First render previews! (Not mobile friendly) (Patreon)

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!