CakeInferno

Encounter 2 - Work in Progress (1080p60FPS)

Aaaaand it’s here! A preview at the new animation, at long last! I took a couple of extra days to make some music for it and also do a bit of color grading. My reasoning was that if it’s out, it’s out, and I frankly didn’t want folks to see this in such a rough state.

1080p/60FPS (Mega): Link 

1080p/60FPS (Youtube): Link 

And hey, look at that! Youtube links! I’m aware that patrons occasionally had issues watching these animations on MEGA, which is why I recently set up a new Youtube channel. It will be used for both public, as well as unlisted Patreon versions of the animations, which will always be uploaded as high-framerate versions. Of course the MEGA links will stay, as patrons should always be able to download the near lossless versions of these animations.

Note that despite my animations being quite tame, I’m still putting an age restriction on these to avoid having any youngsters stumbling upon these animations.

As previously mentioned, there are still multiple scenes missing here, including one major one that takes place inside Zoe. I’ve also thought about an additional scene inside Zoe’s gullet to better tie the swallowing part together. I’m estimating the runtime of the final animation to come out somewhere from 8 – 9 minutes once everything is wrapped up.

Considering there’s still a bit of work ahead of me I’m estimating the final release to be somewhere around late January, especially considering some of these scenes still have a decent amount of animation in them. I’ll of course keep you posted with new playblasts, but note that the next one might take a little while since the internal scene still needs a bit of preparation before I can start properly animating it. I’m also burned out beyond recognition due to having to do work for clients and my company on the side and not having had an actual break ever since Covid started. I’ll still do my best to keep up with my schedule here whatsoever!

Big thank you to all of you for patiently waiting on this! I can’t wait to get back to animating and finalizing this episode, so for those that can still wait a little longer, I’d recommend to not watch the preview and wait for the final thing! (:

Encounter 2 - Work in progress (4k60FPS)

Aaaaand it’s here! A preview at the new animation, at long last! I took a couple of extra days to make some music for it and also do a bit of color grading. My reasoning was that if it’s out, it’s out, and I frankly didn’t want folks to see this in such a rough state.

4k/60FPS (Mega): Link 

4k/60FPS (Youtube): Link 

And hey, look at that! Youtube links! I’m aware that patrons occasionally had issues watching these animations on MEGA, which is why I recently set up a new Youtube channel. It will be used for both public, as well as unlisted Patreon versions of the animations, which will always be uploaded as high-framerate versions. Of course the MEGA links will stay, as patrons should always be able to download the near lossless versions of these animations.

Note that despite my animations being quite tame, I’m still putting an age restriction on these to avoid having any youngsters stumbling upon these animations.

As previously mentioned, there are still multiple scenes missing here, including one major one that takes place inside Zoe. I’ve also thought about an additional scene inside Zoe’s gullet to better tie the swallowing part together. I’m estimating the runtime of the final animation to come out somewhere from 8 – 9 minutes once everything is wrapped up.

Considering there’s still a bit of work ahead of me I’m estimating the final release to be somewhere around late January, especially considering some of these scenes still have a decent amount of animation in them. I’ll of course keep you posted with new playblasts, but note that the next one might take a little while since the internal scene still needs a bit of preparation before I can start properly animating it. I’m also burned out beyond recognition due to having to do work for clients and my company on the side and not having had an actual break ever since Covid started. I’ll still do my best to keep up with my schedule here whatsoever!

Big thank you to all of you for patiently waiting on this! I can’t wait to get back to animating and finalizing this episode, so for those that can still wait a little longer, I’d recommend to not watch the preview and wait for the final thing! (:

Soon!

Compositing for all scenes is done and I started with the sound design today! There are still some missing voice samples I need to get recorded, but in case they'll take too long, then I'll just release it as it is. There will be a lot of things that are still incomplete anyway. I'm quite anxious about putting this out, as I've never actually released an animation that was a work-in-progress before. I'm especially concerned about people leaking this onto Youtube, as I really wouldn't want the public to see this in its current state.

For the preview version there's likely going to be little to no color grading, which makes the scenes look a bit washed out. I'll see if I can use the next few days to already get some minimal color grading in, as I can still apply things such as post effects later down the line. This preview will clock in at roughly 6 and a half minutes, with the final version likely going to be somewhere around 8 - 9 minutes once the rest of the scenes are animated. Good news is that the most complex scenes are out of the way animation-wise, which were basically all the third person scenes where Zoe interacts with Space Hero. It's probably still going to take a bit to animate the remaining scenes, with one particular scene (Space Hero inside Zoe, but everything is ray-traced this time) having a lot of headache potential.

Give me a couple more days to see how far I can get with the sound design. I still want to compose some music as well to take away that awkward silence and accentuate the comedic timing a bit, but I'm not sure if I'm able to get all of this done in time for the preview.

Still rendering

Welp! Rendering of the preview version is still ongoing with there being 5 scenes left to go. Luckily 4 of them are fairly short and shouldn't give me any real headaches, so I'm somewhat confident that rendering shouldn't take more than an additional week, fingers crossed. 

I've already done the processing for most of the rendered material, so the majority of it is ready to go! For the preview version itself, I'll likely not include the full post production pipeline due to the rendered material already looking pretty good on its own. The post production for this will mostly include subtle touches such as smoke/steam coming out of Zoe's mouth, camera water droplets, as well as color grading, which will make the final version pop a little more in terms of colors. Depth of field and motion blur will however be fully included, as they largely contribute to the overall presentation I feel.

I must admit I went back to polish up some previous scenes that had already been rendered. I was specifically unsatisfied with the shading in Zoe's maw, as it looked a tad flat due to the rasterized diffuse sky lighting missing a lot of ambient shading in the more shadowed regions. I first tried to improve this with multiple passes of SSAO that were applied to her mouth, but there were a lot of issues, including haloing, as well as areas that were improperly lit (such as her throat appearing brighter than all the rest). I then realized that I could just toss Zoe's maw into Redshift to render an additional pass of proper ray-traced ambient occlusion, which immediately brought fantastic results. There's a particular scene where our hero gets dragged into Zoe's maw, which was the most problematic scene so far, as the rasterized shading completely fell apart there. RTAO supplied some proper darkening in all the right areas and made for such a substantial improvement that I'm currently going back to apply it to all the other scenes where her maw is more prominent.

The preview version might still take until mid-November to finally drop. I apologize for everything taking so long again. I want to ensure everything looks the best it possibly can, since I almost spent an entire year animating this. ;w;

Here's also another small 60FPS render sample, though note there's no color grading on it yet: Link 

Render Update (Not mobile friendly)

Rendering of Encounter 2 is still ongoing, but phew... saying it's been a bumpy road would be quite of an understatement, as the times I had to re-render certain frequences have been numerous. By now I've meant to be quite a bit further with everything, but there's been one particularly long sequence that's given me a number of headaches, which is due to Maya shifting Zoe's dynamic fur ever so slightly around when reopening the program and requiring me to render a lengthy sequence with multiple layers in one go, otherwise the fur on certain layers such as depth won't match up in the composite. I've figured out a solution to this by splitting up the sequence in "small" 1000 frame chunks and crossfading the shifted fur in After Effects later on, but doing this requires another pass of re-rendering.

All issues aside, the sequences that are finalized so far look quite amazing and a huge step up from the previous Encounter animation, especially so when you see them in full resolution. I however feel that I'm slowly approaching the kind of threshold where I'm in the need for a super computer, as optimization can only do so much to keep the render time reasonable, especially so at a native 60 FPS. I'll need to address frame rate again after finalizing this project, as producing at such a high framerate target has literally doubled the production time on this animation, especially in regards to the much more demanding visuals. Chances are that I'm going back to a native 30 after this and look into some of the new AI-based frame interpolation methods, which I heard have made leaps in the recent years.

My intial plan was to be done with rendering by the 20th, then rush through compositing and post production until the 25th, then tackle sound design and music and release the preview version around the 30th/31st. With rendering seemingly taking another week, things might take until early November whatsoever. 

Note that this version will very much be a work-in-progress and still have a couple of scenes missing, including a major one that takes place within Zoe. It's likely that some post production, sound design, and general polish will be missing for a lot of the scenes as well, but I'll make sure to take care of that in the final version. Right now I just want to get this preview out, so I can de-stress a bit and take my time to polish everything up, while animating the final scenes. Thank you guys so much for being so patient with this! Producing this thing has been quite the journey!

Big Gulpe - Polished playblast

Here's a more polished version of the last playblast with improvements to the overall motion, as well as some additional animation that simulates the rolling of Zoe's belly muscles. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, ohoho~

I sadly didn't have the time to render this out with the preview fur, as currently both my computers are rendering frames for the animation literally every minute I'm not using them. There was quite a bit of a screw-up earlier this month in form of a memory leak, which manifested during a lengthy 5000 frame sequence (native 60 FPS rendering will be the end of me). I always render as an image sequence, so this shouldn't be an issue, but I figured out then that whenever I'd close and re-open my project, Zoe's new dynamic fur would be in a slightly different position compared to last time, likely due to the fur system working with some sort of random seed. This became quite a bit of an issue with some of the render layers not properly aligning anymore. I didn't get around to fixing the issue, but managed to find a workaround by fading certain layers together in post-production. Fingers crossed that it's smooth sailing from here on!

Right now all the scenes for the preview version are animated and polished, with me mostly doing render and compositing work at the moment. I'm still hoping for everything to be in a somewhat presentable state until the end of October. There's still quite a bit of material to render and composite, in fact so much that I might only have a single week to do post production and sound. So yeah, the Patreon preview version of this animation might be a bit rougher than usual! As always, I'll give you another update mid-October, likely including a few more render previews. In the meantime I want to thank all of you for your incredible patience! ;w;

Big gulpe - Playblast (Rough)

Pheeeeeeeew! The recent two weeks have been a tough grind, but I managed to finalize almost three new scenes for a tiny sacrifice to my social life! The most recent scene you're seeing here is still heavily work in progress, but I'm certain that at my current pace I'll have it polished and finalized soon! This is by the way going to be the final scene for the preview version of Encounter 2, which I'm hoping to drop by the end of next month. The full-length final version will be extended by roughly three additional scenes, as well as another post credits scene.

Rendering has been progressing quite well, with roughly 3 minutes being fully rendered out as of now. In terms of visual quality this animation should be my best yet, with a pretty considerate leap in scene complexity and character rendering. You can get a glimpse of the close to final quality here, as I put together a small preview at 1080p/60 to get a glimpse of what it looks like in higher resolution. The clarity in both 4K and 1080p versions will look significantly better than the last animations due to a new temporal anti-aliasing algorithm that was applied to the full resolution images. Thanks to this new method, flickering on Zoe's fur, as well as other high-frequency detail is almost fully eliminated.

High res: Link 

Note that these sequences still lack any post production and color grading, which I'll apply later down the line! For now I'm going right back to animating, as there's still two scenes left that I'm hoping to finish by the end of the month. I'll make sure to update you guys with a more polished version of the scene above, as well as a few more render previews as things progress! (:

Speaking of which - RT Playblast

Here's a new playblast that continues the previously hinted mawplay! Guess you can call it a mawplayblast, uahahahahohohohuhuhaha! :D

As previously mentioned, all internal shots in this animation will be rendered in glorious path tracing, marking a significant upgrade from the previous ones, which were based on rasterization. This comes with a significant increase in render time, but I think the jump in quality is pretty much worth it!

The first lengthy scene is still being rendered and coming along quite well! I sadly needed to throw two weeks of render progress into the dumpster after realizing that the 60 FPS conversion in Maya borked the new fur physics, so I had to tweak the wind and turbulence controllers to get proper hair dynamics again. Everything seems to be working okay now, so rendering should progress neatly throughout the next months.

Right now there's about 4 more scenes to complete until I should be able to put everything together for an early Patreon preview. My plan is to animate two scenes next month, and then the other two in October, which will hopefully suffice for a late October release. Note that there are going to be multiple scenes missing, mainly at the start and end of the animation. I'm hoping get them all done in the following weeks after that.

Early render preview and upscaling

Hey guys! Here's a mini-update on the progress! First off, rendering is progressing quite well! I've spent the recent days polishing, tweaking, and optimizing the main scene, which is now being rendered. The ray traced background layer already finished a few days prior, means I was able to to put together a fresh preview! Note that it still isn't final whatsoever, as some layers like fog and SSAO are still missing here.

I had planned to also have a new playblast ready by now, but realized one of Zoe's lines had to be retaken for animation reference. Unfortunately Gen had fallen sick and hasn't been able to redo it yet, which is why I had to postpone it to the end of the month. Admittedly this is probably for the better though, as this gave me the chance to prepare the next render layer, which will likely be the one that needs the longest time to complete, hah!

Since doing full path tracing at 60 FPS is nearly impossible without having a little render farm, I needed to decide on a lower resolution for all the ray traced images. 1440p seemed to be the most I could do, as it kept the render time per frame between 2 - 3 minutes. To get the full 4K quality back, I used Topaz' AI upscaling algorithm, which frankly works wonders on CG images. It was perfectly able reconstructing all the detail and is something I can wholeheartedly recommend to every CG artist, as it might save you huge amounts of render time.

Thanks so much for sticking by everyone! I'll make sure to have a new playblast by the end of the month, along with some more render previews as well as things are progressing!

Handheld Slurp - Extended Playblast

Aaaaaand here's a slightly extended version of the previous playblast! Lighting has been slighly improved but is still a bit so so. I'll have to tweak it that for the final render later down the line!

Phew, I'm making some decent progress, but there's still a decent amount of scenes to go! At least rendering has advanced quite nicely, with half of the background layer already rendered out for the first (and longest) scene. Once that's done I'll render the foreground and will leave that rendering. Then with some luck a major part of the animation will already be done once all animation is completed and I'll get a headstart at rendering.

In addition to a few selected scenes that will feature ray tracing, I've also been trying my hand at a new AI upscaling algorithm that I'll be using in this animation, mainly to improve the quality of the anti-aliasing, while also upscaling the fully ray-traced scenes, which won't be rendered at a full 4K resolution. The few tests results I've made have been quite impressive! Not only does the image appear significantly higher res, but the algorithm also takes care of aliasing and noise, making for a much smoother image, without losing sharpness.

To my knowledge, the algorithm works by looking up information from neighboring frames and using it to reconstruct detail and smooth the image. This is then combined with an AI image upscaler, which is somewhat similar to how NVidia's DLSS works. We've used to have temporal reconstruction in video games for quite a while now (usually known as TAA), so it's nice to finally have this available for offline-rendered animations. If you're a CG artist yourself and you've always struggled with AA and noise, then I'd definitely recommend to check out Topaz Video Enhance Ai, whose algorithm I've been using for this test!

Encounter 2 - Early Preview (Public)

With my animations continuously increasing in scope, runtime, and production time, it seemed like a good idea to do a public preview at some point, as throughout the last weeks I've received a considerable amount of messages asking me if I still do animations. Here's hoping that this preview will answer some of these burning questions and give a few insights as to when to expect the next major animation!

As the name already suggests, Encounter 2 is a direct sequel to the previous bossfight style animation. It still keeps the same tone, but is more designed as a lengthy cutscene, rather than an actual bossfight as it was the case with the previous one. This time Zoe and our Space Hero will be a bit more familiar with each other, which their interactions will reflect. I won't go ahead and spoil what's going to happen, but you can probably already assume it, given my record of previous animations! :D

I'm trying out a few new things here visually, with this being my first animation that will feature partial ray tracing for selected scenes, as well AI image reconstruction to further increase the 4K rendering quality. I've originally aimed at September 2021 as the release date for the preview version, but considering I'm currently extending some of the mawplay bits by multiple scenes, October seems a bit more realistic. It's usually pretty hard to give a proper estimate with these big animations, as there are usually a lot of things that can go wrong during production, or take considerably longer than first assumed, so take these dates with a grain of salt!

As always, I'll first release a Patreon-exclusive preview that will still have a few scenes missing. Then roughly one month later there will be a full release, which will include a public version as well! The difference here being quality, with Patreon versions being encoded at near lossless bitrates and offering up to 4k/HDR at a native 60 FPS, where the public version will be limited to 1080p/30FPS.

Here's hoping you're looking forward to the animation, as an insane amount of work has already gotten into it!

Handheld Slurp - Rough Playblast (Not mobile friendly)

Welp, here's a new playblast that continues the rather affectionate mawplay. I must admit I'm not quite happy with this yet, as there's still a ton of clipping, while the lighting lacks a bit of contrast and definition. I'll probably adjust the lighting on a per-shot basis, which is something I've already done in the last animation. In addition I'll take another two days to polish this shot a little, as I must admit that I rushed this scene a little since I was already overdue with the next preview. I'll make sure to have a more polished version of this by the end of the month!

To make up for it I have a couple more things to show, mainly some of the first rendered frames of the ray traced background layer, as well as the final lighting on Zoe and the environment for the first shot.

Rendering in the first Encounter took a whopping two months, which came due to the new, native 60 FPS format, as well as the lengthy runtime of the animation itself. The length of the process got me quite anxious back then, which is why for this animation I'm already rendering some sequences that are good to go in advance, hopefully buffering the time it will take once both of my machines are committed to rendering frames. 

There are two new technical additions to this animation, coming in the form of path tracing for selected scenes, as well as Ai-based temporal image reconstruction, which should supply massively improved image quality through anti-aliasing that is comparable to NVidia's DLSS. I might show some of the experiments I've made regarding the later in the next preview!

Rendering this new animation will be a more colossal task than ever, as scene and effects complexity have drastically increased. This time I've come fully prepared, with a desktop that is equipped with an RTX 3090 FE, as well as a new laptop that I recently set up, which also rocks a high wattage RTX 3080 to assist rendering where ever necessary. Right now my desktop is already rendering the background layer, while I'm still animating on my laptop. There's still a lot of scenes to get done, and with the additional mawplay scenes I'm a little uncertain if I'll still manage to hit the September goal for the Patreon release, but I'll keep crunching!

Safeword - Extended Playblast

Here's an extended version of the previous playblast, including polished animation, fur, and some tweaked lighting! Note that I'm currently in the process of polishing up the lighting some more, so there are likely going to be further tweaks to this. The sequence you're seeing is almost done, but there's still a bit to animate. In the meantime I'm trying my best not to spoiler too much of the nommy goodness~!

Note that I'm aware that there's currently two accounts on Youtube that are leaking some of my content. Since I don't have a proper Cake Youtube myself, I sadly can't report these, but another patron gave me the hint to reach out to TeamYoutube through my official Twitter account, so I'll try that route in the next days.

On top of that I'm planning on making a public preview of the animation, which will show one of the older sequences I posted a couple months back, but with the updated lighting. I figured that most watchers on other sites aren't aware I've been working on a new animation since I keep getting PMs that ask me if I'm still alive, hah!

Safeword - Playblast (Rough)

Apologies for the dull lighting, will make sure to properly adjust it for every scene. Phew, we've finally reached the 3rd person nommy scenes, through which most of the dialogue will continue. Animation work was getting somewhat slow throughout the recent 2 weeks, as I ended up spending a week revising the Space Hero model, while also setting up the 3rd person rig for these scenes I'm going to animate. I also started polishing a bit of the previous animation, but had to stop at some point since I also wanted to get some new parts done. Animated films always feel a bit like having a construction site, but in this case I'm pretty much the only worker, so there's a lot of going back and forth, hah!

I juiced up the Space Hero model a bit and gave him sleeves, armor parts, some belts, and a fairly simple helmet design that has a bit of a basic face model behind the visor. It's by no means a massive upgrade, but it should help mitigate the stick figure look a little.

I'll make sure to have an extended version of the playblast ready by the end of the month, stay tuned! (:

Tongue Scoop - Playblast

Here's a new playblast that finally concludes the first scene! From here on there will be a mix of 3rd and 1st person camera angles, as Zoe is going to have a bit of fun with our hero!

I might actually polish up this lengthy scene first in the upcoming week, before advancing with the mawplay part. This way I could already start rendering the background layer on another PC, while I keep animating on another. I usually don't start rendering before at least the key scenes are done, but considering how long these animations have got in terms of running time, doing it like this might dampen the rendering time a bit, especially since this new animation partially uses ray tracing and comes with significantly higher render time per frame compared to the first Encounter.

On another note, I might do some minor changes to our space hero model, as he could probably use a bit more detail in some parts!

Two Hands - Playblast

Scene with voice over: Link 

Just a tiny playblast this time! The first major scene is almost done and will directly transition into the mawplay part, in which the banter between the two will mostly continue.

I already did a preview export of the first scene plus the intro, and it already came out well over 4 minutes. Still can't tell what the final runtime will be like, but considered I've already extended some scenes, it might come out around 6 - 7 minutes. The scenes after this will be a lot tighter in terms of pacing, so it's still a bit hard to tell.

Blaster Nom - Playblast

I mean... he basically asked for it. <:

Higher res with voice over: Link 

Day 100... I still haven't fixed the lighting. Gotta say that animating her tongue is a lot more fun with these new controllers, at the same time it also seems to take twice as long since there's all these animation layers, but I'd say the results are definitely worth it!

It's likely I'll have Gen record a few more bits of ASMR specific sounds, as these scenes are quite a bit sensual! Really can't wait to show you what else is to come here~!

What if I really want you - Rough playblast

Just a short preview this time, which is still a bit rough! I didn't get to do a version with audio this time around, as I'm trying to put the time into getting more animation done, but I'll make sure to post a more polished version of this with audio later this month! I really can't wait to get to the nommy bits, but I want to make sure all the teasing is properly timed and animated. 

Once we get to the mawplay, the perspectives will occasionally switch between 1st and 3rd person and we'll finally get to see our space hero in his entirety! So far this animation runs a bit over 3 minutes btw. The target was around 5, but considered I'm extending the mawplay by additional scenes, the animation might run a little longer in the end. But we'll see about that later down the line!

Getting down this cliff - Playblast

Higher res with voiceover: Link

Looks like our silly vixen is getting a bit impatient and has quite the difficult time hiding her true intentions!

Guess we're finally getting to the teasy bits, which will lead us right to the nommy bits right after! I did some work on the rig of Zoe's tongue, which has a new controller to better simulate the movements of muscles, making it quite a bit more squishy looking! Note that saliva strands and various other effects are still missing right now, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to at least set up her lighting soon, which still looks a bit bland right now and doesn't even affect the environment. Her fur is already looking pretty decent, and that's only at half of its full density and shading detail. I'll still have to decide how wet I want it to look later down the line, but I'd probably prefer a more dry-ish look, so it can better move in the wind. Welp, for know there are still a lot of scenes to be animated, as we're just getting started with the interesting bits~!

Aha, Pirates! - Playblast

Watch with voice over: Link 

It's still the 15th, right? Am I back in the game?

There's another sentence right after this, but I didn't manage to finish animating it, so the joke is kind of incomplete, but we'll get there around the end of the month! I'll likely have Barry re-record one line and replace the word "macro" with "giant vixen", as it's probably more accessible for the viewer.

With that, all the intro dialogue is almost done and we're slowly moving to the teasy bits! I already have a lot of mawplay planned and might extend it by a few more shots to make things a little more satisfying! Been planning to use a mix of 1st and 3rd person shots, which should hopefully satisfy most folks~! Zoe is going to be quite a bit more gentle in this one as well, as both of these characters are already pretty familiar with each other, but we'll get there later!

Really excited to animate some more sensual scenes again, as the ASMR parts of Encounter were quite fun to pull off. Furthermore I'm also planning to use Redshift for all the 1st person in-maw and internal shots, as I'm certain that full on ray tracing will make for some incredible visuals there~!

Thank you for your amazing support again! The last few months have been incredibly hard with one deadline chasing the other, but the prospect of finishing another Encounter episode and making it as amazing as I can really keeps me motivated, ahhhhh! ;w;

Casually T-Posting - Extended Playblast

Better quality with voice-over: Link 

Guess at least we'll finally know what happened at the village! There will be a cut right after this that actually shows Zoe there, but that's more of an additional scene I'm going to animate later on, once the bulk of the animation is rendering!

Apologies for the slight delay. There's been a whole lot of other work that was tossed at me during February, which is already pretty stressful as it is due to it being so short. On top of that I've been dealing with tax related issues, as my accountant seems to have issues figuring out how to properly file EU tax for Patreon. I don't want to bore you with the details, but this has been ongoing in the background for years now and drained  a lot of my energy. I'm unable to tell whether it's actually as complex, if my account just isn't up to the task, or if it's related to them being encumbered due to filing Covid-relief packages, but it's likely a mix of all of these factors.

But boring stuff aside, I'm hoping to finally get to animating the nommy bits soon! There's still a bit of dialogue ahead of us, but none of it is particularly long and complex, so I'm hoping I can breeze through it pretty quickly!

Casually T-Posing (Rough Playblast)

Not gonna lie, this part was quite difficult due to the sheer amount of words Zoe says in such a short time frame! I'm still not fully satisfied with the animation and will have to tweak some things a little more before including this part in a more polished playblast by the end of the month! For now I wanted to give you another small preview of the banter between our vixen and the hero, which is ever so slightly breaking the 4th wall! But who knows, perhaps both are already aware they're in a videogame. After all there's a larger story arc behind this!

I'm considering to decrease the animations speed by roughly 10% and might make some adjustments to that last expression, which to me seems a little off. The character animation was done to the voice clips I got from Gen, so I might have to slow down that particular line as well, which was likely a little too fast in the first place. Oh well, February is short, so apologies for things still being a little rough, I'll make sure to have this part improved by the end of the month and some more dialogue added to the end!

OH SNAP, AND HAPPY VALENTINES' EVERYONE! <3

Only a friend - Extended Playblast

Preview with voice over: Link 

Here's a more polished playblast of the last sequence that has been extended with some more animation! Character lighting/shading are of course not final and were just quickly set up for this playblast. Also make sure to not pay too much attention to N64 world in the background, I'm using a lot of in-production for blocking and reference points. The entire stage will be replaced with the forest environment I showed last month for the final render. 

Thanks to my new graphics card I should be able to post previews with full fur shading a little more often. In this case I wanted to see how her new dynamic fur behaves with the wind controller when she's actually animated. So far it looks pretty well, but there's still some work to be done on her fur, as I'm aiming to give it a semi-wet look from the drizzle.

Note that we finally finished recording all the lines for this episode, so from here I'll just be animating until my hands fall off! As always, thanks so much for your incredible support during these harsh times! I'll make sure to have more previews next month! <3

Only a friend - Rough Playblast (No lighting)

Oh snap, 2020 is finally over! Happy new year everyone!

Looks like Zoe is finally making an appearance as well, and she's a lot more willing to help than last time, or so it seems!

Apologies for this playblast being a tad rough. Next to animating I'm currently in touch with the voice actors regarding the recordings for this episode's voice over, which still has me caught up in reviewing and editing samples. I'm expecting the voiceover to be done by the end of the month though, from there on animating should get a little faster!

Since some of the voiceover has already been recorded, you can preview a version with the voices here: Link 

It's literally just the voices with no editing, so it might sound a little sterile due to the lack of sound design and music!

Should've brought a rope - Rough Playblast

Poor space hero! At this rate he'll be in debt forever!

Here's a super early look at the intro of the second Encounter animation! Just like in the previous film, there's a small conversation with the snarky radio communication voice that will help getting the plot rolling a bit. Zoe is patiently waiting behind the cliff in the meantime and will make her entrance soon. The intro is almost done in terms of animation and a bit over a minute in terms of length, this will help setting a mood a bit before we get to the fun stuff! 

All things considered, Zoe will most likely be included in the next playblast. I'm still making some last revisions to the script before having the lines recorded by the voice actors, which will be done before the character animation, as it's likely easier for me to animate this way. The entire voice cast of this animation will be the same as in the first Encounter, guess it's safe to say that I'll try to keep it that way for all the future animations as well! (:

As always, the quality of this playblast is fairly rough! I've removed most of the environment assets and reduced most of the base shapes to low-poly objects, as I need to keep the scene small for animating. Lighting is also heavily reduced and there's some wrong materials like the POV character's skin, which looks super bright and glowy here. None of this represents the final quality of course.

Animated Stomach - Render test with ray tracing

The second Encounter episode with have a decent share of internal shots again, and since I now got my hands on a new renderer it was only a given I'd port over Zoe's stomach "environment". Next to the much improved reflections, lighting, and materials, the new renderer actually comes with some new functions, namely animated textures, which is a farily basic feature that has been completely absent in the previous renderer I'm using. I've used this to have properly animated water, as opposed to a plane I've been shoving around; as well as animated ripples on the stomach surface itself, which adds another layer of animation atop of the simple joint animation from the previous animations.

Next to the visual improvements, this new rendering approach is making the production itself a lot easier as well. The internal shots usually took a long time to produce since I always had to handle various amounts of layers for volumetric light, depth of field, motion blur, etc. All of this however can now be done in a single render!

On another note, I was finally lucky enough to get my hands on the elusive RTX 3090, and boy is it a brick. Let's see what I can do on this thing for the next animation! <:

Deep Forest Route - Final Environment

Here's a final look at the new environment for the next Encounter episode! This is something I've sidelined throughout the last 2 months while making the recent mini animations. Needless to say this has taken quite some time, as it's supposed to be an interactive environment, rather than just a stage you could only see from one angle. I've started blocking this out back in October, layouting the environment with some basic planes and cliffs I've originally made for the first Encounter animation. The trees are actually game assets that I've souped up with custom displacement and enhanced normal maps. This was necessary to save up on render time, as I was intending to make a lush forest environment with a couple hundred trees that reaches far into the distance. The wind simulation was taken into account right from the start, which is why I've made a small variety of rigs for the trees that were later instanced to save up on render time.

In terms of rendering this is using a hybrid approach, with the foreground and characters still being rendered with the old rasterizer I've been using for most animation, while the background is rendered using Redshift and its RTX-accelerated path tracing. One frame at 4k takes roughly 8 minutes to render on my current RTX 2070, but I'm finally expecting a 3090 to arrive this week, which should cut down the render time just enough to make an animation of this quality feasable. 

As a proof of concept I've already rendered out a small sequence here: Link 

With the environment now finalized, animating will soon begin! (:

Big Sloshy Tummy - Alternative Lighting (Scrapped)

As previously mentioned, here's an alternative version of the recent mini animation with different lighting! I wasn't so fond on this one, which is why I scrapped it and haven't rendered out the background layer, but I think it would still make a neat, little Patreon bonus thingy~!

Link: https://mega.nz/file/Y5ZjnC7b#-UFT1hcz7HSOSYucgc4KYDGXt7m3RHciTH351QvOxCE 

Big Sloshy Tummy - Free Version

Here's a new mini animation loop that shows Zoe with a rather squishy tummy! Since the previous tummy animations were always a little over-animated, I decided to give this a more leisure pace. The deformations were by far the hardest part, as I needed additional deformers to give the impression of mass displacing to the sides when she grabbed her belly, but after figuring out that I can have sculpt deformers only influence certain parts of the model, things got a whole lot easier!

720p/30FPS: Link 

Big Sloshy Tummy - Mini Animation (Higher res)

I used to have HD gifs for Biscuit tiers, so let's continue that tradition by posting a version that is a bit fancier than the free version! (:

900p/30FPS: Link