CakeInferno

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

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!

I have a version of this with different lighting, but scraped it since I wasn't happy with it. I figured that the detailed movements I animated became harder to spot once there's fur, so I made it a little shorter than usual for this clip. I might post the scraped alternative lighting version here later, though!

1080p/60FPS: Link

900p/30FPS: Link

Big Sloshy Tummy - Mini Animation (4k/60FPS)

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!

I have a version of this with different lighting, but scraped it since I wasn't happy with it. I figured that the detailed movements I animated became harder to spot once there's fur, so I made it a little shorter than usual for this clip. I might post the scraped alternative lighting version here later, though!

4K/60FPS: Link 

1080p/60FPS: Link 

900p/30FPS: Link 

Encounter 2 - Even more environment progress

With the new mini animation finally rendering, I've been able to get back to the environment of the next Encounter episode. Note that what you're seeing here is still not final, but definitely pretty close to it. The remaining work I still need to do is rigging/animating the bushes, ferns, and smaller plants to sway in the wind, animate soft drizzle/rain, maybe do some small tweaks to lighting, and then optimize the scene to reduce the VRAM footprint a little.

Unlike the last shots, these ones are showing all the layers to give a better idea of what the environment will look like in the final film. I'm still not 100% happy about the look of the background, as the lighting detail is insufficient to get that sort of depth shadowing you see in the close environment. Chances are I might end up using a different renderer for it, as ray tracing would solve all of these problems. The only challenge would be making it blend with the foreground in the end.

In terms of sheer polycount, this is likely the most detailed environment I've ever done for a nommy animation. Most surfaces use highly detailed 8K textures with displacement, I've then constructed another layer of small plants over particularly mossy areas to add a bit more depth to them. The ground area uses slightly larger plants in addition and is also decored with sticks, branches, stones, and other detailed objects to further increase surface detail. In combination with Zoe's new improvements, this should easily become the most visually appealing animation yet and be another step upward from the previous films!

As previously mentioned, the new mini animation is currently rendering and will be posted in the course of the next days as well! (:

Squishy tummy - Playblast (No lighting)

First off, apologies for the low poly tummy! The model will of course be a lot smoother in the final render!

Here's a new mini animation I've been working on the side this month that has a particularly full Zoe playing with her big tummy. Note that this one will actually just be a mini animation that comes as an 8 second loop, which should provide a bit more content this month than just the WIPs I've been posting. I'm hoping to have this rendered out in the next days, but it might bleed into the first days of December since I'm still working on the environment for Encounter 2 on the side. Oh well, I really need to go back to just focusing on one project next month, hah!

Encounter 2 - More environment progress

After doing the last touches on Zoe, I've gotten right back to working on the new environment for the next Encounter episode! This has overall taken a little longer than expected, as it took me multiple days to troubleshoot render crashes that kept occuring with the background environment you're seeing above. I drastically reduced the amount of trees, which mitigated the amount of crashes significantly, but they still occur every 50 - 100 frames of rendering. Oddly enough, they're almost completely gone if I remove the water plane, or make it opaque, which hints at a possible issue with transparency over-allocation. A new GPU with more VRAM might fix that, but they're still out of stock everywhere in Europe. Le sigh.

With the 3D background layer being finished, I was finally able to move on to the actual "playing field", which will be a small foresty area with lots of greenery. Here's a shot that I had previously blocked out, which is now decorated with lots of geometry and fancy PBR shaders. I'm using a lot of Quixel Megascans for the geometric detail here. The surface texture channels have been created using Quixel Mixer and Photoshop, with every asset using 8K textures for almost each channel. I'll still need to optimize the scene and will probably have to downsample some of the textures that are a little further away from to camera to either 4K resolution, or even lower.

The visual tone I want to strike is somewhat inspired by The Last of Us, featuring a mountainous area with lots of pine trees, ferns (to be added later), cloudy weather and a slight drizzle, leaving all surfaces slightly slightly wet and muddy. The lighting you're seeing isn't final yet, but fairly close to it. I'll likely place a few more light sources to simulate GI style bounce lighting a little better, this will also brighten up the scene ever so slighty!

In terms of visuals I have a pretty good feeling that this is likely going to become the best looking project I've ever put out. It even looks significantly better in motion, as all the trees move in the wind, along with other elements such as vegetation, water, clouds, and Zoe's hair. I'm going the extra mile and make rigs for nearly all of the vegetation groups, so they're affected by wind movement as well. Note that I work in Maya, so I need to come up with all of these dynamics myself, which can sometimes take a decent amount of time.

The complexity of the assets lies somewhere in between game and film quality, with the majority of them using the highpoly versions of those found in the Megascans library. I made use of Simplygon to reduce these to roughly 1/10 of their original poly count, which is still ten times higher than what current game assets use. The trees you're seeing were actually lowpoly assets that I've retextured with new displacement and normal maps to significantly increase their detail, all while keeping render times managable.

Note that this environment is still work in progress and currently lacks any foliage and micro assets, which I'll add throughout the next days.

PM Swampiness

Hey guys! I thought it would be a good idea to put a bit of a management update here, as my PM inbox is giving me a bit of anxiety. Right now I have about 78 unread PMs, as well as a few more that I haven’t managed to reply yet. I’ve usually been able to keep up with them okay enough in the past, but have admittedly reached a kind of threshold that had me burying my head in the sand for a bit.

The release of Encounter caused a fairly large wave of feedback, which I managed to keep up with to a certain degree. A month after however, I sent out the PM links for the animation and completely forgot to put a note in there to not reply to these messages, as they were bulk messages sent to almost a thousand people. This incentivized a lot of patrons to reply, causing a lot of the still open messages to get buried beneath a large amount of new PMs with lengthy bulk-reply chains.

I’ll do the best I can to get back to these, but it will take a bit of time since I still to make sure to get actual content done. If you have already sent a message to me, make sure to not send multiple ones after it since it will only move the reply chain to the top in my inbox. This will only make me get to it even later, as I’m going through my messages chronologically, starting with the oldest ones.

In the meantime I can only apologize for not getting back to everyone in time. In the recent months there’s been a massive surge in new patrons, letting this account average to 900 – 1000 supporters every month. It’s no secret that I’m quite overloaded with managing things here, especially so with me having a career and company to work for IRL, which isn’t related to anything I do here.

I’m hoping that things will go back to normal here once I’m done with all the pre-production work for the Encounter sequel. By the time I’m animating, I’ll hopefully have caught up with a lot of the outstanding messages. In the meantime, getting back to PMs will probably take some time.

Zoe - Wind test and claws

The next Encounter is going to take place in a somewhat more windy location, which is something I'm hoping to show through Zoe's new dynamic fur swaying with the wind! There were still a few quirks I had to fix with her dynamics, such as all physics mirroring the left side of her model, as Maya apparently binds hair physics to the UV map, but that's finally been fixed!

Her fur is influenced by both a direction push, as well as a turbulence field, which have animated parameters to simulate gusts of wind blowing over her fur. It took a bit of tweaking, as the effect looked everything but subtle at first, but after a few tests I'd say it's starting to look believable!

The physics affect not just her longer clumps, but also her short hair as well, albeit with a far smaller sample count. For a final render I might increase increase the sample density for her fur physics a little further to have the clumps move more individually. I got to say I'm quite excited animating her with this new controller, as it adds yet another layer of animation on top of her movements. In combination with all the trees swaying in the environment, this is probably going to be my most dynamic looking animation yet!

Next to the wind controllers, I've finally managed to implement claws on each of her fingers. The implementation I found is a janky in terms of performance, but it works perfectly without any visual glitches!

Encounter 2 - Environment Progress

It's probably no secret anymore that I invest a lot of time making custom environments for my animations, which in my oppinion are always a substantial aspect of any animation, as they usually fill up a lot of screen space, even when there's a towering vixen present on screen. Since the Encounter series is supposed to look and feel like a videogame, having a believable stage in which the characters can interact is ever so important, as it will set the mood for the entire animation.

The second episode of this intended series takes us down into a coniferous forest area that will mostly feature lush green colors during rainy weather. I started working on this at the beginning of last month to have most of the rough layout finalized. I'm still going to add more details to the areas that are a little further away from the camera, before modelling and designing all of the close details, on which I haven't started working just yet.

While I was quite happy with the stage design of the first Encounter, I wasn't so keen on the first area at the safe point, which was admittedly a bit rushed, as by the time of making it I was already rendering some of the main animation, resulting in a bit of a chaotic schedule.

This time I want to do enough pre-production work to ensure that every aspect of production is considered right from the start, so I don't need to go back and forth between scenes that hadn't even been properly planned yet. That being said, I might still take November to prepare all the necessary things such as the script, environment, models, and voice overs, which I'm planning to have pre-recorded this time, as animating to sound samples is a tad easier I've learned.

Note that the scenes I'm showing are just quick viewport screenshots, as lighting and rendering isn't even set up yet. The close environment shown here only shows the rough landscape that will still be decorated with highly detailed assets and foliage, just like in the previous animation. Most of the original assets for this film were newly made, but I reused some of the modular cliffs I've made for the first Encounter, which definitely sped up the layouting process of the environment.

With this animation I'm hoping to provide a significant visual upgrade from the previous ones not just in visuals, but also in dynamics as well. One of the biggest issues with the last animation were the trees, which consisted of almost a million polygons each. This made any sort of dynamic transformation quite costly in terms of CPU translation time. So much that I ended up swapping between two different scenes during rendering, one that had static trees, and another one with rigged ones, all just to animate the branches of one tree as it got hit by Zoe's tail.

Since this new animation was supposed to have a lot more trees than the previous one, I opted to using game-ready tree assets and made various LODs for them. The new trees only have 2.500 - 20.000 polygons, which not only made it possible to have a massive amount of them, but also to animate them as well.

To have the trees sway in the wind I set up a super simple rig that is being instanced and merely time-shifted, making the trees' animations asynchronous among each other. This saves a huge amount of CPU translation time, while substantially contributing to the animation's dynamics. Zoe's new dynamic fur will also be made use of, as I'll be setting its dynamics up to sway subtly in the wind. Animated fur that moves along with wind was always something that absolutely impressed me in CG movies, so I'm happy this is finally becoming a possibility in this new animation.

Since the pre-production of this new animation is still taking a decent amount of time, I might release another mini animation this month. This time it would actually just be a mini animation though, as the one from last month ended up eating a lot of time I had planned to invest into the making of the Encounter sequel.

Note that I'm currently facing some problems with my PMs, which I'll address in another post I'll make soon. Until then, thank you so much for your ongoing incredible support here! I'll keep working on increasing my own quality bar with each new animation, which certainly wouldn't be possible without you guys! <3

Zoe Noms Ur phone - Mini Animation (Free Version)

Here's the new mini animation for October, ever so slightly late! I usually design these as 10 second loops, but with this one being about three times as long, I didn't quite manage to squeeze it into a gif without heavily sacrificing either the framerate or resolution. Since I'm releasing it as a proper video I also added sound as a small bonus. The Patreon version also has a slow motion version added to the end of the credits, as I thought it would be pretty neat to look at!

This animation is somewhat being used to sneakily test a couple of new things for the next large animation, which will be an Encounter sequel. This includes an improvement to Zoe's fur, which now has longer areas around her back, cheeks, collar, and shoulders that also clump accordingly. There's also super thin fur poking through her tank top, but that's only visible in close ups and hard to make out in this animation. Her fur is also fully dynamic now, which is only visible when she makes fast motions in this animation. For now I needed to test if this works properly, as I'm planning to have her fur affected by gusts of wind in the next big animation.

You might notice that Zoe looks a tad smoother than in all of the recent animations, which usually had her fur flicker quite a bit in various shots. The improved quality comes from using AI-based image upscaling software, which I used to upscale the images from 4K to 8K resolution. This took roughly 1 - 2 days, but the results were seriously impressive. The next Encounter animation will have a lot of high frequency detail like vegetation in its environment, so using a technique like this will almost be necessary to not end up with a flickery mess of an image. Seeing this work so well is giving me quite a bit of confidence!

1080p/30FPS: Link 

Zoe Noms Ur phone - Mini Animation (1080p/60FPS)

Here's the new mini animation for October, ever so slightly late! I usually design these as 10 second loops, but with this one being about three times as long, I didn't quite manage to squeeze it into a gif without heavily sacrificing either the framerate or resolution. Since I'm releasing it as a proper video I also added sound as a small bonus. The Patreon version also has a slow motion version added to the end of the credits, as I thought it would be pretty neat to look at!

This animation is somewhat being used to sneakily test a couple of new things for the next large animation, which will be an Encounter sequel. This includes an improvement to Zoe's fur, which now has longer areas around her back, cheeks, collar, and shoulders that also clump accordingly. There's also super thin fur poking through her tank top, but that's only visible in close ups and hard to make out in this animation. Her fur is also fully dynamic now, which is only visible when she makes fast motions in this animation. For now I needed to test if this works properly, as I'm planning to have her fur affected by gusts of wind in the next big animation.

You might notice that Zoe looks a tad smoother than in all of the recent animations, which usually had her fur flicker quite a bit in various shots. The improved quality comes from using AI-based image upscaling software, which I used to upscale the images from 4K to 8K resolution. This took roughly 1 - 2 days, but the results were seriously impressive. The next Encounter animation will have a lot of high frequency detail like vegetation in its environment, so using a technique like this will almost be necessary to not end up with a flickery mess of an image. Seeing this work so well is giving me quite a bit of confidence!

1080p/60FPS: Link

Zoe Noms Ur phone - Mini Animation (4k/60FPS)

Here's the new mini animation for October, ever so slightly late! I usually design these as 10 second loops, but with this one being about three times as long, I didn't quite manage to squeeze it into a gif without heavily sacrificing either the framerate or resolution. Since I'm releasing it as a proper video I also added sound as a small bonus. The Patreon version also has a slow motion version added to the end of the credits, as I thought it would be pretty neat to look at!

This animation is somewhat being used to sneakily test a couple of new things for the next large animation, which will be an Encounter sequel. This includes an improvement to Zoe's fur, which now has longer areas around her back, cheeks, collar, and shoulders that also clump accordingly. There's also super thin fur poking through her tank top, but that's only visible in close ups and hard to make out in this animation. Her fur is also fully dynamic now, which is only visible when she makes fast motions in this animation. For now I needed to test if this works properly, as I'm planning to have her fur affected by gusts of wind in the next big animation.

You might notice that Zoe looks a tad smoother than in all of the recent animations, which usually had her fur flicker quite a bit in various shots. The improved quality comes from using AI-based image upscaling software, which I used to upscale the images from 4K to 8K resolution. This took roughly 1 - 2 days, but the results were seriously impressive. The next Encounter animation will have a lot of high frequency detail like vegetation in its environment, so using a technique like this will almost be necessary to not end up with a flickery mess of an image. Seeing this work so well is giving me quite a bit of confidence!

Source Resolution (4096x2304)/HDR/60 FPS: Link 

4K/60FPS: Link 

1080p/60FPS: Link 

Quick update on the October mini-animation

Hey guys! Just quickly letting you know that the new mini animation is still going to take a couple of days. I originally planned to have it done and posted today, but I haven't even rendered out all the layers yet. Zoe's new, dynamic fur is quite a bit more elaborate than the previous one, and the hit in render time was a little more pronounced than I first assumed. 

I'm confident I'll still get it out before the month's end, as the post production shouldn't take more than a few days! Usually these mini animations are done within a single month, but I went a little overboard with this one and ended up with something that is 34 seconds in runtime (as opposed to roughly 10, which is the usual length of these). At this point I'm kind of considering putting sound under it as well, but at first I'll have to see how quickly I can finalize the visuals.

Your Phone - Playblast 2 (No lighting)

Here's a second playblast of this month's mini animation, which has Zoe confiscating your phone for the day! After the longest running full animation, this might become the longest running mini animation, as it's already over 20 seconds long and there's still a bit to animate. I'm getting a little worried about being able to properly squeeze this into a gif, since the final one might end up around 30 seconds, oh boy.

This will be using Zoe's room as an environment with roughly the same lighting setup as the previous grape play animation from a few years back! There's just something about rainy indoor scenes that feels incredibly cozy~!

Quick note that the crunch is still ongoing on my end, which is why I still haven't caught up with all my messages here. In parallel to this mini animation, I'm also working on both the script, and the environment for the Encounter sequel, while also converting Zoe's rig to work in the latest version of Maya, which includes having to redo her entire hair/fur systems from scratch. This is more of a long-term thing that I got very technical with in the recent posts, which I'll try to avoid from here on out. For now I want to highlight that the benefits of this conversion are a much more streamlined production schedule, significantly improved visuals, and support for modern formats such as VR, which has been a long-running goal that might finally become a reality with this. Note that it will still at least take until 2021 until I feel confident in making a full animation in the new software, until then there's still a lot of work to do that I'll try to do on the side next to animating!

Your Phone - Rough Playblast and other WIP stuff

Here's a super duper quaduper early playblast of next month's animation, which will probably have Zoe devouring your phone in front of your very eyes~! The animation is currently still rough and has no lighting, as I literally only started work on it last week. I'm hoping to have it finalized by the end of next month whatsoever! I'll make sure to keep you updated with another preview sometime next month that should be a little more fleshed out! (:

Next to this animation, I've also been doing some more experiments with the new version of Maya, as well as the new renderer I'm planning to switch to in a couple of months, both versions are still running in trial mode for the time being, but I'm hoping to upgrade both to the full version after being able to test the speed of the newly released RTX 3090, which I sadly couldn't get my hands on during launch. As a test, I've migrated the entire mountain pass scene from Encounter to the new renderer to better illustrate the visual impact that raytracing can make to the look of my animations.

The background layer with the mountains is still missing, but this should already show how much of an improvement the lighting and materials are getting. Furthermore the working speed with it will be tremendously faster, as I won't have to manage a massive checklist of things I need to oversee to bypass the vast list of missing features of my current renderer. Things like volumetric light, fur gloss, or animated lights would just work out of the box, without me having to spend hours trying to fake these with ultra complicated scene setups.

The hardest part is still migrating Zoe and her fur/hair to the new software, which will have to be done entirely from scratch. But once that's finalized she should look better than ever~!

At last, here's a little WIP model of a Piranha Plant I made earlier this month. I'll probably still rig it in the old software to ensure full compatibility in case the migration takes a little while longer, but I've been planning to have these in a future episode of Encounter as a sort of regular enemy! It sadly won't be the next, but hopefully the one after that~!

CG Bonus stuff - High Res Skyboxes

Here's a small series of custom skyboxes I've originally made for Encounter! These were made in Unreal Engine with the Truesky middleware and later on heavily edited in Photoshop. Since there's a few CG artists and animators among my patrons I'd be sure they'd appreciate them, as I figured that neat looking spherical skyboxes can get quite expensive. That being said, feel free to use these commercially!

Download (8K, 16-bit): Link 

The night sky one was edited together from various images by NASA and other sources. They have some other great stuff available, like an ultra high resolution spherical texture of the moon, if you ever need one. Absolutely worth checking out! https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720

A look into the future (Not mobile-friendly)

Hey guys! First off, thank you so much for the overwhelming and still ongoing feedback on the recent animation! I'm quite happy to see the warm reception, especially considered how long it to animate and produce! (:

As previously mentioned, this might become a new series, as I'm already bouncing around ideas for the script of the next installment. For the near future though, I'll be working on some more bite-sized monthly animations, as well as some other things that I wanted to get into in this little journal. This is going to be quite a bit more technical than the usual posts, so here's hoping it won't sound like complete gibberish to most of you.

Short-term plans

The aforementioned sequel of Encounter will be the next big animation to come. This episode will be a lot shorter and go back to the more usual animation length of roughly 3 minutes as a set goal. Whether it will be more or less will show when I'm getting closer to completion, but it's supposed to be a project that can be pulled off in roughly 4 months. With this new animation I'm hoping to push my dated software to its limit, as by the time of production I'll finally have a new workstation that will be fully optimized for 3D animation. Luckily new GPUs are just around the corner, which means there was never a better time to upgrade! Throughout the next weeks I'm hoping to get my hands on a new RTX 3090, which should hopefully solve all the woes I've been having with video memory for the past year. VRAM is quite crucial, as it has a large influence on render time. Exceeding a card's memory makes rendering a frame significantly slower, and staying within those limits has become increasingly more complicated.

A large sacrifice that had to be made with Encounter was the skylight resolution of my custom-built skydome that basically consisted of over a hundred light probes directed at the scene. Each probe casts a dynamic shadow map, resulting in a large amount of shadow map data that simulates soft, diffuse lighting in real time without any raytracing required. The quality of the diffuse lighting is driven by the shadow map resolution, which had to be set to 1024x1024 per light, resulting in roughly 2GB of shadow map data. This was optimal for the 11GB of VRAM of the RTX 2080 Ti that was used to render this animation. I was originally hoping to render it at four times the resolution, but the resulting shadow data resulted in 8GB, which was too much for shadows alone, even if it would've given the environment a lot more definition, as this sequence demonstrates.

In the future this will likely become a non-issue, as 24GB of video memory should be more than enough for high-res lighting data, 8K textures, as well as Zoe's elaborate fur, which is going to get a significant upgrade as well!

Something that used to bother me with Zoe's previous fur shader was that it looked quite a bit flat and didn't quite have that full, clumpy look that you mostly see with animated characters of higher budged films. Throughout the recent weeks I've finally been able to take some time to redo certain areas that in my opinion needed a do-over. The areas in question were mostly above her chest, back, shoulders, as well as her cheek. This was finally achieved by making a second fur layer that uses much clumpier fur, somewhat akin to her tail.

I feel that these are adding a lot depth to the areas that make use of longer fur, especially to areas like her shoulders, which I always thought looked a little undefined and flat. In addition to the clumps, I've added another fur layer, which mainly adds fine singular hair poking through her tank top. These are mostly just visible from up close and quite subtle!

And now for possibly the best part! Zoe's new fur is now fully dynamic and reacts to her movement, just like the dynamic hair on her head and tail! This is admittedly quite expensive to simulate, but luckily I can turn all of that off during animation, so it doesn't slow down the performance within my program.

This new fur is quite a bit overkill to render for my current card, as it almost doubles the amount of individual fur. I feel that this will be a proper upgrade to her overall appearance though, and with the graphics cards coming out pretty soon, rendering these things shouldn't be much of a problem anymore.

Long-term goals

The future of computer graphics looks pretty bright! With RTX basically becoming more feasible this generation I've been starting to look more and more into raytracing. This won't certainly be something I'll be able to utilize anytime soon, but I've been experimenting with various renderers and even started porting Zoe over to Maya 2020, which was hell in high heels on its own. There's still a couple of problems with the rig, but I'm planning to eventually iron these out, as the new version of Maya offers support for a couple of amazing renderers that could bring future animations into legitimate Pixar territory.

One of those would be Redshift, which I've been extensively testing throughout the recent days. My goal here was to convert Zoe's basic materials to the native ones of this new render engine, which came with some decent results. The render times were still a little too long for my taste, but these were only done on a laptop with a GTX 1070. Redshift is RTX accelerated, so I'm sure that an RTX 3090 would yield significantly better results.

Apologies for the watermarks, I've only been testing this for two days, so I'm still running a trial version, hah!

Zoe is of course still missing her fur and her eyes also look a bit dull, but the improvement in material rendering should still be pretty evident in this image. Her fur is still by far my biggest concern, as fur has always been something that rendered ridiculously slow with raytracing. For this new version it would have to be remade from the ground up, so this conversion of Zoe is going to be a bit of a project that I'll keep running on the side. I doubt that I'll be doing any animating within the new software before 2021, but it's something that I slowly want to approach, as my current rasterized renderer will possibly be hitting its limit soon.

At last, a quick look at a raytraced Zoe. Don't mind the dull eyes, or her complete lack of fur. Oh well! :D

Encounter - Free Version

Here it finally is, my longest animation so far! Clocking in at over 10 minutes, this somewhat unique animation mocks a classic video game boss encounter and likely a somewhat unusual romance!

A huge thank you to all of those on Patreon for enabling me to make this animation! This has taken by far the longest production time yet, due to the sheer length of the animated material. The total production time of this was roughly 8 months, with 6 months being purely animation time. I'm incredibly grateful for my patrons patience on this, as getting this done was an incredibly difficult task. Everything from making the environments, setting up lighting and shading, modelling unique assets, and of course the animation itself was quite time consuming and often drove me to the point where I started to question myself if I'm actually capable of pulling this thing off. Luckily I've had some help by some incredibly talented voice actors who helped bringing these characters to live by perfectly delivering the silly lines I gave them. A huge thank you to Gen, Barry, and Hestia for their incredible enthusiasm on this, it gave me a lot of confidence in this animation and helped driving the light-hearted mood of this film.

This animation also marks the first time I'm using binaural audio to further enhance the more sensual parts. A lot of the audio was recorded with simple every day objects, using a stereo setup of two Neumann mics. Next to the foley work there's also a decent bit of high quality library audio here, as well as some samples from Jeschke's packs that are available over on FA. The music was done in Cubase, using samples from Eastwest's Composer Cloud, as well as a couple of soundfonts and free synths I found online.

Despite the insane length, this animation was natively rendered at 60FPS/4096x2403/32-Bit color to ensure the highest possible quality. Note that the high framerate and lossless 4KHDR versions are only available on the higher Patreon tiers, as these also come with some hefty file sizes. The entire foreground (characters + close environment) was rendered on a single 2080 Ti, while the background (mountain vista + sky) was rendered by a laptop with a GTX 1070. I had to make some visual compromises to get everything rendered in a somewhat timely manner, these were mostly related to light probe resolution and fur density since these effects were pretty brutal on the VRAM. Here's hoping that making compromises will soon be a thing of the past since new GPUs are just around the corner!

Anywho, enough with the technical stuff. I hope you can enjoy the finalized animation! :D

1080p: Link 

720p: Link 

Bandwidth might get crippled during the first day due to the high demand, apologies in case it's slow!

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

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

Radio Communication Voiced by: Hestia042

Encounter - Extended Version (1080p/60FPS)

Oh boy, this cover makes it look like one of those off-brand CG movies.

At long last, the finalized version of the new animation! A HUGE thank you to all patrons for making this insane project possible and sticking with me for such a long time!

This version extends the animation by a short post-credits scene, as well as additional bonus angles of a few selected scenes. Due to not being in a rush anymore I was able to take my time with the last scene and get it to look as pretty as I could. Additionally I wasn't on a limited render-time budget anymore, so I could drastically increase the light and shadow resolutions for the scene, just in case someone asks why the post-credits scene looks better than the previous night sequence, hah. The increased settings were also used on the bonus angles, though it's a little less noticeable there since it only increases the fidelity of depth-shadowing on Zoe's fur, the environment benefits more significantly from these settings, but that's mostly off-camera for these shots.

Note that this version includes additional tweaks and effects in the post-production pipeline, such as added camera-water splashes, some light tweaks in the color grading, as well as some fixes on the audio, as well as other minor things such as subtitle-timing. Here's hoping you enjoy this finalized version, I'm going to take a break for a few days to catch up with some important messages, but I'll make sure to post another update about future projects a little later this month! (:

1080p/60FPS: Link 

Encounter - Extended Version (4K/HDR/60FPS)

Oh boy, this cover makes it look like one of those off-brand CG movies.

At long last, the finalized version of the new animation! A HUGE thank you to all patrons for making this insane project possible and sticking with me for such a long time!

This version extends the animation by a short post-credits scene, as well as additional bonus angles of a few selected scenes. Due to not being in a rush anymore I was able to take my time with the last scene and get it to look as pretty as I could. Additionally I wasn't on a limited render-time budget anymore, so I could drastically increase the light and shadow resolutions for the scene, just in case someone asks why the post-credits scene looks better than the previous night sequence, hah. The increased settings were also used on the bonus angles, though it's a little less noticeable there since it only increases the fidelity of depth-shadowing on Zoe's fur, the environment benefits more significantly from these settings, but that's mostly off-camera for these shots.

Note that this version includes additional tweaks and effects in the post-production pipeline, such as added camera-water splashes, some light tweaks in the color grading, as well as some fixes on the audio, as well as other minor things such as subtitle-timing. Here's hoping you enjoy this finalized version, I'm going to take a break for a few days to catch up with some important messages, but I'll make sure to post another update about future projects a little later this month! (:

Source Resolution (4096x2304)/HDR/60FPS: Link 

4K/60FPS: Link 

1080p/60FPS: Link 

Bonus angles - Preview

Here's a quick look at some of the bonus angles for the extended version of the animation that will be posted next month! Note that some of these were mainly animated for a 1st person POV, so they can look a tiny bit wonky from an outer angle. I'm currently re-rendering one of the angles since I didn't like how it turned out, afterwards I'll finish animating the post credits scene, so the release for the extended version should be somewhere in between the 1st - 10th of September, roughly one month after the initial release!

Many thanks for the overwhelming feedback on the animation by the way! I still haven't caught up with all the PMs and comments, but I'm hoping to get there soon! There's also been some RL stuff I'm still catching up with, which I've been neglecting quite a bit during the recent weeks of crunch, means I'm still a bit slow with getting back to folks!

Lastly, the free version of this animation should get posted a couple of days after the extended cut. I'll have to offset things by a few days to figure out a decent compromise between quality and file size, as I'm afraid of the public release bursting my bandwidth otherwise!

Encounter (1080p/60FPS)

When it's so early, there isn't even a cover yet!

Here it finally is, my longest animation so far! Clocking in at over 10 minutes, this somewhat unique animation mocks a classic video game boss encounter and likely a somewhat unusual romance~! But I think I've already said it all during the many months of production time!

Note that despite the visuals being mostly finalized, it's still missing a few minor touches such as water drops on the camera, and one or two sound effects here and there. Since I didn't want to delay the release any further, I've decided to postpone these for the extended version next month, which will include some alternative angles for some of the sequences, as well as a tiny post credits scene. I'll also make sure to fix other stuff in that extended version, such as the subtitles being out of sync in a later scene. For now I hope you can enjoy this animation and have a blast watching it~!

1080p/60FPS: Link 

720p/60FPS: Link 

Links will get updated daily, make sure to use the ones on the actual post on Patreon, as the email ones might stop working after a while.

Encounter (4K/HDR/60FPS)

When it's so early, there isn't even a cover yet!

Here it finally is, my longest animation so far! Clocking in at over 10 minutes, this somewhat unique animation mocks a classic video game boss encounter and likely a somewhat unusual romance~! But I think I've already said it all during the many months of production time!

Note that despite the visuals being mostly finalized, it's still missing a few minor touches such as water drops on the camera, and one or two sound effects here and there. Since I didn't want to delay the release any further, I've decided to postpone these for the extended version next month, which will include some alternative angles for some of the sequences, as well as a tiny post credits scene. I'll also make sure to fix other stuff in that extended version, such as the subtitles being out of sync in a later scene. For now I hope you can enjoy this animation and have a blast watching it~!

Source Resolution/HDR/60FPS: Link (Requires h.265/HEVC codec)

4K/60FPS: Link 

1080p/60FPS: Link 

720p/60FPS: Link 

Links will get updated daily, make sure to use the ones on the actual post on Patreon, as the email ones might stop working after a while.

Some final renders!

As usual, here's a small gallery showing some of the final renders with full post effects and color grading. Putting the frame sequences together became a fairly elaborate task, as with the native 60FPS format, as well as the extended length, frame numbers multiplied to such a degree that the bare frames, with all the layer groups came together at over a whopping 20TB in size. After putting everything together it's now down to a single, cozy terabyte, but for now I'll have to keep the source files in case something horrible happens along the way.

While I'm currently grading the last few sequences, I'm about to get everything ready for the final sound design, which still needs to be done for a large part of the animation, as the sneak peak was only a small part of it. I was originally planning for a release somewhere in between the 25 - 31st July, but after losing a couple of days to repairing broken TIFF sequences, I'd say that early August seems more realistic, as there's still a decent bit of work to do with the sound design.  Working with these massive file sizes has been a huge challenge and has been a lot more time consuming than I initially thought, so here's hoping you still have a little bit of patience until everything is nice and toasty. ;w;

Once the full version is out I'm planning to work on an extended version that will come with a small post-credits scene, as well as some bonus angles from the tastier shots! These will either be added after the post-credits scene, or released as their own files!

Animation sneak-peak (1080p/60)

1080p/60FPS: Link (Link gets updated regularly, make sure to directly use the one in the post on Patreon)

Here's a short sneak-peak for the upcoming animation! I'm frankly a bit uneasy putting this out, since this is super unfinished and heavily WIP. There's currently no post-production (apart from the depth of field in the stomach scene), making for a raw and untreated image. The sound design is unfinished as well, with there being a lot of missing sound effects, as well as missing voice samples in the beginning, which is due to the actor for the hero character having fallen sick. The final version will also feature HUD elements, as well as typical videogame button prompts that will show up in certain situations. I'm hoping to release the full 10-minute version later this month, with the project probably needing another 2 - 3 weeks inside the oven.

Should you still have the patience then I'd recommend skipping this, as it's probably best to see the full experience without any spoilers, even if most of the scenes in this preview version have already been spoiled in the many playblasts I've been posting.

Animation sneak-peak (4k/60)

4K/60FPS: Link (Link gets updated regularly, make sure to directly use the one in the post on Patreon)

Here's a short sneak-peak for the upcoming animation! I'm frankly a bit uneasy putting this out, since this is super unfinished and heavily WIP. There's currently no post-production (apart from the depth of field in the stomach scene), making for a raw and untreated image. The sound design is unfinished as well, with there being a lot of missing sound effects, as well as missing voice samples in the beginning, which is due to the actor for the hero character having fallen sick. The final version will also feature HUD elements, as well as typical videogame button prompts that will show up in certain situations. I'm hoping to release the full 10-minute version later this month, with the project probably needing another 2 - 3 weeks inside the oven.

Should you still have the patience then I'd recommend skipping this, as it's probably best to see the full experience without any spoilers, even if most of the scenes in this preview version have already been spoiled in the many playblasts I've been posting.

Sound design preview!

https://mega.nz/file/d4p2AIrJ#g40Tuy9Pl1mDjAXBTvqJNCyqCZ5k7PyAvb7tDtPT9vM 

(Link gets updated regularly, and might not work in the email notifications, make sure to use the one in this post.)

Here's a short sequence to show the sound design, as well as Zoe's new voice! I've written a bit of original music for the animation, so the entire thing doesn't sound as sterile on the ears. The sound design itself is using binaural samples from high-quality sound libraries such as Boom Library, some of Jeschke's stuff, as well as a bit of custom foley work that will totally not be recorded with wet rags or something. I mean that would be totally silly! :D

Hoh boy, figured we recently crossed 1000 patrons, so a HUGE thank you to everyone here! Wish I could do a bit more than just posting another preview while I'm still barely awake, but at least the sneak peak version will be done soon. This version will feature the first 3-ish minutes of the film, though it probably won't have much in terms of post production, as the main sequences are still rendering. The quality will likely be like in the sound design preview I linked above, but hey! 60FPS will be a given, now where it's natively produced at that framerate! 

While we're at it, here's another render preview that shows all the render layers!

Render progress

First off, apologies for the long wait. Rendering this lengthy animation is taking quite a decent while due to the sheer amount of frames. ;-;

Right now two thirds of the main part with Zoe are rendered. There were a few complications with a certain scene that had issues with heavy shadow flickering occurring during one of the close ups. While I wasn't able to fully fix it, I was at least able to minimize it to a degree where it's not a distraction. Apart from that I finished animating all the three internal scenes, with two of them already rendered. There's still two more scenes I'm animating, but these only include fairly low-key animation and are more of an environment design job. It's basically an area that has an old-fashioned save point in it, serving as a respawn area for the player. This also exists as a bit of an intro environment for the film so it feels a little more fleshed out. It's not finalized yet, still lacking lighting and some veggies, but I'm hoping to get there in a couple days.

Work on sound design has started just a few days ago, with me implementing some music I wrote, various environment sounds, as well as some voice work, for which I've already received a number of samples. As you can probably imagine, the recent weeks have been heavy in multitasking, with me only sleeping when all my systems were busy rendering. Part of the reason for the delay in render time is an external GPU box I've ordered two months back. Back then the item was available, but delivery time kept getting pushed back with every other week until the thing was basically reported unavailable at every reseller here. I'm uncertain if this had anything to do with the pandemic, but it seemed like an odd item to go out of stock so suddenly. My second PC has luckily still been able to support rendering this film, albeit at a much slower speed.

I'm still planning to release a sneak-peak version of the animation before the month's end, which would show the first three minutes of the film. There might be some things missing such as the full post-production, as well as a couple samples in the sound design. 

While rendering should definitely finish this month, I still need some time to slam all the frames together, do post production, and the full sound design. In the meantime I should have some new render previews available this coming weekend. Might as well show a snippet of the sound design, which includes ASMR-style binaural audio. In the meantime, thank you so much for your patience. I'll make sure this animation won't disappoint!

Exciting post about taxes!

I've been reading about Patreon being required to include sales tax now and just adjusted the tiers with a couple of pre-defined categories they offer, including WIP content, as well as downloadable goods, and patron shout-outs for the higher tiers. I still have no idea how this is going to affect pledges yet, as it seems it will only affect a handful of patrons (based on residence?).

While most people could see no effects at all, I still wanted to post this heads-up here. In case there are any changes to your pledge, please let me know in the comments!

First render previews! (Not mobile friendly)

Here's a first look of some of the render previews from the first part of the animation! Right now I have almost 10.000 frames rendered, with roughly 15.000 more to go. Probably a few more since I'm still animating new scenes, but these should render considerably faster since Zoe's fur won't be on most of these! These previews don't have the full post production yet, means the final images are going to look a lot more balanced and vibrant. I'll also include depth of field, but will mostly use it sparingly and only in "cutscenes".

While the rendering is pretty fast thanks to careful optimization, the sheer amount of frames is making the progress a lot slower than in previous films. Throughout the last two weeks I've also been working on a few other things related to this animation, including writing two simple pieces of music, as well as animating the first internal scene, as well as an additional scene where Zoe belches, which should hopefully please the burp gang at last!

Should I ever tackle something of this caliber again, I might end up collaborating with someone, as I noticed that some 3D artists on Furaffinity seem to be doing it this way, which frankly doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Despite being able to animate, model, render, do sound design, and having a bit of musical training; I shouldn't really take on everything on my own and maybe commission at least the sound and music by someone else next time. I'm just usually a bit picky when it comes to these things, as I think they can still make or break an animation.

To prove I'm actually rendering at 60 FPS I'm including this slow-mo sequence at 50%, which should reveal that all the frames are real and nothing is interpolated. There's been a few issues with some physics at first that seemed to be tied to the 30 FPS refresh, but I managed to solve all these problems.

Gotta see how I'm going to release this animation, as I'm still animating scenes and need to do the sound design, as well as a bit more music later on. Perhaps I end up first releasing the first 3 - 4 minutes of it next month, and the full version a few weeks later since everything from the post production to the sound design is scaling with the runtime of this film, making it take quite a bit longer. It at least seems like a better method than releasing it with scenes that are missing in between it, where actual context is lost.

Here's also a playblast of one of the first internal scenes, note this isn't final render though!

Polishing and Render Prep

Render prep for the new animation is almost done, which means that I'm planning to start rendering tomorrow! Throughout the last weeks I've been improving the animation, revising the entire environment, got rid of all the remaining bugs, optimized the per-frame render times and exported a draft render version of the film for the voice actors and the sound design I'll be doing later on!

To my surprise, the time of the draft render version already clocked in at 7-minutes, already making this the longest running animation yet. Considering I'm still animating about six scenes for the extended version it's not unlikely that this one might end up somewhere around 10 minutes. Phew... guess there really wasn't a whole lot else to do during the quarantine. This run time sounds quite awesome in theory, though I'm afraid it might make rendering this film in a somewhat timely manner a bit of a challenge, especially so at 60FPS. Right now it's difficult to give a clear estimate on how long the total render time will be, but considered there are already over 25.000 frames to grind through it will likely be longer than anything before that. The lengthy Halloween animation for example only had a meager 7.500 frames in comparison, but that one was also rendered at only 30FPS. Should this film take over a month to render then I might do a little swap and push out a new mini animation next month to shorten the waiting time a little. That's only in case that rendering will take an obscene amount of time whatsoever!

Feel free to enlarge these 4K pictures and zoom in all the way, as the detail still holds up with everything completely blown up. I've replaced every photo-scanned asset in the close vicinity with its high poly source file. Of course I reduced their poly count a little to optimize the render time, as I realized that not every asset needs to necessarily have over a million triangles. These photo scans are all from the Megascans library by the way, which was also heavily used in the Unreal Engine 5 demo during yesterday's PS5 showcase.

In addition to better assets I've also made sure to completely rework the ground and cliff textures for the custom objects I've made, including an overhaul of the background landscape, which now has proper texturing, as well as efficient custom billboard trees that make it look a little less barren! Oh, and look at all this new vegetation as well!

The following target renders are quickly put together to show what Zoe looks like in the environment with her full fur density. I've made it so the quantity of her fur is reduced when she's a little further away from the camera to cut down the render time a bit. Sadly I didn't manage to implement the claws I've made for her, as it would have required to redo her entire hand rigs, which would've also required me to animate her fingers all over again for the entire animation. Ah well, something to do for next time. I've however managed to include paw pads that make a nice contrast with her furred parts whatsoever. At least one thing that worked without having to do any major changes!

As mentioned, rendering will likely start tomorrow! I have rented a RTX 2080Ti, and another RTX 2070S that is my own to get the job done, even though the later card will probably just sit around and do nothing during the first weeks, as the external graphics card box I've ordered for my laptop weeks ago was now delayed indefinitely, likely due to Corona O'Brien. As always, I'll let you know how things are progressing! Expect some render clips and possibly 60FPS sequences throughout the upcoming weeks. And once again, thanks for sticking around during these tough times! ;w;

Omnomnom! O:<