Weekly update and renderfarms - 15/11/20

Not really much to report on this week, but I want to maintain transparency.

I managed to recover the main project file and get the new Kyn model in and transfer the keyframing across to it, meaning no wasted time. In fact it worked so well, I did a few tweaks to Efa and switched her out as well. I took notice of the complaints about her being too plasticene-y so added a bit of texture to her. First I gave her draconic scales, but they didn't tile too well and the texture had some weird properties. In the end I went for a voronoi texture that generates onto her, along with some bumpmapping to make it look like there's some surface texture as well.

Once I had both models in and working, I ran through the stuff I'd already animated. Up until then it was a first pass just blocking in basic movements. I went back over it a section at a time and cleaned it up, got rid of 99% of the bits where the models merged through each other and generally finished up the majority of motion, leaving just the small stuff like eyes, blinking and facial animation for the final pass.

I also finished off the last pose that I had started but not yet properly looped, taking the length of this file up to 3470 frames, which works out at 1min55s of footage total.

I've also been playing around with render settings. At the moment, the final product is 1280 x 720 @ 30fps. It turns out the popping it up to 1920 x 1080 adds about 2 seconds on to the render time, giving a rendertime of 64s/f. The only thing this will really affect is filesize at the end, so I'm going to bump up the video size from now on. The other thing I played with was fur quality. Currently fur is subdivided twice. I tried it a three times, but it pushed render times up to 6 minutes, so that's not going to happen.

I mentioned that I would be looking into costs for renderfarms so I could blast through the render process. Unfortunately, it turns out that it's really expensive. The current 2min of footage would cost between £70-£110. Given each episode turns out at around 5min, that's £175 - £275 per episode. I think I'd need a few more Patrons to justify that cost, so unfortunately, it looks like that idea might have to go on hold for a while!

This week coming will probably not see too much progress. I'm starting a new job tomorrow, and I'm hoping once the initial office days are done, and I start working from Van again, I can let this stuff get on with rendering while I work on my work equipment. The hope is to get enough animation completed today that I can just leave it rendering.