Here's a final look at the new environment for the next Encounter episode! This is something I've sidelined throughout the last 2 months while making the recent mini animations. Needless to say this has taken quite some time, as it's supposed to be an interactive environment, rather than just a stage you could only see from one angle. I've started blocking this out back in October, layouting the environment with some basic planes and cliffs I've originally made for the first Encounter animation. The trees are actually game assets that I've souped up with custom displacement and enhanced normal maps. This was necessary to save up on render time, as I was intending to make a lush forest environment with a couple hundred trees that reaches far into the distance. The wind simulation was taken into account right from the start, which is why I've made a small variety of rigs for the trees that were later instanced to save up on render time.

In terms of rendering this is using a hybrid approach, with the foreground and characters still being rendered with the old rasterizer I've been using for most animation, while the background is rendered using Redshift and its RTX-accelerated path tracing. One frame at 4k takes roughly 8 minutes to render on my current RTX 2070, but I'm finally expecting a 3090 to arrive this week, which should cut down the render time just enough to make an animation of this quality feasable.

As a proof of concept I've already rendered out a small sequence here: https://mega.nz/file/VpYERJAD#2UYpC.....eoJcyduqMLLL4I

With the environment now finalized, animating will soon begin. Updates and early access will be posted on Patreon in the meantime!