Disregard is my friend now! <:

With the ongoing increase of production values with each new animation, it has become increasingly more difficult to produce these things on my own. This has manifested in constantly rising production times in especially the more recent animations, which didn't only make use of a modern rendering pipeline, but also significantly improved on the character models, their rigs, and their animation.

The character creation phase has already been supported by  Acidic and  Disregard67 (Alex) who played a substantial part in Chloe's creation. We compliment each other pretty well, which is why I'm planning to keep working with Cid and Alex on future original characters. Since Alex also specializes in animation, we've decided to take this collaboration a step further and involve him in future major animations now as well. This means that Encounter 3 will be animated by both Alex and myself to parallelize the animation workload a lot better. At the moment it's mostly a part-time thing since Alex still has his own projects on the side, but knowing there's a second animator already takes a massive burden off my own shoulders.

As an example, while I finalized the recently released Chloe's Tease animation, Alex had already been animating on the first Encounter 3 scenes, which will be shown some time in the upcoming weeks. Alex is quite fast with animating, admittedly a good bit faster than I am, which is why we've had a bit of an exchange in regards to my work schedule, where we managed to nail it down to me using a fairly dated laptop as a daily driver. My laptop is fairly slow by now and it requires me to export every animation before viewing it, so I'm hoping to get rid of that bottleneck by getting a new desktop this week with a powerful modern processor that I'll be using to animate going forward. Being able to animate and preview animations in real time sounds like the dream to me and should hopefully make my own animating a good bit faster. Once I'm done with the alternative angles and this new computer is also good to go, I'll join him with the animation. Note that I'll still handle all production-related aspects such as simulation, lighting, rendering going forward.

Encounter 3 plans

Knowing I have Alex aboard with this animation gave me a lot of liberties with the script, as I didn't need to write it with the limitation in mind that I need to animate everything on my own and release it in a somewhat timely manner as well. As a result of that, the whole animation will be more comparable to a TV episode and have a supposed runtime of up to twenty minutes. The plot revolves around Space Hero trying to get the Ankh of infinite wishes from Chloe, who of course isn't just going to give it to him. It's supposed to be divided in three parts, starting with Space Hero meeting Chloe, the actual bossfight, and a smaller part afterwards that takes place at the Tiki Bar at night. Before joining Alex on the animation, I'll likely do a few improvements on both the environment and Chloe herself, as I want to look everything as good as I possibly can.

Future long term plans include the introduction of new original characters, including the revamped Zoe 2.0 model sometime after the third Encounter episode is completed.

New Release Schedule (Patreon)

With Encounter 3 being such an absolute chonker of a project, I thought it would be a good idea to deviate from the typical release schedule of only showing playblasts for so many months and then only release an animation when it's completed. The idea for the new release schedule is to post the animation as far as it's rendered and do that every few months until completion. I figured this has already worked pretty well with the Bunsen, as well as the Chloe's Tease animation, where I posted them in a partially completed state. For the future I want to double down on it and post major update milestones more frequently, especially as it probably works a lot better with these long form animations. As for public releases, nothing really changes as I'll keep posting the finalized animations once they're fully completed!

I want to thank everyone on Patreon for their ongoing support! Not only has this enabled me to dedicate so much time to producing these animation with state-of-the-art soft and hardware, but it's also making it possible to collaborate with other artists and fairly compensate them for their work. Knowing there's now a second animator helping me with these huge animations is a massive stress relief as well since I've often found myself overburdened from making these animations on my own. <3