Hi!

With all the fantastic feedback I got from the last critique, I felt like I had an obvious game plan set out in front of me. Finish the content, place it all in, and make some edits to existing scenes to improve readability and the like.

The biggest note was to slow things down which would inevitably increase render time, but I was able to get around that by diving into my project file and uncovering why everything was so slow. Turns out I was rendering far larger than I should have, at a resolution that really wasn’t necessary, and I was leaving too much crap in the scene that hogged resources when trying to render it.

Lo and behold, when I addressed all those issues, my render times sped up so much that I was able to render my new 1,250 frame animation (a 950 frame increase from before!!) even faster than I could the 350 frame one. The batch rendering tip was considered as a fallback in case I couldn’t improve things substantially, so that is appreciated 🙂

I tackled the lack of biology in the scene first, but that took me so long that I figured I should try to iron out the one creature I managed to finish in time to put in the massively extended scene. This was met with some difficult trials when creating believable scale materials, but I managed to create something I am relatively proud of.

I based my fish off the deep sea lanternfish, pictured below.

And the (thus far) final!

There’s a few edits that need to be made that I couldn’t quite iron out in time, namely light timing and smoothing out some animations, but I think it’s a huge step up from where I was 🙂