New Previews, Render Workstation, Release Schedule (Patreon)

First off, happy new year! Hope you all had a blast going into January! I've been admittedly keeping a bit quiet since I've been grinding away on the new animation, which has seen a lot of progress in the recent weeks. The progress had admittedly been hampered a bit by the finalization of my new render workstation, but I'm grinding away on it again to get an early version of it completed as fast as I can.

First some bad news though, the preview version I had planned to release this month will likely not be ready before February. While I'm on track with the animation itself, the rendering process is quite a bit behind schedule due to some issues that came up when building the workstation. I've only managed to complete it just a few days ago, while initially I had hoped to have it set up 1 - 2 weeks earlier. There's been another complication with a scene I was animating that simply didn't work out as well as I had imagined, which is why I scrapped and reanimated it entirely. In the scene, Bunsen was supposed to bite around a tree and trap Space Hero with his maw, and while it sounded good on paper, it was difficult to make it exciting animation-wise. It was quite difficult to place the camera in a way where you'd get a good look at the action. This probably would've worked better if Space Hero was a tad smaller in terms of scale, but then I wanted the size differences not to be too large to allow for decent bulges and the likes. The scene was now replaced with one where Bunsen pushes Space Hero against the tree with his tongue, which admittedly works a lot better! Here's a playblast that takes place right after that!

Autosave Playblast: https://youtu.be/GD9A5sJSNrI 

Rendering is currently in full force, and boy... the polished animation is looking better than ever! I've implemented a version of the new tongue shader I made that is supposed to visualize the small tastebuds and it simply looks phenomenal. There's also a few more tweaks such as a new saliva shader, overhauled materials, volumetrics, etc. I'm quite proud of some shots, but a lot is currently still rendering. I'm however certain I'll have a more proper preview before the month ends! 

Note that the animation preview will roughly be 3/4 of the final animation. Unfortunately, a decent chunk of the nommy sequences will still be missing from it. This also includes a post-credits scene that is supposed to tease Encounter 3 (Part 1), which will be my major project for 2023. But I don't want to get ahead of myself too much. There are still a number of scenes to animate for this animation, so even after next month's animation preview, I'll still be posting one or two playblasts afterwards. I think by then you should have a good idea of what the final animation will look like!

Render Workstation Completion

As many of you may know, rendering had become a major issue for me since the release of the last Encounter animation. My increasing demands for better visuals couldn't be met by the old renderer I had been using, which is why I switched to Redshift not too long ago. With that however, came a significant increase in render times, which in itself delayed Encounter 2 by two whole months. I realized that I needed to drastically cut render and simulation times for future animations, which is why I recently completed my very own render workstation that is powered by an i9-13900K, 64GB of RAM, and two RTX 4090's. The configuration itself is still a bit on the ghetto side of things, as I tried to cut costs where ever I could. With GPUs having become so comedically large these days, I opted for a setup where I'd have one GPU internally, and another one connected through Thunderbolt. The idea was originally sparked by watching a Youtube video in which someone managed to cram a 4090 FE into a Razer Core X with a modified power supply, and since I had both a Razer Core X, and a spare 750W PSU lying around, it seemed like a pretty good setup to try. At least so I thought... as for some reason, the 4090 FE I got did not fit inside the eGPU case I had. I'm assuming that it might be due to me having an older version of the Core X, as it wasn't even able to fit my older 3090 FE either. My solution was to saw off a part of the back and sideplate with an angle grinder, which finally made enough room for this monstrocity of a card. 

The problems didn't end here whatsoever, as I figured there are a number of issues that can occur when running Thunderbolt devices on a Windows desktop. Out of the box, none of the Thunderbolt ports worked initially. Only after I uninstalled all Thunderbolt drivers and software from my new PC, the external GPU was finally recognized! At least until the next Windows feature update, oh well. I eventually got it running with some tinkering, but if I ever intended to build a new setup, I'd probably go for a big tower, a large PSU and motherboard right away and run everything internally. The hassle I had with modifying an eGPU case to fit a 4090, as well as the issues that can crop up with Thunderbolt are simply not worth saving a few hundred bucks, especially when the hardware is already so expensive.

Oh well, but on the bright side... everything is running quite well now! In terms of render times I'm seeing a massive speed increase of 4 - 5x in comparison to my previous single 3090 setup!