Update Log 3: August 2022

Hello everyone!

The end of the month is near and I wanted to give you guys a final update for August to wrap things up for what we've been up to, and what you should hopefully expect for next month.

Important notice for "Early Adopters" and <$8 patrons

If you are part of the "Early Adopter" tier or are currently pledging less than $8 USD, you should have received a message from me regarding your current pledge and how it will affect you gaining access to future content going forward. Please check your inbox if this applies to you! If you need further information, please message me. As for everyone else, it does not affect you and you can safely ignore this :)

Untitled 2: Part 1

We're getting to the fun stuff finally!

I finished up the blocks for Scene 2, and I'm hoping to block out Scene 3 before I begin polishing Scenes 1 thru 3. My goal is to get Scenes 1 and 2 polished by the end of September, but of course I'm horrible with ETAs so don't count on that lol

However, I do plan on releasing the blocks of Scene 2 sometime on the first week of September. The scene is currently a total of 25 seconds!

This past week I've been focusing on setting up the environment and doing some render tests to ensure maximum render speeds from my hardware. Currently I have two GPUs going full-ham on rendering frames for testing. Before optimization, it would have taken over seven minutes to render one frame. After some experimenting and research, we've gotten the frames to render a little under two minutes in 1080p! This is a raw frame; there is no denoising, or post-processing just yet!

     > Frame 1527; it took one minute and forty-six seconds!

For this scene, I experimented with dynamic displacement of the ground as Andre stretches in this scene. In the future, I want to experiment with particle primitives/rigid bodies in Houdini to add more detail to the ground deformity as he moves. It will be a good challenge, and all the reason to make it feel more realistic :) But that won't be until the verrrrry end probably :P

Anthgrow4Blender Public Release

Anthgrow for Blender will be officially released to the public on September 6th, 2022. Since the beta 1 release there has been minor changes involving bone shapes and rig-load on startup, but other than that he's been pretty stable for the most part :)

Where is Brax?

Incase you're unaware, Brax has been my character that I've been designing in my free time. Unfortunately, a lot of that free time has been eaten up by Untitled 2. As much as I want to show you guys more of Brax and put him in some shenanigans, it's been difficult to juggle several projects at once. Regardless, he has not been forgotten

in conclusion

In September, I plan on creating a rough post-production pathway going so I can show you guys rough-drafts of frames after post-production. 

Alongside this I hope to polish Scenes 1 and 2, as well as block out Scene 3 for the month. If I get the time during this time I hope to get Scene 3 polished also, but only time will tell :p

aaand that's all! luv u all x

take care

A