Episode 9 Progress - 7/27/19 (Patreon)

Hello friends.  I am back.

I’m still a little burnt, but I am most definitely pushing through it and making progress.  I started working again on Wednesday, and since discovered a glitch in rendering that was completely messing up my eye rigs in Act 2.  To fix it, I had to move every 3D Object in Act 2 by 2500 units, leading to a BUNCH of stuff breaking that I had to go back and fix and some stuff that I had to re-do entirely.  So that was a major headache, but everything looks okay now. 

The lighting is actually going pretty okay now and progressing now.  I’ve discovered a lighting technique that gets the job done.  It doesn’t look AMAZING, but it produces results I’m happy with and makes the animation readable.  I might make more adjustments as I continue, but, notwithstanding any problems upon reviewing the preview render, lighting for Act 1 is done.  Before I move completely over to Act 2, I need to make sure it renders out okay.

Rendering, however, isn’t going all that well.  It turns out that the render farm that I've been building up points for, SheepIt, has a file size limit of 500 mb.  Act 1, which is by far the simplest, smallest piece of the episode,  is 1.5 GB on its own.  So using this farm won’t be feasible.  I tried rendering things on my own PC, and got about 8 frames in a 10 hour render, so there’s no way I’ll be able to handle 21725 frames.  It seems that I’m going to need to seek out another render farm, which might prove expensive, or possibly wait for Blender 2.8, which still isn’t out.  I'm not worried.  I'll find a way to work it out.  And nonetheless, I’ll still be working on Act 2 lighting, and continuing with prepping the episode’s sound design, which I’ve also been doing this week. 

I’m back in this and looking toward the finish line.  Thanks for all your support, friends. 

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