Final Push & other stuff

It's that time again!

I've had a little bit of a rethink on how to edit this episode, and I think it would actually be more effective if I moved the last few scenes to another episode. This isn't just laziness. Well, it is a little, but thinking about where the next episode was going to go, I felt it would make a bit more sense to steer it in another direction briefly.

I've mentioned a few times already that the end of this episode needs several new characters to be created. The introduction to them that I had planned just doesn't really have much impact, so a bit more focus on them would probably be worthwhile. Especially when there's a planned scene a bit down the line, and I don't want to suffer from DCEU Syndrome, where you throw a bunch of characters together without letting you get to know them individually, so you don't really care what happens to them.

So, at this point right now, there are 2 scenes to complete. First is still the space explosion scene. That's going to be the last bit I do, for reasons I will explain shortly. Second, is the final scene which I have been working on for so long. It's such a horribly complex scene, that even after well over a month on it, I've only just started character animation.

One of the reasons for the length of time is actually the complexity. The more complex the scene is, the longer it takes to render, especially if you have effects as well. So a lot of time has been problem-solving.

For example, Efa and Kyn are looking over the landscape. The landscape is about 24 individual mountain objects, with some water and plains thrown in to hide gaps. Each mountain has a hi-res texture, as well as displacement to make them look mountainy. Then there's the city. Although it's got a lot of faces, it's actually fairly simple. The light pillar is a basic glowing cylinder, but it's also got a vortex of 150,000 particles around it, and the cylinder itself has some code in there to randomise intensity of the light to make it flicker.

Next, there's several layers of volumetric mist, which can be resource intensive at the best of times. Those are completely shat on by the volumetric clouds, of which there are about 20. Then add in some heavy duty lighting effects AND two hi resolution characters, one with about 500,000 strands of hair, and the other with a cloth simulation. Put that all together, hit RENDER, and watch as Blender implodes.

Even by reducing quality, it's tough to animate Kyn and Efa to react to things happening in the landscape when you have to hide all the landscape and lighting to be able to preview them running at 30fps.

The solution only occured to me 2 days ago. First, I completely remove everything in the foreground. Efa, Kyn and the landing pad they are stood on. The camera stays in a fixed position, so I can remove absolutely everything off-camera. This leaves me with the landscape and actions out there. This got rendered out over the course of the weekend at a high quality setting.

Finally, I invert everything. So the foreground stuff and characters are brought back ion, while all the landscape is removed. Then the video I rendered out gets added to a plane set up to match the camera size. This means that everything but the foreground is basically just a big movie screen that lets me run it at 30fps. The video looks washed out, so I swap it's texture from Principled BSDF to an emitter. This also means the screen isn't affected by lighting in the world. To finish, several light sources are added between screen and characters and synchronised to what is happening onscreen, so the light hits Kyn and Efa as well.

This is what I plan to do for the space explosion scene now I've figured this out.

Holy shit, this post has got long. Where we are now, once I get the final edit together, I suspect I might need a short additional scene just to clarify something that is happening, but it should be a quick one. I think we're close to this being done now.

And then to throw a dampener on things, I'm taking some time off over the next 2 weeks. I was going to go biking in France, but it turns out that the Scottish Vaccination Certificate may or may not be valid for use when travelling to the EU, so rather than waste money just to get turned around at Calais, I'm going to retry my Sctoland roadtrip again. The current plan is to be away from wednesday until the end of the weekend, spend a few days at home (hopefully getting this finished) then away down south for a few days as well.

I'll try and record some footage while I'm away as well. Show off a bit of Scotland, some of the scenery and maybe some trails. We'll see. Until this next episode is released, there will be nothing else released. I want to get this in the can and out there.