CakeInferno
patreon
Still rendering
🕑 Added 2021-11-01 12:03:08 +0000 UTCWelp! Rendering of the preview version is still ongoing with there being 5 scenes left to go. Luckily 4 of them are fairly short and shouldn't give me any real headaches, so I'm somewhat confident that rendering shouldn't take more than an additional week, fingers crossed.
I've already done the processing for most of the rendered material, so the majority of it is ready to go! For the preview version itself, I'll likely not include the full post production pipeline due to the rendered material already looking pretty good on its own. The post production for this will mostly include subtle touches such as smoke/steam coming out of Zoe's mouth, camera water droplets, as well as color grading, which will make the final version pop a little more in terms of colors. Depth of field and motion blur will however be fully included, as they largely contribute to the overall presentation I feel.
I must admit I went back to polish up some previous scenes that had already been rendered. I was specifically unsatisfied with the shading in Zoe's maw, as it looked a tad flat due to the rasterized diffuse sky lighting missing a lot of ambient shading in the more shadowed regions. I first tried to improve this with multiple passes of SSAO that were applied to her mouth, but there were a lot of issues, including haloing, as well as areas that were improperly lit (such as her throat appearing brighter than all the rest). I then realized that I could just toss Zoe's maw into Redshift to render an additional pass of proper ray-traced ambient occlusion, which immediately brought fantastic results. There's a particular scene where our hero gets dragged into Zoe's maw, which was the most problematic scene so far, as the rasterized shading completely fell apart there. RTAO supplied some proper darkening in all the right areas and made for such a substantial improvement that I'm currently going back to apply it to all the other scenes where her maw is more prominent.
The preview version might still take until mid-November to finally drop. I apologize for everything taking so long again. I want to ensure everything looks the best it possibly can, since I almost spent an entire year animating this. ;w;
Here's also another small 60FPS render sample, though note there's no color grading on it yet: Link
Comments
Charles J Burgess
Makes a great wallpaper
Jacob Travis
p.p
Jacob Travis
The wait is the worst part
CakeInferno
Nonono, it will still be in November. Rendering the final scene should conclude tomorrow evening. From there I'll gather all scenes in their current state and tie everything together, before doing a bit of sound design and music. I'll post the last preview either tomorrow or the day after!
Vampire king
Wait so would this preview be till December or a few days after the next rendering post
Michael Lee Vogel
Can't wait for the preview version and I'm also ready to see the next small preview. I'm going to watch both encounter 1 and 2 in order as if it were a TV show/movie experience
CakeInferno
About to render the final scene, which still has a few issues that still need to be ironed out. =/ For now I'll just leave it as it is though, as it's almost mid-November already. Will need to re-render this later on for the final version with the fixes applied. Expect another small preview in the next few days, from there the release of the preview should be close!
Vampire king
Any news on that preview?
MelloBoi
Oh goodie! Can't wait to see how it comes out!
CakeInferno
I actually do! I've even considered remaking the first animation I posted from the ground up as the next project, haha!
CakeInferno
I looked into it a couple times, but it sadly won't work with my old renderer, as it's limited to rendering on a single GPU. Basically the reason why I'm slowly shifting to Redshift, as there's cloud services that support this specific renderer! (:
Kyasaki
Have you ever considered cloud rendering? You could save a lot of time if pricing is interesting :3
CakeInferno
Also, found the article! https://www.insider.com/pixars-animation-evolved-toy-story-2019-6
CakeInferno
Basically what Krono said! There was also a pretty good article that described how in the recent Toy Story, a single frame would take about 60 - 160 hours to render. Of course my own per-frame budget is similar to what Krono described since my visuals aren't nearly as demanding, but they sure got a lot more complex since my early animations. With such a long animation runtime, the total frames that need to be rendered have also gotten quite overwhelming. Both the first Encounter, as well as Encounter 2 have over 20.000 frames that need to be rendered and edited, which is an amount that mostly comes together from the 60 FPS format that I might have to abandon again sometime in the future. I guess back then when I established this tier, I was assuming I'd stick to making 1 - 3 minute animations. (':
jackybang
Ohh wow :O thank u very much :) never knew how this works :3 now i understand why this takes so much time ^^
Krono
Rendering is generally done with a graphics card. It will take all the data from the 3d model and mathematically calculate everything (camera angle, lighting at that camera angle, color shades, shading offset due to lighting, shadows, how shadows affect colors, reflections, textures, hair/fur, environmental physics (waves on water, how gravity affects things, surface collisions). It calculates this info for every single pixel. Any video is rendered 1 frame at a time. and each frame can take about 15 minutes or more. A good graphics card will render a frame in patches. My GTX1080 typically renders with 12 threads/patches when I make something on Solidworks. I'm sure Cake has a much better graphics card than me though.
MelloBoi
I can't wait to see this when it's finished! Also, considering all the new stuff you're using to make the visuals better, you ever thought of making a remaster of some of your older animations? (Jackal Noms You, Zoe's Tease, The Orange Fox etc.)
jackybang
Maybe you wanna explain me someday why rendering takes so long ^^' dont feel offended or smth please... i really just dont know why and wanna learn something more about your work :3
CakeInferno
I did a massive upgrade after the last animation and now use a desktop RTX 3090, as well as a laptop with a 3080 mobile to help out my primary rig. Should GPU prices normalize at some point in time then I might even get a dual GPU desktop workstation, especially with how much the render times have increased with the last animations, phew!
CakeInferno
Sure thing! I usually do the gifs because they look really nice in a post, but yeah! They tend to get quite a little big. Will see if I can switch to using Mega a bit more for the future!
Jacob Knopp
Still waiting for a first person digestion sceneπ€€
Danny
So excited. It's going to be so awesome!
Ponlets
oh gawd this is gonna be gorgious :3 looking forward to it also what GPU do you use for these?
Jordan DuDoit
My body is ready
Qinky
Gosh, is it almost a whole year? Wow! Time flies by... Well, I can safely say that quality takes it's time. And I'm 100% sure to be pleased with this animation once more.Β°) Looking forward to it. ^^
Khaki Chan
I'm ready bb
Flaps
Mega kudos for putting the render preview in Mega instead of embedding on Patreon. Usually giant gifs take ages for Patreon to load on my internet (it's bad internet) and sometimes locks images underneath on my homepage from loading. So thank you.
John
this is gonna be so epic gamer
Annon Follower
Looking great, as always
Michael Lee Vogel
I love how amazing it's looking. This is going to be one of the best animations ever.
Diantheris
Knowing the quality it always is I'd say it's worth the wait~
