which I'm hoping to breeze through the remaining scenes!

Sound is highly work-in-progress as well. Various voice over parts are still missing, sound mix is a bit wonky, and the incomplete music was literally composed together in a few hours by me today. I'm quite a bit nervous showing this in such a half-baked state, but I'm hoping that you guys have gotten used to my previews by now and know that the final thing will be a lot more polished!

I had hoped to get this out a week sooner, but Covid took quite a bite out of me and was followed up by a sinus infection briefly after. I'm however back on my feet and fully recovered, and while there are quite a few things I need to catch up on, I'll mostly focus on animating the remaining scenes from tomorrow on!

Again, thank you so much for your patience! I'm hoping to be able to show the next playblast as early as next week! (:

Halloween Special - Patreon Preview 2 (4K)

Mega link: Link 

Here's the second Patreon preview of the upcoming Halloween Special!

There's still quite a bit of work to be done here, with multiple scenes still missing from the animation. Unfortunately this includes a good deal of the vore stuff, which is concentrated at the end of the animation, but I got a tight schedule for the upcoming weeks, in which I'm hoping to breeze through the remaining scenes!

Sound is highly work-in-progress as well. Various voice over parts are still missing, sound mix is a bit wonky, and the incomplete music was literally composed together in a few hours by me today. I'm quite a bit nervous showing this in such a half-baked state, but I'm hoping that you guys have gotten used to my previews by now and know that the final thing will be a lot more polished!

I had hoped to get this out a week sooner, but Covid took quite a bite out of me and was followed up by a sinus infection briefly after. I'm however back on my feet and fully recovered, and while there are quite a few things I need to catch up on, I'll mostly focus on animating the remaining scenes from tomorrow on!

Again, thank you so much for your patience! I'm hoping to be able to show the next playblast as early as next week! (:

Soon!

If you followed my Twitter, you might have noticed that I recently got Covid, which unfortunately put me into timeout for a couple of days. I guess with my last booster dating back to over a year, it hit me a little harder than I had initially hoped for, but I'm well on my way on the recovery and have recently gotten back to doing editing work!

The Patreon preview to the new animation is pretty close to being done. Right now I'm rendering the final sequences, while Darkwitt is taking care of the sound design. We're about to have a directed voice acting session soon since I want him to do a few retakes, but my voice is still pretty messed up from Covid, so I might need to wait a couple more days for that to happen.

Originally I hadn't planned out this animation to be any longer than 2 - 3 minutes, but the preview version is already clocking in well over 3 minutes itself, so I might have went a little overboard here again. With all the scenes added, I'm assuming that the total runtime will bring us anywhere in the 4 - 5 minutes range.

Once this preview is out, I'll immediately get back to animating the last scenes, which will mostly be vore-related, so I guess the best has yet to come. I'll likely also use the time to re-render a few other shots, as I think some of them could still be improved upon, but I'll get to that later!

The preview should drop in a few days! Oof, originally I had it planned out to be done for mid-February, but I guess this is as close as I could manage given the circumstances.

Thank you so much for your patience everyone! I really can't wait to show this to you! <3

Render Previews (Not Mobile Friendly)

(Give it a tiny bit of time for the gifs to load!)

Hey guys! As expected, rendering the preview version of the animation isn’t quite finished yet, but it’s progressing pretty well! I’ve taken the extra time to polish up a lot of the animation, which included some slight retiming, more accented motion, breathing, and other flourishes such as smoke coming out of Bunsen’s mouth every now and then. Except for the first shot, rendering hasn’t quite caught up to the Bunsen scenes yet, but we're slowly getting there.

The scenes with Space Hero came out quite nicely! His materials have been significantly overhauled since Encounter 2, and the addition of a proper facial model/rig with hair have now allowed for facial close-ups and generally more expression coming from him. I might overhaul him once more for Encounter 3 and see if I can further improve his rig, as I’ve planned on having him in a lot of 3rd person scenes again.

Right now I’m aiming for mid-February for the Patreon preview version of this animation, with the final thing hopefully being done in the month after. I’ve still got some animating to do for the vore scenes, which unfortunately take place at the end of the animation, so a lot of them aren’t in the preview, but I do hope that at least gives you guys something else to look forward to! 

Again, apologies for the animation taking so long. I had planned for this to only be 2 – 3 minutes, but it already looks like the preview animation is reaching the 3-minute mark on its own, whoops! Fingers crossed that rendering of the remaining scenes will be done in 2 weeks, so I can finally release an early preview and go right back to animating!

New Previews, Render Workstation, Release Schedule

First off, happy new year! Hope you all had a blast going into January! I've been admittedly keeping a bit quiet since I've been grinding away on the new animation, which has seen a lot of progress in the recent weeks. The progress had admittedly been hampered a bit by the finalization of my new render workstation, but I'm grinding away on it again to get an early version of it completed as fast as I can.

First some bad news though, the preview version I had planned to release this month will likely not be ready before February. While I'm on track with the animation itself, the rendering process is quite a bit behind schedule due to some issues that came up when building the workstation. I've only managed to complete it just a few days ago, while initially I had hoped to have it set up 1 - 2 weeks earlier. There's been another complication with a scene I was animating that simply didn't work out as well as I had imagined, which is why I scrapped and reanimated it entirely. In the scene, Bunsen was supposed to bite around a tree and trap Space Hero with his maw, and while it sounded good on paper, it was difficult to make it exciting animation-wise. It was quite difficult to place the camera in a way where you'd get a good look at the action. This probably would've worked better if Space Hero was a tad smaller in terms of scale, but then I wanted the size differences not to be too large to allow for decent bulges and the likes. The scene was now replaced with one where Bunsen pushes Space Hero against the tree with his tongue, which admittedly works a lot better! Here's a playblast that takes place right after that!

Autosave Playblast: https://youtu.be/GD9A5sJSNrI 

Rendering is currently in full force, and boy... the polished animation is looking better than ever! I've implemented a version of the new tongue shader I made that is supposed to visualize the small tastebuds and it simply looks phenomenal. There's also a few more tweaks such as a new saliva shader, overhauled materials, volumetrics, etc. I'm quite proud of some shots, but a lot is currently still rendering. I'm however certain I'll have a more proper preview before the month ends! 

Note that the animation preview will roughly be 3/4 of the final animation. Unfortunately, a decent chunk of the nommy sequences will still be missing from it. This also includes a post-credits scene that is supposed to tease Encounter 3 (Part 1), which will be my major project for 2023. But I don't want to get ahead of myself too much. There are still a number of scenes to animate for this animation, so even after next month's animation preview, I'll still be posting one or two playblasts afterwards. I think by then you should have a good idea of what the final animation will look like!

Render Workstation Completion

As many of you may know, rendering had become a major issue for me since the release of the last Encounter animation. My increasing demands for better visuals couldn't be met by the old renderer I had been using, which is why I switched to Redshift not too long ago. With that however, came a significant increase in render times, which in itself delayed Encounter 2 by two whole months. I realized that I needed to drastically cut render and simulation times for future animations, which is why I recently completed my very own render workstation that is powered by an i9-13900K, 64GB of RAM, and two RTX 4090's. The configuration itself is still a bit on the ghetto side of things, as I tried to cut costs where ever I could. With GPUs having become so comedically large these days, I opted for a setup where I'd have one GPU internally, and another one connected through Thunderbolt. The idea was originally sparked by watching a Youtube video in which someone managed to cram a 4090 FE into a Razer Core X with a modified power supply, and since I had both a Razer Core X, and a spare 750W PSU lying around, it seemed like a pretty good setup to try. At least so I thought... as for some reason, the 4090 FE I got did not fit inside the eGPU case I had. I'm assuming that it might be due to me having an older version of the Core X, as it wasn't even able to fit my older 3090 FE either. My solution was to saw off a part of the back and sideplate with an angle grinder, which finally made enough room for this monstrocity of a card. 

The problems didn't end here whatsoever, as I figured there are a number of issues that can occur when running Thunderbolt devices on a Windows desktop. Out of the box, none of the Thunderbolt ports worked initially. Only after I uninstalled all Thunderbolt drivers and software from my new PC, the external GPU was finally recognized! At least until the next Windows feature update, oh well. I eventually got it running with some tinkering, but if I ever intended to build a new setup, I'd probably go for a big tower, a large PSU and motherboard right away and run everything internally. The hassle I had with modifying an eGPU case to fit a 4090, as well as the issues that can crop up with Thunderbolt are simply not worth saving a few hundred bucks, especially when the hardware is already so expensive.

Oh well, but on the bright side... everything is running quite well now! In terms of render times I'm seeing a massive speed increase of 4 - 5x in comparison to my previous single 3090 setup!

The Empress' New Clothes - Chloe Updates

Here are some updates on Chloe's overall clothing design! Cid recently finalized her bra, loincloth, and wristbands and also managed to update her maw a bit with better geometry. I also sat down to overwork her tongue a bit as well yesterday, which now looks a tad squishier. Note that her mouth render still isn't final just yet though, as it's still missing one of the displacement maps he made for her maw, which will add a little more detail additionally.

I MIGHT still do some additional work on the tongue since I think it could still look a little squishier, but I think we're slowly getting there! Her bra and loincloth are using a material that is supposed to represent silk, while her bracelets are made of gold. In a certain way she looks a bit like a dark version of Krystal, haha! But I guess that's mainly due to the loincloth aesthetics. 

Once I'm finally happy with her mouth, we're going to move to rigging, before fur and maybe some extras will be added! For the rest of the year I'm going back to animating though! Here's hoping I can squeeze in another playblast before the year ends!

Also, Merry Christmas everyone! :D

Anywho! - Extended Render Playblasts (not mobile friendly)

Here are some first in-progress render playblasts of the recent scene, as well as the next one. Note these are just rendered at preview settings with a lot of the features missing! Lighting, materials, and effects are a work in progress.

This month I finally managed to set up my new dedicated render node, which packs an RTX 4090 that has so far managed to cut render times in half. The per-frame times are still pretty high at the moment, which is why I'm hoping to get a second card once my bank account has recovered a little. With this increase in speed I'm at least able to deliver some delicious render playblasts again in better quality than ever! I think the transition to Redshift is finally starting to pay off, especially since I have to do far less post production in After Effects as well with how good everything looks coming out of the box. These shots are using Redshift's new randomwalk SSS mode, which is quite slow to render, but boy, do fleshy surfaces look good with it, haha! Makes me consider upgrading the stomach model I made and make another mini animation with it some time!

Note that I forgot to turn Space Hero's hair back on, but luckily these are only preview renders, pffff~! Bunsen's eyes are also just using Maya standard materials since the fancy eye shaders won't show his expressions in the viewport. Fire, smoke, and better lighting will be added later as well!

Anywho! - Playblast and Intro Render Preview

Looks like Bunsen is getting a little impatient with out delicious Space Hero! 

Phew, this scene is still a little rough and not quite done yet, but I didn't want to move the preview to next month. I think it's save to say we finally made it to the fun bits, hah!

Hoh boy, seeing how many scenes there are still left to animate, I think January is a much safer estimate for this animation's release window. I had originally aimed for a release around Christmas, but realized that only 3 - 4 months of production time were just a little too optimistic for this, especially considered that each of the RAADD animations already took this long to make, and these were only a minute in runtime. Oh well, how much I yearn to make something a little shorter again. Who knows, maybe I'll do that when Chloe is done!

Speaking of which, next to showing more progress on this animation, there should be some updates on Chloe again next month. Since we're going with the Anubian Jackal design, she'll be getting some proper clothes and jewelry. We might touch up her mouth as well while we're at it!

Last but not least, the rendering of the intro scene for this animation has been completed! There's no post and color grading yet, but I think the quality of the bare rendering Is already pretty convincing and illustrates how much further I can push the visuals now. But have a look for yourself: Link 

Bunsen Introduction - Extended Playblast

Here's an extended version of the Bunsen introduction, showing a bit more banter between Bunsen and Space Hero before we get to the noms! Still going to rework the facial expressions of the last shot a bit, but we're pretty close to getting into the vorish bits. Hoping to be there by the end of the month!

Note that this one is still mute. We're going to re-record some lines next week that I felt didn't quite hit the mark yet, but the next playblast should be fully voice acted. There's also some trees clipping since Bunsen is so big, but I'll make sure to have that fixed before the rendering. I might have a render preview of the entire intro scene by the end of the month as well, which should give you a better look of how everything looks fully rendered! (:

Chloé - Anubian Jackal Redesign (No Clothes)

As announced in the last post, I had Chloé taken back to the drawing board for a redesign. Last month I had a lot of time to think about making her Zoe's sister, but eventually abandoned the idea after coming to the conclusion that it would be better to do another update of Zoe's model down the line, which should only clean up some inconsistencies and stay a lot closer to the original.

Since this new model looked fairly different from Zoe, it seemed like a much better idea to turn her into a completely new original character, rather than a weird Zoe lookalike that would co-exists next to her and would be hard to place in any sort of plot.

Meet Chloé... Patra! An anubian jackal goddess that is supposed to be the star of the show in likely the next Encounter episode, which will take place in an Egyptian setting. I admittedly already planned to have a setting like this in a future episode, but I had zero plans for characters and plot. A lot of people are still messaging me if I ever planned to bring back Jackal from one of my very first animations, and considering that Chloé's side profile looks quite jackal-like, I counted two and two together. I furthermore had always been in love with anubian-style jackals, so this was definitely a subject that I feel quite intrigued digging into!

Note that while these renders are supposed to show off her materials, her design is still unfinished and will be expanded upon in the upcoming weeks. I had to take a few steps back with Chloé and drop the clothes that Cid made for her, though they might be repurposed for Zoe's re-revision next year since they already looked great. I mostly spent the recent days retexturing her, working on her materials, and doing some first accessories that were easy to model, such as the ankh necklace. I'll probably do a couple more touches before Cid will take it from here next month to make her some proper Egytian-style clothes.

For her clothes we've decided to go with a loincloth, a bandage-esque bra, and bracelets for her wrists. I might start on the later myself already this month, but I also need to make sure to get some more animation work done on the Bunsen animation, for which I'm already planning to show a new playblast next week, hah!

Here's hoping you like where this character is taken. I certainly heard you regarding Zoe and will make sure she gets a touch up next year that is far more subtle and keeps her closer to the original. Chloé however will become a completely new original character with her own personality, traits, and abilities. I'll make sure to share some more shots of her once her clothes and accessories are done. I'm quite certain that she'll look absolutely beautiful in a full outfit with proper fur and all!

Materials are still work-in-progress, hope you like! (:

Bunsen Introduction - Playblast

Hoh boy, this animation was quite something! I admittedly needed to start over with this after thinking I was just able to animate a dragon walking out of my head, oop! Fortunately there's a decent amount of reference material out there that helped me getting the movement of his legs and torso right, which were quite a bit more challenging to animate than I thought.

Luckily there's only very few scenes in this animation that require detailed animation of Bunsen's entire body, as I realized early on that his many limbs and controllers take a lot longer to animate than any regular humanoid character. Big kudos to NuttyMrGecky for the amazing rig, though! I'm hoping to get in touch with him some time next month to show him some gratitude!

I'm expecting progress to speed up quite a bit in the upcoming weeks and that we reach the nommy bits quite soon. My side project is finally completed, which means I'll have no more distractions for the next two months and can fully focus on animating. 

Note that in the recent weeks I finally managed to find a voice actor for Bunsen who will lend our dragon his voice in this animation. He goes under the name Darkwitt and has lent his voice to many audio plays by Caudle, if you're familiar with their work. Darkwitt also does sound design and will likely take care of doing the sound in my future animations. He previously did the sound design for Hazbin Hotel, which I always found sounded excellent, so it's needless to say he's perfect for the job! It also takes some more work off my shoulders, as I've previously done all these things on my own.

Note that the Halloween animation won't be finished for Halloween, as there's still a lot to animate. I probably would've needed to skip the previous two mini animations to make the date, but I felt like I first needed a bit of practice with Bunsen's rig, as well as with Redshift, as this will be the first major animation that will use the new renderer. I'm hoping to have the animation finished somewhere around Christmas, but I might want to extend the vorish play by another scene, so I'll have to see how progress is going throughout the next weeks!

Chloé Reconsiderations

I had originally planned to have Chloé rigged this month, but after Autodesk required me buy a pricey second Maya license for 3 years, I needed to move these plans back towards the end of 2023 as I wanted to pay a professional rigger for this endeavor and money is currently a little tighter than expected due to a lot of unexpected bills throughout the recent months. This might however be a blessing in disguise, as this got me to think about the new model a little more and ultimately got me to the conclusion that Chloé would work much better as a completely new character, rather than a sister to Zoe who looks somewhat akin to her. Zoe will likely get another revision next year, but this time the changes to her model will only be very subtle and mostly just fix the issues the old model has.

To this day, I'm still receiving messages about bringing back the jackal character from one of my oldest animations. Sadly this isn't quite possible, as the character originally belonged to an old friend who had left the furry community, which is why I can't just reuse the design as it was. I've however been thinking about having a more anubian-style jackal character for the longest time (dark fur with yellow/golden accents), as the aesthetic always really appealed to me. And considering Chloé's side profile looks a lot more jackal than fox-like already, her model could be perfect for a character design like this. I had already planned to have a future Encounter episode play out in an Egyptian setting, and the thought of Space Hero fighting Chloépatra, the large anubian goddess is quite appealing to me, hah!

With my schedule freeing up again next month, I should definitely find some time to work on Chloé again. So far I've done a couple of tests of how she'd look with dark fur, and I have to say it suits her quite well. Once I have a few more updates on the model next month, I'll make sure to give you guys an update! :)

Intro Playblast, Render Previews, Bunsen Material Overhaul, etc.

Oh wow, who knew Space Hero's blaster doubled as a flashlight! This playblast finally concludes the intro, which admittedly took a little longer than expected, but unlike the intros in many previous animations this was almost entirely done in third person, which took quite a bit to animate (especially with walk cycles not being my strength, pfff~).

With the intro out of the way, we can finally move to the fun stuff! The next scenes to animate will be some relatively short banter between Bunsen and Space Hero, which will transition to teasing and the noms. I admittedly haven't found a voice actor for Bunsen yet, but it's not unlikely that I'm letting Bari give it a try, who's also been voicing Space Hero. I know he's got quite a decent vocal range and should be able to do an excellent job with him. There's also the magic of editing in case he sounds a bit too much like Space Hero, but I'd almost assume this wouldn't be necessary.

Note that the opening scene of the animation is already being rendered and should completely somewhere around the end of the month, which means I should be able to give you a render playblast on that one! I'm extremely proud at the outcome here, as the visuals are a giant leap from Encounter 2, which is thanks to using proper ray and path tracing as opposed to rasterization. The only thing that somewhat worries me is the render time, with the completion time of a single frame now being up to an hour. I'm however trying to get my hands on two RTX 4090 throughout the next weeks for the render node I've been building, which should theoretically be able to increase the render speed by 300% - 400%. Fingers crossed I won't have to buy them from scalpers off ebay, oof.

Recently Redshift implemented random walk SSS, arguably one of the most sought-after features that has been on their roadmap for quite some time. I've been eagerly awaiting the feature myself, as to me it's one of the features that has been making Arnold and Cycles renders so incredibly good looking.

In further preparation to introducing Bunsen to this animation, I went ahead and updated all of his materials to the new Redshift Standard Materials, which is their new-ish material pipeline that now supports random walk SSS. I'll of course still fine tune the materials for this animation since the lighting situation will be quite different, but early results show that the effect is quite handsome!

Lastly, I apologize there has been such a long gap between the recent update. The recent weeks have been incredibly difficult with my Mum catching Covid, a completely unnecessary project deadline that was due mid-October, as well as an unexpected bill that ate up a full month's salary. I might get into more detail about the later since it concerns 3D animation, but at first I want the dust to settle on this a little. 

Anywho, I'm hoping you enjoy the recent developments! Due to this month's project deadline I had only been able to drive this animation forward and didn't get any time to work on Chloé. I'm still planning to outsource her to a rigging artist and will get back on that soon, so expect more updates on her in the upcoming weeks. For now I'll be focusing on the Halloween animation, for which I should have another update by the end of this month!

Playblast, Tongue Material study, and Covid

First off, here's a recent playblast of the end of the Halloween animation's intro! I'm already a lot further into it, but since the animation is a bit more polished here I figured I'd show this part. I'm fairly close to the part where Bunsen gets properly introduced, so hopefully I should have some previews with him next month!

Playblast: https://mega.nz/file/Ugh2haCa#Rutje6XGz9YogtHKjnQ0gq6gdGJQ_AKjc1p-R-kmhrg 

Had to upload it to Mega since the playblast is a little long. I might shorten the camera pan a bit in the final version since it's dragging a little, oop!

Tongue Material Shader

Here's a little material study I've been doing for a sort of next-gen shader I've been planning to use on Chloé's tongue. I've always been a bit dissatisfied with the look of Zoe's tongue when it came to close ups, as standard bump and normal maps could only simulate so much surface detail. This new material is supposed to give her tongue a softer look by simulating the appearance of small little taste buds. The effect is achieved by using detailed displacement in combination with Redshift's new random walk SSS, which I'll be extensively using for future materials.

Right now the material looks a bit like sugar-coated candy, but I'm still tweaking it of course. The white spots are currently a bit exaggerated due to the super bright rim lighting. In a normal scene they're a lot more pink looking. Whether or not I'll be using this new material on Bunsen in the current animation is something I'll have to decide later on. I'd likely only use it for close ups, as the shader is pretty heavy to render, oof!

Regarding Chloé I'm still doing some minor things on her here and there, but she'll most likely get rigged next month! I'll of course will let you guys see how that's coming along once it has begun! :D

Some Covid Stuff

Things are currently progressing a little slow, not only due to me sidelining another project, but also since my Mum recently caught Covid. Since she's in quarantine I'm currently taking care of her by running errands all day. I've furthermore stayed at her place for coffee a few days ago when she was already sick, but she only tested positive on the day after, so it's not unlikely that I get it as well within the next days. So far I've tested negative though, fingers crossed!

Chloe - Facial Tweaks, Body Fat Deformer, etc.

With Cid having finalized his work on remodeling and retopologizing our vixen last month, I've been taking it from here to do more tweaks on her before she's getting fully rigged in October. Since the model turned out quite different from the original, I'll be sticking to making her Zoe's sister and treat her like a new character in future animations. Zoe's original model will still have to go through an update whatsoever, as she's barely usable in the new version of Maya, which has a lot of issues with the old rig and the overall model in general.

In regards to Chloe I've first and foremost tweaked her face a little more, with most of the attention going to her eyes. I was already fairly happy with the previous iteration, but think the tweaks that have been made in the recent days were quite the improvement. Next to tweaks to her eye shape and brows I've also remade the physical eyeballs from scratch today to better fit her head shape.

There have been some minor tweaks to her mouth internals as well, mostly to tongue shape and uvula. The edits were fairly minor though, as I thought Cid already did a pretty great job with it, especially with remodeling her teeth, which look a lot more canine and less human now. He also connected the tongue to her lower jaw, which is a pretty neat detail I think!

The by far biggest change is her body fat deformer that I've implemented this week. This was basically achieved by making an alternative, chonkier version of her model and implementing it as a simple morph target. This way I can change her body weight on the fly and even animate it if necessary. We'll likely have another deformer that allows me to change her head size as well, as I feel like it needs to be a little bigger when she's a bit on the chonkier side. Note that once fur is added, her head will appear a lot bigger, as especially her cheeks will gain a lot of volume. Hair style will factor into that as well. Still gotta see what I'll do with her hair since I now want to differentiate her a little more from Zoe now!

Here's her torso at a thickness of 33%, which will likely be the default value for animations. I think it would make for a pretty neat visual trick to slowly ramp her thickness slider up through a future Encounter episode, haha! And yes, her shirt is having more of an underboob style now, which was in actuality the original design idea for OG Zoe. I just figured that her breasts never looked good from below, which is why I kept it at the tank top she wore.

Technically this is already rigging related, but since it's just a simple blend shape, it's generally no problem to put a skeleton on top of it. 

I'll keep you updated on the progress on her, though the next update will likely be related to the Bunsen animation, which I had to sideline a bit due to the work on Chloe! September and October will both be pretty tight due to another animation project I'm signed on (unrelated to my work here), so things might move a bit slow! D:

Zoe 2.0 - Work in Progress shots

As promised, here are a couple more WIPs of Zoe's makeover, fresh out of Maya! As you've probably guessed from the recent teaser, this is a full makeover of the model that merely used the old version of her as a base. Her shape, topology and UVs have been completely remade. This includes body physique, hands, feet, and tail as well, mouth and teeth also included.

With the new model being so different from the old one I'm starting to consider to keeping the old one around and making Zoe 2.0 a completely new character. I remember joking about introducing her as Zoe's sister and calling her Chloé, and the more I think about it, the more I'm actually liking the idea. OG Zoe would of course still need a bit of an update, which likely wouldn't be as dramatic as the difference between these two models right now.

It never actually occurred to me how big old Zoe's head originally was, until I've looked at this comparison here. Note that Zoe 2.0 will likely increase in thickness a little once fur is applied. Cid made sure to take it into account when modelling her head especially, which should allow me to go a little crazier with her coat.

I'm aware that she's currently still a little lean in terms of body physique. Note that this is fully intended, as I'm planning to add a deformer to her that lets me morph between her lean self, and a slightly thicker version. The base of course had to be a little leaner for that, as it seemed easier to increase the thickness of the character, than to go the other way around.

Cid made sure to completely redo her clothes as well! Her new jeans are probably the biggest upgrade, which comes with some really nice stitching and 8K textures. Her top has also been remade, rocking more of an underboob aesthetic, which was actually the original idea for her. I might show some more of that in a future post, including her remodeled maw and teeth as well. I only got the model from Cid a few days ago and have only recently started modifying her.

Also, yes! She's got some proper feetsies with pawpads now! :D

Uncertain Walk (Playblast) & Zoe 2.0 Early Look!

Here's a first look at the first playblast of the upcoming Halloween special, which starts out with Space Hero nervously making his way through a seemingly never ending forest! I'm already a little further into the animation and aim to have the entire intro part done in two weeks or so. I'm also considering to start rendering right away, so this section can already render in the background while I move forward with the animation.

In terms of the overall look and feel I'm already quite satisfied! Thanks to Redshift, indirect lighting looks better than ever due to proper GI and scattering. I'm also making use of fancier volumetric simulation here, which includes soft smoke rising from the ground. For the final render I'm likely going to add moss patches to some environment objects, as the greenery looks otherwise a little flat at 4K resolution.

At long last, a first look at Zoe's new model! Cid is already a little further on the overall progress, but I thought it was a good idea to show the general geometry first. Unlike the previous updates, this is almost a full remodel of her body, merely using the old model as a base to start from. Her face and head received a major upgrade as well, going away from that previous boxy look and giving her proper ears and eyes, including proper eyelids as opposed to alpha map cutouts. Her mouth got an update as well, mainly improving her lips, teeth and everything else. This also includes a throat that also goes a lot further than in the original model.

I'm probably going to make my own tweaks later down the line before we move to rigging, but overall I'm pretty happy with her overall structure. Her face looks a bit like a mix of Diane Foxington and Krystal, which were both references I've sent to Cid. I'll keep you updated with new model shots early next month! For now I'm hoping you like this revision! (: