Problem solving

I think in the last post I mentioned issues with Kyns fur not rendering correctly and how I was sure I'd fixed it.

I had not.

It took 4 days and 4 failed overnight renders, all with the same shitty fur result. I tried everything. Baking the fur simulation, recombing all of it, regenerating the fur and redoing it in the scene, even removing all hair dynamics. Nothing worked.

Then, on  my way into work, I realised there was another particle simulation in the scene that had a vorticity forcefield for some particle effects.

After I got home, I had a look, tracked down the vortex and removed it. The simulation it was used on had been baked way before, so it was no longer needed. Turns out that the vortex was meant to give a wilder effect, so was cranked up high. High enough that it was mangling Kyns fur over a kilometer away.

So that's sorted, I've run renders the last few nights, and we are now down to 2 scenes left to go! I'm fairly confident the end of month deadline is not going to be made. There's still a lot of animating on the longshot to do. I've only just added the new Kyn in and rejigged camera movement and a bit where he walked through a kitchen counter.

Fingers crossed, not too long now. I want to batter through the longshot animation, and I think once it's animated, I can run through 400-500 frames each night of rendering, so 3/4 days for this scene then another day or two for the scene near the start.

I'm hoping to get through it in the next couple of weeks. I did want to put something together for April Fools, but there's too much work on this to get through, as well as several major work deployments.

On the plus side, finally got out on my bike yesterday. Last summer I went biking for a week and knocked out about 150km of trails over 4 days of riding. Yesterday I managed about 5km and wore myself out. I need to concentrate a bit of my time on that as well. I've mentioned my hopes that I could go away once lockdown clears out and get a good few days riding, but I think at this point it would be a wasted trip.

Anyway, look out for another update later in the week. Hopefully we'll be almost there on the next episode.