CakeInferno

Finalized Environment & Space Hero Updates

Here's a look at the finalized forest environment for the Encounter Halloween special! The animation will play out at two different times of day, starting with a blue hour twilight-style lighting that you get just before nightfall. I do remember being in a forest with friends during this kind of time and it always had something slightly foreboding and unsettling to it for me, which is why I always wanted to replicate this kind of mood in an animation! Luckily with this was a lot easier with Redshift due it utilizing real path tracing. I admittedly tried to fake diffuse lighting scenarios in previous animations with the old renderer, but they admittedly never came out this good.

This lighting mood will remain for the first few opening scenes before skipping to night time, which will show Space Hero attempting to make a fire at what seems to be a bit of a dead end. From here he'll run into Bunsen, who will mostly be lit by the nearby campfire and moonlight. The lighting for the later part is admittedly not 100% final, but I'm slowly getting there! Note that I've already started animating the first scene, so it's likely I'll be posting a first animation test as well towards the end of the month!

There's still a few things I need to tweak, such as some trees looking a bit copypasted, but I'd say the environment coming along extremely well! This is partly also due to me now working natively in Maya 2022, which comes with features that significantly speed up the environment creation. One of them would be MASH, which allowed me to scatter and paint background foliage, as well as little details such as fallen leafs on the ground. All these things are instanced, so the scene size remains quite small. All trees and bushes in the foreground as still hand-placed since I need to keep some form of freedom over where these trees are located, then everything from the third row of trees uses procedural scattering to fill out the background. Despite the scene rocking tens of millions of polygons, the rendering is quite fast due to the instancing. It's actually a bit faster than the Encounter 2 environment even!

Space Hero Updates

While Space Hero had already received a few upgrades in the last Encounter episodes, I still wasn't quite happy with his face, which basically just used a base human default head with no rigging at all. I decided to finally tackle this issue and make improvements to his face, so it wouldn't have to be obscured by his visor anymore.

I've first of all given him the same eye models I had made for Zoe and made some slight adjustments to them. I then redid his facial proportions to be more in line with the Pixar aesthetics, which included remodeling his eyes, nose and mouth to be a bit more stylized. Of course his mouth won't be visible, but who knows! Maybe I'll do a full facial reveal of him in the final Encounter episode since he's actually handsome now! :D

His skin shader was also remade and now has some proper SSS applied to it! I then wrapped it by making some hair for him as well, which admittedly makes him look a tiny bit like Hiccup from HTTYD! At least if you only see the upper part of his face, haha! I've made a fully functioning facial rig for him as well now, so his face will finally be animated and not static like in the last Encounter episode, oh dear!

That's it for the mid-monthly update! Note that by now Acidic has already made some decent progress on the Zoe remodel, so it's not unlikely we'll have some updates to show on her by this weekend! Then by the end of the month I should already be able to show the first playblast of some WIP animation! (:

Environment Progress - Encounter Halloween Special

Here's a look at the new location in which the upcoming Bunsen animation will play out! The idea was a dense forest path that leads to a bit of a clearing on which Space Hero will start a campfire, before being greeted by the dragon that haunts these woods, hoho!

I've admittedly only started working on this scene on August 1st since there were a couple of other things I needed to get done prior to this. For a mere eight days, the progress has been quite great whatsoever, with the majority of the terrain work being pretty much finished! The next step is to dress everything with trees and a bit more foliage before tacking the scene lighting. I'm hoping for all of that to be done by next week, so I can proceed animating the first opening shots as soon as possible.

You might have already noticed it, but this environment is using a ton of assets from Encounter 2, which made it possible for me to come up with something in a mere week. The setting will be somewhat similar, so reusing the assets and shaders I had already tweaked seemed like a better idea than to spend over a month making an environment entirely from scratch.

I'm expecting to have this finalized by mid-August, on which I'll hopefully post some renders on the lighting setup as well! (:

Video Library Update

A quick note that the Video Libraries have been updated with all new major and mini animations, along with bonus stuff such as alternative angles as well! You can find the video library links either on my main page at the top or right here.

4K/60 Video Library: Link

1080p/60 Video Library: Link

Note that next month I'll begin work on the Bunsen Halloween Special, which will be a "shorter" animation that will be somewhere around 2 - 3 minutes in length and a bit more like my older animations in terms of runtime. There's some banter in the current version of the script, but it's comparably short in comparison to Encounter and just serves to quickly set the scene up. I'll make a custom environment for it, but will likely reuse a lot of environment assets from the recent Encounter episode since I don't want the environment creation to take longer than 1 - 2 weeks and get to animating as fast as I can. Just like the previous Bunsen mini animation, this film will be entirely rendered with Redshift with visuals on par or hopefully even better than the previous test animation. I'm hoping to get my very own render server for autumn and have it house multiple GPUs to significantly cut down the render times, which admittedly had become a bit of an issue in the recent major animation. I can't give a clear estimate, but I'm aiming for this animation to be finalized somewhere between Halloween and Christmas-ish!

Acidic and me will soon be starting renovations on Zoe's model to give her not only a clean topology, but also fix some of her wonky proportions and improve on a few things I was previously unhappy with (hands, feet, eyelids, etc.). If you're familiar with Cid's work then you might be aware that he's a bit of an expert when it comes to 3D character modelling, so it's save to say that Zoe is in good hands! The Bunsen collab was a bit of a first test of what I'm hoping to be an ongoing relationship going forward. I'll make sure to keep you updated on how things are coming along with everything here! :)

Big Sloshy Tummy Part 2 - Mini Animation (1080p/60FPS)

1080p/60FPS MEGA Download: Link 

Since the first big sloshy tummy animation was so popular, it was only calling for a follow-up!

I used this animation as a bit of an early test for Zoe's future fur, of which you can see sort of a first attempt here! This animation served for a perfect test run, as her head is mostly hidden, so I was getting away with only doing a fur base layer. While still primitive in complexity, it should illustrate the advantages over the previous fur, where the strands always got super thick in close-ups. The new system allows me to have a significantly higher fur density, while allowing for additional shading parameters such as (proper) reflections and translucency, giving it a much softer appearance.

There's still a couple problems here such as the fur looking a bit wobbly in motion. This is due to me being unable to properly bake the fur due to Zoe's model having too much editing history on it, causing the fur to be recalculated for literally every frame. Guess it illustrates why an overhaul of her model with a fresh rig has become so long overdue, oof!

Anywho, I'm sure everyone's just here for the big tummy anyway, so I hope you enjoy the animation! :D

In addition, here's an alternative angle from the little Bunsen animation earlier this month! I actually wanted to do an in-maw angle, but it frankly didn't look particularly exciting due to his jaws spreading so much, so here's a POV from Space Hero's butt instead!

Note that I might use this scene for some first VR tests later this year after the arrival of my dedicated render server! Rendering these ray traced animations is still incredibly heavy with my current setup.

Bunsen extra angle 1080p Link: Link 

Big Sloshy Tummy Part 2 - Mini Animation (4K/60FPS)

4K60 MEGA Download: Link 

Since the first big sloshy tummy animation was so popular, it was only calling for a follow-up!

I used this animation as a bit of an early test for Zoe's future fur, of which you can see sort of a first attempt here! This animation served for a perfect test run, as her head is mostly hidden, so I was getting away with only doing a fur base layer. While still primitive in complexity, it should illustrate the advantages over the previous fur, where the strands always got super thick in close-ups. The new system allows me to have a significantly higher fur density, while allowing for additional shading parameters such as (proper) reflections and translucency, giving it a much softer appearance. 

There's still a couple problems here such as the fur looking a bit wobbly in motion. This is due to me being unable to properly bake the fur due to Zoe's model having too much editing history on it, causing the fur to be recalculated for literally every frame. Guess it illustrates why an overhaul of her model with a fresh rig has become so long overdue, oof!

Anywho, I'm sure everyone's just here for the big tummy anyway, so I hope you enjoy the animation! :D

In addition, here's an alternative angle from the little Bunsen animation earlier this month! I actually wanted to do an in-maw angle, but it frankly didn't look particularly exciting due to his jaws spreading so much, so here's a POV from Space Hero's butt instead!

Note that I might use this scene for some first VR tests later this year after the arrival of my dedicated render server! Rendering these ray traced animations is still incredibly heavy with my current setup.

Bunsen extra angle 4K Link: Link 

Bunsen Mini Animation - Public Version

A new mini animation featuring *GASP* Bunsen! This is a bit of a test run of working with Bunsen's rig before tackling a longer animation with him in the coming months.

This started out as a bit of an idea between me and Acidic, who originally made the model before it was rigged by Nutty_Mr_Gecky in Maya. I've spent the recent month adding a couple features to the rig and visually touching it up a little, before doing this animation as a test drive.

The upcoming Bunsen animation with him will be a bit of a special episode in the Encounter series and might have a bit of a spookier theme to it, as Halloween is coming up in a couple of months. This will also bridge the time a little, as Acidic and me made plans to do a complete touch-up of Zoe's model, as her current rig has a ton of problems. This will come include revised model proportions, a new rig, as well redone hair and fur to make her compatible to the latest version of Maya and allow for significantly better shading and rendering of the model. But I guess I'm getting way ahead of myself there! Here's hoping you like this little animation! <:

Bunsen model done by Acidic: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/acidic 

Bunsen rigging done by Nutty_Mr_Gecky: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/nuttymrgecky 

Check out my Patreon to follow my progress and get high quality versions of these animations! https://www.patreon.com/CakeInferno 

Bunsen Mini Animation - 1080p/60FPS

Here's the finalized Bunsen mini animation! Definitely one of the longer ones, oop!

Note that I MIGHT add sound later down the line. I actually started doing some sound design today and realized I had absolutely no dragon sounds, let alone a voice actor for Bunsen, so I guess I still got a bit of homework to do before tackling the longer animation with him! For now I hope you enjoy the bit of variety after 5 years of non-stop Zoe! :D

MEGA 1080p/60FPS Download: Link 

Hope you guys enjoy! I'm just resuming work on the Zoe tummy animation, which should also release later this month!

Bunsen Mini Animation - 4k/60FPS

Here's the finalized Bunsen mini animation! Definitely one of the longer ones, oop! 

Note that I MIGHT add sound later down the line. I actually started doing some sound design today and realized I had absolutely no dragon sounds, let alone a voice actor for Bunsen, so I guess I still got a bit of homework to do before tackling the longer animation with him! For now I hope you enjoy the bit of variety after 5 years of non-stop Zoe! :D

MEGA 4K/60FPS Download: Link 

Hope you guys enjoy! I'm just resuming work on the Zoe tummy animation, which should also release later this month!

Big Sloshy Tummy Part 2 - Playblast (SUPER Rough)

Two playblasts for two different animations in the same month? Oh snap!

I had actually planned to post the finalized Bunsen mini animation this month, but it's still rendering for another day, which is why I had already started working on next month's animation in the meantime! This means I'll probably be posting two finalized mini animations in the upcoming month, which feels quite good since there's been a bit of a drought after the finalization of Encounter 2!

Since the big tummy animation was so popular, it's getting a bit of a sequel, this time having Zoe rocking her belly quite a bit before heaving and dropping it! I'll still have to properly animate her hands and fingers and tweak this a ton, so excuse the rough animation quality of this. This was actually supposed to be shown next week when it was a little more presentable, but with Bunsen still rendering I wanted to make sure to get at least another preview out before the month ends!

The Bunsen mini-animation will be posted in a few days, then later in July I should have this animation finished as well!

Note that I've finally managed to catch up with most of my PMs here. I'll also make sure to update all the links in the animation gallery around the end of next month as well, which will add links for the high quality versions of the Encounter animations, as well as all the mini animations released in between them! Phew, feels good to be back on track!

Dangling Above - Playblast

But of a deja vu moment from an older animation, only that Space Hero makes it in this one! <:

A preview of the mini animation that I'm hoping to release by the end of the month! Probably the first animation that isn't staring Zoe or a blue vixen, hoho! There's another scene that precedes this one, so I guess I went a little overboard with the length of this again. Animation on this has been completed in the recent two weeks and is now rendering in Redshift, here's a sample of the final render quality as well for those that are curious!

Probably my first time animating a new character in a while, so please go easy on me, hah! It's either way a good way to train myself in Redshift a little more as the entire animation is being rendered natively in it, which means I only have to deal with a single render layer. Render times are quite a bit brutal though as they range between 30 - 60 minutes for a single frame at native 4k, but with new GPUs right around the corner, this number will probably decrease significantly in a few months to come!

I've yet to decide whether I'm moving on to doing a longer animation with Bunsen starting next month, or if I'm doing another mini animation with Zoe. I guess I'll have to wait and see how well the character is received, haha!

Encounter 2 - VFX Breakdown

Alternative Link (MEGA): Link 

Here's a new VFX breakdown of the recent major animation! This was originally planned as a series of small clips, but I realized I had so much material that it made more sense wrapping everything up in an actual video!

This breakdown highlights the creation of the environment and the upgrades made to Zoe, and also shows actual layer and animation breakdowns of the final images. Since there were some scenes with as much as ten render layers, I made sure to group some of these together. I'm certain that this will highlight why I'm so excited about moving to a modern renderer, as in the future I can basically pull all this stuff off with only a single layer! Here's hoping people find these interesting, as I'm planning to document the next major animation even further! This by the way concludes all the Encounter 2 bonus stuff, which is probably a good way to end the month! I've already started working on the upcoming Bunsen mini animation, which I'm hoping to release next month! (:

Friendship ended with Rasterization (Lighting Studies)

Ray tracing is my friend now! In preparation to the upcoming animations, I've started reworking one of my environments, starting with the Forest Pass from the recent Encounter 2 animation. I'm planning on using the environment in next month's mini animation that will feature Bunsen and Space Hero.

Fully converting the environment was a tad easier since the background was already using Redshift shaders, the foreground however was still using the old rasterized render engine, which had quite a lot of shortcomings when it came to lighting and the rendering of vegetation. The greenery is now using proper subsurface materials with fancy backlighting, something that wasn't possible previously due to the lack of support of SSS with alpha materials.

To get a bit more familiar with Ornatrix, I've been making fur maps for a lot of the environment assets to simulate moss. I'm still improving the material shader itself, which is pretty good training for remaking Zoe's fur later down the line. I'm anticipating for it to look a big step up from the previous fur model due to some new shading parameters such as scattering and reflection, which will allow me to add proper light scattering and wetness  properties to fur/hair shaders.

I'm still unertain on which lighting mood I'll be going for for next month's mini animation, but it will likely either the sunny one, or the one with the moody early morning lighting. For the animation I might also be using some fancy volumetric effects, such as steam coming from Bunsen's maw. I've used an effect like this in the past for Zoe's maw, but it was mostly a layered smoke effect in post that I sometimes combined with a 3D depth channel to make it a bit more convincing. There's already some volumetrics in in these renders, including 3D clouds, which will probably become standard for future animations as well.

I'm going to start work on the new mini animation in a few days and will hopefully have the first playblast for the first half of the month. I'm quite excited finally something that doesn't use my old renderer, as the render workflow will be so much better, oh gosh! Also note that I MIGHT have another post coming up soon that shows a bit of a VFX breakdown of some Encounter 2 scenes. Stay tuned! <3

Animation Plans 2022 - The Acidic/Bunsen Collab, Zoe Makeover, and more...

When people asked me what's next I've usually been a bit reserved in my announcements, with the only major reveal being the most obvious one that Encounter 3 is already being planned. This was however only the tip of the iceberg, as there have already been a few things on the horizon that were planned since last year, with one thing being a collab that involves Acidic's Bunsen model.

Cid and me have been in the talks of teaming up on something for over a year now, and with me finally getting all in on the latest version of Maya and Redshift, this finally became viable. We've decided that it would be a great idea for me to try my hand at his Bunsen model to test out the waters. You've likely seen the model around for a while now in form of  the highly capable Blender rig. There however is a Maya rig of the model as well that was rigged by Nutty_Mr_Gecky, which was perfectly usable with Maya and Redshift. The rig supposedly wasn't as elaborate as its Blender counterpart whatsoever, which is why I've sat down for a couple of days to make adjustments to the overall model and its materials.

The first thing that stuck out to me were the eyes, which were basically the same as in the Blender model. I completely replaced them with a similar eye model I had originally done for Zoe, which is a physically-based one with iris shapes that could be animated. Since we're dealing with a dragon, I've added another blendshape target that allows for an oval iris shape. Overall I think the new eyes breathe a lot more life into his overall face, perhaps even make him a bit cuter, which to me is a nice bonus. <:

Next up was obviously the mouth, which needed a bit of additional weight painting as the tongue exposed a few odd polygons when bending it. I wasn't too keen on the original shape, which is why I added an additional blend shape that morphs it into something that looks a bit squishier. In addition, this can be used to animate the shape of the tongue as well and is similar to what I've done with Zoe's tongue, you've probably seen it balling up and changing its size a lot in the recent animations. Various blendshapes have also been added to his throat, which came with no animatable deformers to begin with, so I added a couple ones that can make it wider and flex it as well!

All of his materials received a large overhaul as well! Next to tweaking roughness, reflectivity and subsurface scattering, I've brought in a couple of new texture maps as well, including a normal map for his tongue, which is derived from Zoe's, as well as a more detailed normal map that is used to bring out a bit more surface detail on his scales. They're now using a displacement shader, which brings them out a lot better! Cid was so kind to include a displacement map, but it had some issues as it created large visible seams on the model. I've managed to fix these, but I'm assuming the seam issue was why the map was never utilized in renders or animations before.

I'm still ironing out some minor things with the model, but when I'm done with it I'll be sending it back to Bunsen and Acidic, so anyone who uses Maya and Redshift can give this model a spin. Obviously I have one mini animation planned with him for the next month, which is something I'll get into a bit later. Should this be met with a warm reception then I'll likely do a slightly longer animation (2 - 3 mins) in the form of a Halloween special later this year. This would pretty much be a special mini episode in the Encounter series and feature Space Hero, a spooky forest, as well as full voice over for both characters. The time would also be used to do some work on Zoe, for which I've planned another belly-related mini animation as well for the next months. This will however still be using the current, rasterized model.

Zoe's Major Makeover

With the shift to Redshift, a large part of Zoe's features became non-functional, with the biggest one being her elaborate fur and hair. Throughout the recent months I've had the chance to try out various industry-leading fur and hair plugins now, including X-Gen, Ornatrix, and Yeti. I've eventually settled for Ornatrix, as it has the artist-friendliest approach so far and lets you style a character's fur in realtime. I've already practiced a bit with the plugin and mainly used it to add a layer of 3D moss to some environment assets, which Redshift surprisingly handled with ease. It's save to say that I'm pretty much ready to work on her new fur, but after a few weeks of careful consideration, I've decided that before tackling her fur, she might need a revision that goes a lot deeper than this.

Throughout the recent years I've added a ton of new features to Zoe's rig, which included model-specific stuff such as proportional edits, claws, pawpads, etc; as well as animation-related controllers for her body and face. A lot of these were post-rig additions, which have made the rig incredibly heavy. The last time I've actually re-skined the rig was actually before the Halloween animation 5 years ago, everything after that was basically stuff I've added on top of the model, and it's beginning to show. A lot of these issues came back to haunt me while animating the last Encounter episode, as the rig wasn't only heavy to work with, but also had a couple of bugs that I needed to work around at times. I frankly don't want to carry all of this stuff over into the next generation of films, which is why I think it's time for a major revision of the model that includes major improvements and an all around cleanup of her topology. There are a couple of things about her model that I've been rather unhappy about, which includes her lack of proper eyelids (mostly been using cutouts for the eyes), her hands, feet, and clothing. This could all be tackled before a makeover of her rig and would provide a much better base to add fur back onto her.

The goal with this makeover is to breathe a bit of new life into her and hopefully bring her on par with a character that could be straight out of Zootopia. I'm certain that this major model revision, as well as the addition of ray traced lighting would make for a transformative effect on her. To accomplish all of this within the next few months, I've planned to collaborate with other artists from our community, which should keep my hands free enough to still make new animations for the time being.

I'll of course keep you guys updated on how things are progressing and will post small work in progress updates in between the usual animation playblasts. It's certainly going to be one heck of a busy time! Thanks to all of your amazing support I've also started to consider building a proper render server later this year when NVidia drops new GPUs. This is planned to be a remote PC that will house multiple GPUs for the purpose of not only grinding away frames in a fraction of the previous time, but to also to elevate the visuals of these animations to new heights!

Encounter 2 - Alt Angles (Public)

MEGA Version: Link 

And here's the completed alt angles! I have to admit I'm even liking some of these more than the angles in the original, especially that final gulp scene, oh gosh! I'm quite happy with some of these scenes, so I didn't feel particularly shy to show them off at a much slower pace, hoho~!

Encounter 2 - Alt Angles (1080p60)

Download (1080p60): Link 

And here's the completed alt angles! I have to admit I'm even liking some of these more than the angles in the original, especially that final gulp scene, oh gosh! For convenience these scenes are followed by a slow motion version, with the Patreon versions being upscaled from 60 to 120FPS using AI image interpolation! I'm quite happy with some of these scenes, so I didn't feel particularly shy to show them off at a much slower pace, hoho~!

Note that I've already been working on something else in the background while this was rendering, so I'll have another post for you in a couple of days. This will come with a bit of a secret project announcement as well! :D

Encounter 2 - Alt Angles (4k60)

Download (4k60): Link 

And here's the completed alt angles! I have to admit I'm even liking some of these more than the angles in the original, especially that final gulp scene, oh gosh! For convenience these scenes are followed by a slow motion version, with the Patreon versions being upscaled from 60 to 120FPS using AI image interpolation! I'm quite happy with some of these scenes, so I didn't feel particularly shy to show them off at a much slower pace, hoho~!

Note that I've already been working on something else in the background while this was rendering, so I'll have another post for you in a couple of days. This will come with a bit of a secret project announcement as well! :D

POV Lick Preview, Encounter 3 and future plans

Getting a bit of a deja vu from the first Encounter animation here, haha! There were quite a couple of changes I needed to do animation-wise, as the scene was pretty much designed to mostly work from one perspective. I first tried getting away with just strapping a camera to Space Hero’s head, but quickly realized I’d have to redo his entire head animation since it was so unsteady that it downright induced motion sickness. There was also a lot of additional clipping to get rid off that was previously conveniently covered up by Zoe’s thumb, haha!

I’m anticipating for the extra scenes to be done next month, with this playblast likely being the last before release. Right now I’m adjusting the gulp scene, which will be included as well in addition to the belly rock scene! Since I still have most of the production material still lying on my drives, I’ll likely post a VFX breakdown of some scenes as well, likely as a separate post after the next one!

Encounter 3 Concept (spoilers)

It's probably no secret that I'm already working on concepts for the third Encounter episode, which will go back to its roots and be more akin to the first one, featuring a boss fight in which Space Hero will fight against Zoe. This time however, Zoe will be possessed by an evil force and be a lot more ruthless and devious than before, though it will more be in the category of her being comedically bad to keep the light-hearted tone of the series! I've already written down some basic script ideas, but it's still a long way from being done. In the meantime I'll be working on a few mini animations either way while sidelining the pre-production phase. It's however likely that this time I'll split the release of the animation in two parts since it might make things a little more workable for me. Encounter 1 & 2 were absolutely insane from both the animation and overall production load, so splitting a project like that in two parts might make things a bit more managable.

Other Animation Projects

With Encounter 3 still being a out in the future, I have a couple of other animation projects that I'm pretty excited about! There's specifically one which I can't talk about just yet, but I can at least mention that it's somewhat of a collab with another artist. I might have more about this next month after releasing the Encounter 2 bonus whatsoever! :D

Another small animation I've planned is actually a remake of the old Blue Vixen Noms U animation, which was the first animation I've posted online! This would of course feature Zoe, as well as completely redone animation and rendering. Whether the new version of her will be done by that is something we'll have to see, as I've hit a few minor roadblocks in redoing her fur and hair, so she works in the latest version of Maya and Redshift. I'll make sure to post updates on her once I'm getting there whatsoever! 

Welp, looks like my posting schedule is finally back on track! Note that I still haven't taken care of my PM inbox yet, but I'm hoping to finally tackle that in the upcoming month! I might have help with that soon, as I'm in the process of talking to someone who should be able to help me taking care of the messaging load here. Fingers crossed! (:

More alt angles previews!

Looks like I'm still a bit behind with my posting schedule, but I feel like I'm slowly catching up! Note that I'm finally back home, so here's hoping things will go back to a normal schedule soon!

I've made some progress with the alternative angles and would say I'm halfway-ish there with their completion. I've already started working on the POV lick scene, which needed a lot more animation changes than I already anticipated. Was actually hoping to post a playblast of the scene as well today, but there were a few more things in the preview render that I thought needed to be fixed first, so instead I've just exported another clip of the scene I recently finished!

I guess that with there being so many worthwhile scenes in this animation, this will likely be the longest alt angles video yet! I'll make sure to have another post up by the end of the month to hopefully bring my posting schedule fully back on track!

Alt Angles/Lighting - First preview

First off, thank you guys so much on the overwhelming feedback on the final release on Encounter 2! I sadly didn't get much time to celebrate, as I had a flight to catch only a few hours after the release, which was related to another project. 

There wasn't really much time to prepare for travels, which is why this trip had become a bit of a mess. Before leaving I had set up remote access to my home desktop, but it didn't initially work from the US. My friend however helped me out with fixing it, which means I'm back on track working on the alternative angles, with one of them having already finished rendering! To make things a little more worthwhile, I've set these scenes up with some alternative lighting, which closely resembles the one I've made for the post credits scene (which is actually just one of the lighting setups I made for Encounter 1 *cough cough*). There's still going to be a lot more to come, hopefully sooner than later as I'm really trying to catch up with my posting schedule here, hah! Some scene will obviously take a little longer, such as the handheld lick, for which I've planned an alternative POV angle, which will need a decent bit of modification in the animation. Should I not manage to make it look enticing then I'd likely go for a different angle, we'll see!

I'm hoping to address some of my future plans with the next post as well! There's quite A LOT that is coming up for both the short and longer term, with Encounter 3 of course filling out the later. Before that I'm hoping to deliver a couple more bite-sized animations to also test the upcoming 2.0 version of Zoe's model that I've been working on for quite a while. I'll keep you guys in the loop with more frequent updates throughout the month! Big apology for the long radio silence. Releasing Encounter 2 right before flying to California pretty much destroyed me and I'm still recovering. I should however slowly get back on track since I'm all set up again! (:

Encounter Part 2 (Public Version)

Youtube Link: Link 

MEGA Link: Link 

It's finally here! This animation once again set a new personal record  on completion time after being well over a year in production. Making  this a mini series was already part of the original plan, with the  massive amount of positive feedback on the prequel only cementing it  further.

Originally this animation was supposed to top out at 5 minutes since it  was only supposed to be a short episode, but I somehow ended up adding  scene after scene, which kept ongoing even after the first Patreon  preview, which I usually only post a month before the public release.  With all these numerous extensions we're now finding ourselves at a  runtime of a little over 9 minutes. Frankly speaking though, it made for  a much better animation in the end, as the pacing flows a lot nicer  thanks to a lot of these additional scenes. I definitely have to thank  my patrons for their infinite patience here, which let me reiterate and  revise until everything was as best as it could possibly be. Animating a  film like this entirely on my own was already a massive undertaking on  its own, but what added a lot of additional production time was the  rendering process that easily added a couple of months on its own. There  were quite a lot of firsts for me in this animation, with the two  biggest additions being the use of ray tracing and elaborate fluid  simulation. This meant stepping out of my ancient version of Maya and  upgrading to the latest version, which admittedly wasn't too much of a  hassle. The real challenge came from using a completely different  renderer, as a lot of assets I previously made needed to have all their  shaders converted, with some features flat out not working to begin  with. In the end I found myself in this weird transition zone of using  two different renderers, with Redshift being used to render the  background and the majority of scenes in the later part of the  animation, and an old DirectX11 rasterizer to render Zoe, as well as the  foreground in the earlier parts of the film. Frankly, a compositing  nightmare. The good news here is that there's still potential to improve  future animations, as I'm slowly porting Zoe and her fur over to the  new engine, something I'm both scared and excited about at the same  time!

As most of you already assumed, the talented cast from the first Encounter episode is making a return! Gen absolutely knocked it out of the park with her performance for Zoe, and so did Barry as the ever-delicious Space Hero, who got quite a few more lines than last time around! There's also the new addition of Erin who did a fantastic job as the new operator voice in the intro of the  film! As always, there's some vore sound assets here being used by Jeschke, though it's mostly limited to a few groans in this animations, as a lot  of the sound design work here was done with a mix of foley and using  commercial sound libraries to fill in the blanks. I'd still absolutely  recommend checking out sounds whatsoever!

Zoe voiced by: https://www.patreon.com/GenLightningTurtle/posts 

Space Hero voiced by: https://www.patreon.com/baritonev/posts 

Operator voiced by: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/erinelliot 

Encounter Part 2 (1080p/60FPS)

And here it finally is! Phew... I'm sure that everything I wanted to say about this has already been said in the numerous previous posts, so I'm just going to leave you to the video! :D

Patreon 1080p Youtube Version: Link

Download Versions

1080p/60FPS: Link

Make sure to use the download link for the highest possible quality!

Note that there will be additional bonus angles coming next month or so, on which I'll start working within the next few days! I'm literally less than 24h away from catching a flight to the States to start working on another project, but I'll promise to get back to doing the bonus angles once I've settled and got a proper snooze!

Encounter Part 2 (4K/HDR/60FPS)

And here it finally is! Phew... I'm sure that everything I wanted to say about this has already been said in the numerous previous posts, so I'm just going to leave you to the video! :D

Patreon 4K Youtube Version: Link 

Download Versions

Source 4096x2304/60FPS/HDR: Link 

4K/60FPS: Link 

1080p/60FPS: Link 

Note that there will be additional bonus angles coming next month or so, on which I'll start working within the next few days! I'm literally less than 24h away from catching a flight to the States to start working on another project, but I'll promise to get back to doing the bonus angles once I've settled and got a proper snooze!

Note that the source version could take a while to encode since Adobe did a lot of changes to their Media Encoder HDR options. The Youtube 4K version is still fairly compressed, which is why I highly recommend using the download links!

Soon...

Here's the promised image strip before I head to bed! Happy to say that all the editing is finalized and I'm about to start encoding the files. The final animation will be posted tomorrow, clocking in at slightly over 9 minutes. Thank you guys so much for your infinite patience with me! ;w;

Internal Swallow Scene - RT Playblast

Oh dear, I think I've never posted a playblast this close before an animation release, but since this scene is still not ready for rendering I might do so!

Right now all scenes are pretty much done, except for this one, which still has me tinkering with the simulation of thick slobber. This is roughly the 20th iteration of the simulation, and while it's still not quite where I'd like it, it's slowly getting there. The basic animation was already finished a couple days ago, it's mainly the fluid simulation that is taking up a lot of time, as each new calculation takes multiple hours to complete. I'm already quite satisfied with the fluid properly sticking to the walls and character, now I'm just trying to figure out how to make a bit more sticky and less drippy. I'm however hoping to figure it out by tomorrow, so I can finally advance to rendering this scene, which will be quite the undertaking in itself! Note that the scene still looks good without the fancy slobber simulation, but I feel like the inclusion of it makes it truly exceptional which is why I'm trying to make it work.

Note that these long computation times gave me at least time to polish some other scenes, this included adding small additional scenes to the post-credits part, which I think really helped its pacing a little. In terms of the release window we're probably still looking at a solid week to wrap this final scene up (it's a little longer than what's shown in this playblast). I'll make sure to make another post here with some render stills 24 hours before the release to give everyone a heads up! (:

More animation previews & new gullet model

Rendering is still ongoing and so are the last bits of animation. I've recently finalized the animation on the post-credits scene, which I'm currently preparing for rendering. 

Earlier on the rendering on the Zoe falling scene was finally done. There's only the additional bonus scene left to animate after that, which I've already been preparing in the background. Rendering is still taking a ridiculous amount of time, especially with the internal scene where one new frame only gets finalized every 20 - 30 minutes. The new scenes are quite a little heavier as well, but nowhere near that render time of the internal scenes. I think it's definitely worth it whatsoever, despite these lengthy computing times. The internals are a huge step up from all the previous installments, thanks to path-traced SSS/lighting, as well as the new fluid simulation that uses Maya's powerful Bifrost plugin. Never thought I'd use a tool like that on a vore animation, what a time to be alive! :D

I've also modeled a new gullet model and partially rigged it for the bonus scene! There's still some more rigging work to be done on it, but I've already felt confident enough to show it already. The previous one was alright, but I felt like I could redo it a lot better, especially since I could use it with the fancy new renderer as well!

Lighting and materials are still heavily work in progress. I'm hoping to get the rig fully done soon and start setting up the scene. The only thing that is hindering my workflow a bit right now is that I barely have a computer left to work on, as almost every device in my apartment is busy rendering something, hah!

I appologize if I'm currently quite unresponsive with my messages here. Right now I'm fully focused on getting this animation done within the next 2 - 3 weeks, as I have a deadline for another project in March coming up, which will also have me traveling back to LA. I'm hoping that by the time the full animation is finalized, I can continue rendering out some alternative camera shots of the nommier scenes, hoho! Here's hoping that between that and the March project there's finally going to be some time going through all the recent messages, phew!

Stretching - Playblast (No Lighting)

First off, those that follow my Twitter account have probably already heard that I needed to move the full release of Encounter 2 from late January to late February due to the holidays being a little busier than expected, as well as me falling terribly sick earlier this month. I'm already back at animating the final scenes, with this playblast showing one I finished last week. Note that the scene has partially rendered already, but it's sadly not enough to already show a fancy rendering playblast, which is why this playblast from last week will have to do for now!

I'm aiming to have all animation done by mid-February, which would leave me with roughly two weeks of additional rendering time. I'd also love to still do an additional scene of Space Hero being inside Zoe's gullet, but the schedule is already pretty tight, so I need to see if I can still squeeze it in there. I'll make sure to have a more elaborate preview around the mid point of next month. By then the animation will hopefully be fully done and I'll mostly be focusing on rendering and post production.

Apologies for the delay again! I can at least assure that the new scenes that are currently rendering are coming out quite amazing. Thanks you all for your patience in the meantime, I want to make sure everything about this production is as good as it can be.

Belly Dialogue - RT Playblast

Happy new year folks! Here's another internal playblast, likely the last of the internal ones since all the animation for it is done and I'm rendering out this pre-visualization before starting to do the final render on this. 

I've admittedly fallen a bit behind since I was hit with the big sick after Christmas, which eventually got so bad that I had to take a few days off after New Year's. I first assumed it was Covid, but ran a total of four tests throughout the week, which all turned out negative. I mostly tried to use the time to improve the fluid simulation a bit further, since I wasn't fully satisfied with it yet. This mostly contained setting some values and getting back to bed for 10 hours and waiting for the fluid cache to finish calculating, which was pretty manageable. This new bake now uses 5 times the amount of particles than the previous previews, which likely shows in the quality of the simulation.

Anywho, the fever is gone, which means I'll return to animating the remaining scenes! I still need to fix some minor visual bugs before starting with the final render on this. Render time for this scene in particular is quite heavy with a single frame taking nearly 30 minutes to finish at full resolution. This is mainly due to path-traced subsurface scattering with GI being extremely expensive, especially when it fills the entire screen like it's the case here.

Big apologies for not having caught up with my messages yet. I figured it's only gotten worse while I was sick, but I'll try to work them off soon. ;w;

Steady - RT Playblast

Oh well, I had actually promised myself not to work during the holiday season, but you know how it goes! Apologies for not having a Youtube playblast this time. I still need to get a ton of stuff done for New Year's Eve and still haven't slept yet, and uploading a gif was a much quicker option.

Here's a first preview at the opening internal scene in all of its raytraced glory~! The majority of it will be in first person, but I thought it would be nice to have the first two shots in third person since Space Hero's model doesn't look as terrible anymore, snrk! I'm roughly half a minute into animating the internal sequence, which will most likely clock in at one minute total. Still about two more big scenes and one short one to go once this sequence is done to complete the animation!

Apologies I've fallen back on replying to comments and PMs since the holiday season has been quite turbulent. I think the PM situation might never normalize anymore, as having the support of 1600 patrons now has evolved into a management undertaking beyond my physical capabilities. I might have to change my habit of spending 30 minutes to write back a perfectly tailored reply to the lengthier ones, but oh well. I'll try to catch up with this in January most likely!

Hope you're all going to have a lovely New Year's Eve! Remember to take some time off yourself and treat yourself well! My big hope for 2022 is that things will slowly be going back to normal again, as cabin fever contributes to burnout like nothing. Welp, fingers crossed! Happy New Year, folks! <:

Another insides test with Fluids

Looks like our Space Hero will be going on a bit of a journey through Zoe's insides, oh dear!

Here's another test with some fancy bifrost fluids for the later half of the internal scene, which will take us into Zoe's tube-like intestines! Since endo and full-tour have been a request for many years now, I thought I'd finally include it in an animation, even if it's more so hinting at it, instead of literally going all the way. I exported two versions here. The first one has more murky looking water as light that filters through it gets muddled, where the second one has a more clear water approach. Somewhat leaning towards version two here since the clear water is a bit more appealing and a lot faster to render, hah!

I've always wanted to do a lighting scenario where it looked like part of the lighting was shining through the muscular tissue from the outside, and since this animation is finally using full on path tracing, I've went ahead with that here. I also worked on a version that simulated a villi-like surface through x-gen, but didn't end up liking the results too much. AFAIK, it's impossible to have an x-gen description follow and animated displacement map in Maya, which made me lose a layer of animation, making the whole thing look a tad dull. Maybe I'll go back to it and give it another shot in the future, for now I didn't want to end up spending an entire month on this. /.w.\

I'm hoping to have another playblast with proper animation out by the end of the year, but note that things are a bit irregular this month due to Christmas and all the festivities. There's also another thing I've been struggling with that concerns the taxation of Patreon income and how my country handles it, which has taken up a ton of my energy. I've been in touch with Patreon's support regarding this and might share some findings some time next year, as I think it might safe other creators from the hell my accountant and me have been through in that regard.

Not the most christmassy note to end this post now isn't it? Welp, I hope yer all having a mighty-fine time with your friends and family! Thank you so much for your amazing support and Merry Christmas, ahhhhhh! <3

Stomach with Bifrost fluid simulation - Playblast

Hohoho, this has been a long time coming! Since there won't be any fur to render for the upcoming internal scenes, I've been able to migrate them to the latest version of Maya and fully rely on Redshift for rendering these. I remember posting about this back when I first started making the animation, as I had already migrated the stomach environment to the new renderer back then. I finally got back to it after the release of the Encounter 2 preview and started improving the materials a bit and fixed some visual glitches like that horrible UV displacement seam at the top of the stomach model.

Since I now have Maya's latest CG toolkit at my disposal, I thought I should go all the way with this scene and give fluid simulation another try. I had actually experimented with that many years back, but back then rendering a fully path-traced frame took multiple hours and wasn't really feasible for a one-man band animation house. I must also admit I was never particularly happy with the results of Maya's old fluid simulation methods, so I was quite thrilled to finally give this another try with Bifrost! It's quite funny since stuff like Bifrost and Realflow used to be almost exclusive to big-budget Hollywood animation and now it's pretty much accessible for everyone with a somewhat modern PC!

Since the stomach mesh had way too many polygons for particle collision, I ended up making an alternative low-poly mesh and transferred the animation onto it with a simple wrap deformer. Getting the fluids to move in a believable (and aesthetically pleasing) manner took quite a lot of iterations. A full simulation of 1200 frames took a full hour on my somewhat dated i7-8700K, which is why I ended up literally upgrading my CPU to an i9-9900K, which made working with this kind of heavy simulation a bit easier. The only remaining challenge will be the rendering, as a single frame already took about 10 minutes at 3K resolution. The additional fluids increased that up to 15 minutes, which means that for this specific scene I'll end up using frame interpolation, as rendering this at a native 60FPS is probably going to take so long that we'll see the release of a Duke Nukem Forever sequel by the time this finishes rendering. The heavy part here isn't so much the fluid sim, but the actual water shader, which uses multi-layered subsurface scattering, rough refractions, as well as caustics, while being on top of another complex material (the stomach surface). I swear, this thing could be its own ray tracing benchmark.

Note that December is going to be terribly rough for me as I'm still catching up on a ton of things that I needed to pause to get the recent preview out, including client work. I'm still hoping I can manage to get a decent portion of the internal scene done this month, which is still going to need a bit of additional work before I can get to back to animating it! In the meantime, thank you guys so much for the overwhelming feedback on the Encounter 2 preview! It was a huge relief for me to hear that most of you enjoyed it! ;w;