Day 100

With Day 100 arriving ingame there's 15 days left of Book 1. The end is extremely feckin' neigh, as Katie might say.

It didn't feel right to let such a milestone go past without Emily and MC getting some time together, so I set out to render a small sequence. The only problem is that Daz/IRay is *slow*. So I finished rendering this 50 frame clip of Emily, and it took 11 hrs. It's a very *nice* 50 frames, but... the looping is going to be super noticeable.

When it comes to computers, if you're not cheating you're not trying hard enough. So I spent some time looking at how I could cheat at making this clip serve me better, and experimenting with some different approaches. At the end of it I figured the experiment might be interesting for some of you, so I put together a little video.

Because a lot of the tricks I use depend on scaling and playing with time, it's really easy for the clip to feel 'jerky'; holding the same frame for 2-3 frames is actually really noticeable. To combat that I return to my old friend DAIN, a neural network designed to extrapolate keyframes. Running it at max interpolation (8x) turns out 50 frames at 15FPS into 400 frames at 120FPS. This will help keep the animation output (30 FPS) smooth even as I play with time scales.

The second trick is that the clip is designed to be looped by reversing it. We could just play it back in reverse, but After Effects has a couple of different systems for this, and for an animation like this "pingpong" (which slows down at the start/end of the loop) has a more natural feel.

The third trick is the realization that I can 'cut' the clip; it doesn't actually need to go all the way up each time. That lets us have 3 variations. 

Finally we mix and match, making sure to always match up the end of each one with the previous one, so there's no discontinuities.

Here's the final clip:
https://vimeo.com/462099084/89572fa0f6