Episode 9 Progress - 7/6/19 (Patreon)

Hello friends. This week has been one of the most productive I’ve had in a long time. Here’s where I’m at:

So this week, I tackled fluid and smoke simulations. I learned a lot and made a huge amount of mistakes along the way, but I completed all water and fire effects throughout the whole episode. And wow, there was a lot of them.  I really have to be careful getting this ambitious, because I put in way too many effects-heavy scenes.  It took a lot of setting up simulations, rendering them, changing something small, and rendering again over and over and over.  It was very time consuming and I spent most of my entire week indoors.  But it paid off and the major effects are all done. 

Right now, I’m in the middle of tackling dust and sand, which is proving to be way, way easier than fire and water. I made sure to do the hardest and most important simulations first. Now I’m just filling in the details. I should finish them up in the next couple days and move on to lighting. 

I’m now at the point where I don’t have to learn anything else and know exactly how I’m going to finish.  This week was the last hurdle in terms of getting used to the software.  My final overall hurdle will be lighting and rendering, because I put so many effects and volumetrics in this that I don’t know how I’m going to render it efficiently.  Hopefully the render farm I have set up will do the trick.   

For now I need to finish up all the little effects, but I wanted you to know that it’s going pretty well and my productivity is at an all time high.  Let’s finish this thing!

Thanks for your support!  

-Shipp