Episode 9 Progress - 8/3/19 (Patreon)

Hey friends - this has been wild week.

This week, I prepped the episode for sound design and handed it off to my sound designer.  He is currently working on this as I type this and will likely get the final sound mix back to me before I have everything rendered.

I also tried several methods of rendering out the episode.  After several failed attempts to use different render farms, I finally got one working properly.  I did a test render, and the cost came out to roughly $1 per rendered frame.  Given that I have 21725 frames to render, using this farm, not including re-renders and mistakes, would cost roughly $22,000, which I don't really have.

But then, when all hope seemed lost for me, Blender 2.8 FINALLY released.  And it turns out the episode files work nicely with the new render engine, Eevee, although I do need to make sweeping adjustments to the textures and dynamics.  The lighting is way more responsive and the renders come out almost instantaneously.  I was able to light and render all of ACT 1 in a matter of 2-3 days.  When I open up the larger files for the episode, 2.8 crashes constantly, but works when I split the files into chunks of about 2k-4k frames.  So now I'm going to be splitting the episode up into small chunks and then lighting and rendering them one chunk at a time.  The fact that I'm actually rendering this out now is very exciting for me.

I'm really not sure how I would be doing all of this if 2.8 didn't release, so in a way it's a blessing that I've took this long to get to rendering.  As soon as everything renders out, we can polish this off and release it.  Anyway, here's my current status:

FRAMES RENDERED:  3100 of 21725