Chloe's Macro Fur, Trip Cancellation, etc.

Rendering has further been ongoing and we finally reached the first nommy scene, huzzah!

Progress on this is quite a bit slow as Chloe's fur needs a much higher density to still look good, as I wanted to avoid that chunky polygony fur look that was always seen on Zoe closeups in the past, though unfortunately it will be somewhat difficult to avoid once more than macro Chloe's head is on screen, as her entire body is covered in fur, oop!

Unfortunately for Chloe's macro version, her entire fur had to be remade due to her coat not scaling properly. The biggest problem here were the guides itself. They were sticking to her geometry without any issues, however... they didn't scale along with Chloe and bent into weird directions at times, which means a full redo of her fur was unfortunately inevitable. Luckily by the writing of this post, I'm already done with it and her macro coat looks almost 1:1 to that of her original size. I'd say it even looks a bit better around her belly area, as I've retweaked the curl of her fur a bit for much nicer looking gloss, but you'll probably see that for yourself soon as we should reach the rooftop battle in the next weeks!

The Workstation PC Fiasco

Sadly this is where it ends with the good news, as my new workstation arrived and everything that could go wrong did go wrong and the thing got damaged during shipping. On top of that they shipped it with alongside with some wrong components as well, which makes for quite the disaster. In the interest of time, I'm not sending the thing back as it came inside a massive crate that would be quite difficult for me to move to the post office in the first place. Instead the shop agreed to send me a bunch of replacement parts that I'll replace myself next week. Since I had a trip coming up around the end of this month, I decided to cancel and move it to September, as there's no guarantee I'll have this render server set up with remote access until then. Once the parts are here, I'll likely have to stress test it a bit to make sure there isn't any damage to the motherboard. Oh well, will also probably have to check on an extended warranty while I'm at it.

In the meantime, my current render setup will continue squeezing out frames. There should be a new preview around the end of this month that will finally include the first nommy scene as well. Though it might not be fully rendered by then, but I'll see how far we get!

Note that with this preview, I'll probably make the first public announcement as well on the project, as it's probably long overdue by now. c':