Sunday Progress Report (Patreon)

What a week! New PC drama, Rig Speed Improvements, Basted Otter expansion and refinement Staying In Eating out Part 3 rendering and further work.

New PC drama. Anyone who's following me on twitter might have seen the issues I've been having getting the new computer up and running. For those who didn't... I bought a Motherboard at the same time as a CPU. The CPU took over a month to arrive. On setting it up the MB gave a 'CPU error' the place I bought the MB from refused to issue a refund because it's been over a month (even though the website says they are offering returns into Jan for stuff bought over the xmas period). I've since purchased another MB and got that installed now am investigating options for getting the money back. Seeing's as the MB cost almost as much as the CPU This has been very annoying and potentially costly. Due to this the better part of Monday (initial MB, fault finding and attempting to arrange a refund) and Wednesday (replacement MB and finally having a working system) were 'build a computer' days and as such not much work got done. 

Rig Speed Improvements. Rigs are the character armatures, the underlying tech that allows the characters to move and are linked to all work to do with animation be it posing, retiming and polishing keys, refining curves. The lot. 

Previously moving a controller everything was moving through molasses 1-2fps for a single character, less for multiple. In order to see the animation in real time a playblast render (view port capture of each frame comped to an AVI file) was required, this took 2-3 mins to cook or more for 5-10 seconds of animation. Workflow was, do a load of changes, wait for a playblast, watch the animation through several times whilst noting down timestamps and alterations needed. Go make changes as per notes, run another playblast, repeat.

Workflow now: make changes, scrub/play the timeline to preview, make more changes, scrub, more changes, scrub, more changes, scrub, do playblast as a real time check, because even with the improvements I'm still not quite hitting 24fps but I can preview motion fluidly when scrubbing before it was a slide show and not worth bothering with.

Because of the massive improvement in speed I decided the day or so to retrofit the current builds of Yeen, Fox, Otter and Wolf would easily pay itself back several times over. Annoyingly this came at a time where dealing with the computer stuff was already eating into my work time. 

TL;DR faster rigs means more of my time working on animation with instant feedback to changes and less waiting around for the computer to do things. and when I get the new Work PC configured things are going to be even faster! 

New Work PC. Thanks to all the support I've gotten here I've been able to bild a new PC. This will allow for faster character rigs (even before the adjustments made above.) Faster (or more complex) sims. And maybe even faster renders (still need test this out as currently there does seem to be some  CPU overhead at the start of each frame that might be cut down with the new processor)  

For anyone interested in specs its a AMD 5950x, 64GB RAM, PCIe3 NVMe HDDs and a 1500w PSU, the GPUs will be same as I'm currently using. a 2070s and 1070 (the 1070 is being replaced by a 3080 when I can find one) This is double the core count and RAM of my current machine and there is space for 3 GPUs. 

Anyway on to the tangible stuff. Side activity this week, Basted Otter has been expanded and refined, added a section where the characters are catching their breaths whilst the otter is coating himself. As an aside I didn't understand why working on this animation was such a slog. Now I know. Three characters was slowing down the normally slow workflow even more, after the modified versions of the characters were swapped in that's no longer a problem. 

Staying In Eating Out Part 3 has had cam 2 rendered and cam 3 is almost done and ready for rendering. (another round of polishing and a layer of dynamics needed) more blocking has been done on cam 4 really want to have a lot of tender loving in this one ^_^  

and the Executive Producers have decided the upcoming side activity will be finishing off the otter rebuild so when I work on that it'll be getting the groom done finalizing weight painting and making sure everything looks good with him. 

Finally (I'm asking because it's due to your support I can keep doing this.) would it be ok for me to take a weeks holiday?  

I've been working pretty much non stop be it animating, rigging, set designing, or working in the background doing R+D & script work and I'd like a week off to spend a bit of time, play games, watch movies, and generally being able to relax without the ever present nagging feeling that I should get back to work.  

I'll also be using this time to get the new work PC set up, installing and configuring software, transferring licenses and data over, and shuffling around hardware without having to worry about having a working machine in time to put out an Executive Producer poll or Progress Report for this week. 

I'll shortly be putting up a poll that'll run for 24 hours.