Intro Playblast, Render Previews, Bunsen Material Overhaul, etc. (Patreon)

Oh wow, who knew Space Hero's blaster doubled as a flashlight! This playblast finally concludes the intro, which admittedly took a little longer than expected, but unlike the intros in many previous animations this was almost entirely done in third person, which took quite a bit to animate (especially with walk cycles not being my strength, pfff~).

With the intro out of the way, we can finally move to the fun stuff! The next scenes to animate will be some relatively short banter between Bunsen and Space Hero, which will transition to teasing and the noms. I admittedly haven't found a voice actor for Bunsen yet, but it's not unlikely that I'm letting Bari give it a try, who's also been voicing Space Hero. I know he's got quite a decent vocal range and should be able to do an excellent job with him. There's also the magic of editing in case he sounds a bit too much like Space Hero, but I'd almost assume this wouldn't be necessary.

Note that the opening scene of the animation is already being rendered and should completely somewhere around the end of the month, which means I should be able to give you a render playblast on that one! I'm extremely proud at the outcome here, as the visuals are a giant leap from Encounter 2, which is thanks to using proper ray and path tracing as opposed to rasterization. The only thing that somewhat worries me is the render time, with the completion time of a single frame now being up to an hour. I'm however trying to get my hands on two RTX 4090 throughout the next weeks for the render node I've been building, which should theoretically be able to increase the render speed by 300% - 400%. Fingers crossed I won't have to buy them from scalpers off ebay, oof.

Recently Redshift implemented random walk SSS, arguably one of the most sought-after features that has been on their roadmap for quite some time. I've been eagerly awaiting the feature myself, as to me it's one of the features that has been making Arnold and Cycles renders so incredibly good looking.

In further preparation to introducing Bunsen to this animation, I went ahead and updated all of his materials to the new Redshift Standard Materials, which is their new-ish material pipeline that now supports random walk SSS. I'll of course still fine tune the materials for this animation since the lighting situation will be quite different, but early results show that the effect is quite handsome!

Lastly, I apologize there has been such a long gap between the recent update. The recent weeks have been incredibly difficult with my Mum catching Covid, a completely unnecessary project deadline that was due mid-October, as well as an unexpected bill that ate up a full month's salary. I might get into more detail about the later since it concerns 3D animation, but at first I want the dust to settle on this a little. 

Anywho, I'm hoping you enjoy the recent developments! Due to this month's project deadline I had only been able to drive this animation forward and didn't get any time to work on Chloé. I'm still planning to outsource her to a rigging artist and will get back on that soon, so expect more updates on her in the upcoming weeks. For now I'll be focusing on the Halloween animation, for which I should have another update by the end of this month!