Developer's Journal 3:13

Hey everybody.  I have been fighting a cold all week but I think it's finally leaving.  It did slow me down a bit but I still finished the last scene I was working on and sent some files to my animator.  Now I'm working on the court trial again.

I am a little frustrated with the pace of development this cycle.  I'm still working hard, but I feel like the renders are just coming much slower than they did for the last update, and I'm worried that this episode will feel like too little content for how long it takes me to produce it.  A big part of that was getting stuck on the chapel scene for the wedding, but that hasn't been the only thing.

So, with a moderate amount of anxiety in mind, I bought myself a second desktop.  I don't actually think this will have that much of an impact on development time, because the bottleneck usually is the posing.  Although I do sometimes get stuck on six hour renders like I've said before, I frequently just can't get that many renders posed between when I finish my real job and when I go to bed, and so my PC often sits idle while I'm working at my real job.

But there is at least one important job for which the second desktop will make a big difference, and that is animations.  In the past, I've really had to reduce the quality of some of the animations and over-rely on denoisers in order to avoid work stopping for weeks.  But even then the animations still take days.  With a second PC I can run the animations at the quality I want and continue working on still renders at the same time.  So hopefully it will be worth it.  And eventually I'd like to get to the point where my workflow is productive enough that if there are no animations pending, I can use the second PC to speed up my still rendering process as well.  At the moment, the second PC is re-rendering the Malena animations from Episode Two, which were horribly underdone to save time.  Each animation will probably take about a week, so it should be finishing up right about the time the animator sends me the new batch.

That's all for this week.  Thank you for your support!

--Monk