Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello Board.

Starting to work on weekly promo renders to not only get EoTC out there a little, but also to practice lighting, composition, and workflows while animation is still in progress, helping to avoid burnout.

Some interesting news: It's decided that Scene 1 Part 2 will be un-animated; as in, Part 2 will follow the traditional AVN-style of dialogue. This isn't due to time constraints, nor is it because of any limitations with lip-syncing; this is a creative decision to keep Echoes of The Cataclysm true to its identity as an Adult Visual Novel. As a result, most of the voice acting will be removed, and only the sex scene will remain animated. The content itself hasn’t changed—only the format.

Let me further explain: When first conceptualizing this scene, Part 1 (the sex scene) was always meant to be animated, and to my surprise, it turned out even better than expected. Part 2 (a conversation between two characters), on the other hand, was originally going to be just a quick exchange of a few voiced lines. But as the scene developed, I kept saying to myself, "Oh, I’ll just add this line here… and maybe one more there…" And before I knew it, it had grown into a full three-minute back-and-forth conversation between the two characters. I had wanted to add lore and add exposition, but in doing so, the scene got too large for voice acting. It was pure scope-creep. Strangely, it took a few weeks for that realization to actually hit me: maybe this wasn’t the direction the scene needed to go. So, Part 2’s animation will be shifted to the traditional AVN format instead. The upside? It'll likely shave off one, maybe even two or three months of work, and it’ll help me keep a little more of my sanity in the process. In a lot of ways, it's a weight off of my shoulders. 🩵

As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Stephen King have said: "Kill your darlings"

Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

• Scene 1
  • Part 1
    • Rendered 2,000 images (3840 x 2160 at 30fps)
    • Doing some minor post-processing to make some details pop (Psion eye glow + bloom)
  • Part 2
    • Worked with the voice actor (Leo Greystone) for Daz Threadgill (Xana's accomplice); his voice is absolutely gorgeous; almost too gorgeous (Sidenote: unfortunately, the voice acting will be cut due to the scene no longer being animated)
    • Worked on a repeatable clothing workflow to figure out how outfits can be swapped and fitted
    • Created the character: Daz Threadgill (imported from Daz3d Studio)

Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

• Main Menu
  • Creating a simple animation showing Ambrose (main character) in a forced dream-state by a Dremen Psion (off-screen)
• Scene 1
  • Part 1 (video)
    • Finished! 🥳🥳🥳 Undoubtably, some of my best work 🩵
  • Part 2 (images)
    • Taking some of the already blocked portions of the animations and converting them into still rendered images
    • Continuing to pose the rest of the scene (going really well)

Technical Corner

Follow-up on last week's Technical Corner

A brief heads-up: there may be a few days of downtime due to hardware upgrades. Although the system runs a 4090 RTX, it’s currently paired with a 750-watt power supply—unfortunately, not quite enough. If you're not familiar with GPU power requirements, don’t worry—apparently, I wasn’t either when I bought it. For this setup, around 900 watts is ideal. During rendering or other intensive tasks, the current PSU occasionally can't keep up, leading to full system freezes. This is confirmed by the kernel power 41 error in the Windows Event Viewer.
The good news is that a new power supply has arrived! I’ll be swapping it in as soon as I have a solid window of time. If I am successful, I should only be down for a day.

I successfully updated from a 750-watt power supply to a Seasonic VERTEX GX-1000, 1000W 80+ Gold with no problems. I've also got redundant backups of all the Echoes of The Cataclysm data, in case this PSU breaks.

But so far so good with the PSU: No problems rendering (so far!)

Sneak Peek

Main menu background - "What's that blue light?"

Don't forget to check out the Trello Board for detailed progress updates! ❤️