Overwatch - Halloween. How a 3-day animation turned into a production nightmare. Overview.

Hi.
Now that you’ve seen the Halloween animation, I want to talk a bit more about it, how I managed to turn something that easy and fast to animate into a monstrosity I almost scrapped.
As well as some plans for the future.

Halloween event

I had a few ideas at the back of my mind that I wanted to try, and the event felt like a good time to do it. I wanted to tackle other universes and make it a surprise upload, no announcement, no nothing, just put it out and leave it be.
Sadly, it didn’t mean to happen. I couldn’t render it in time, so I spoiled the surprise a bit by saying there’s another project coming.

Initial idea

It’s becoming a common theme now. The idea was simple and easy to implement - Widow is fucking a pumpkin on the table.
That’s it. Easy to animate, fast to render.

But like a dick when you see BOOBA - it just kept growing.

Soon I decided to put them on the bed, then add another character, then a new angle. Then, then, then… a couple more “then”s later, I got it - Widow’s fucking a pumpkin on the bed, cumming right in it, while Juno is behind her, holding a pumpkin and doing Juno things.
You know it. You saw it.

Beginning of the end

It’s October 30th. Animation - done and ready to be rendered.
Only one thing missing.
Oooooow, our usual suspects. You’ll NEVER guess what tanked the project’s deadline and postponed it by at least 10 days.
I mean, everybody knows what.

1. Cum simulation

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Up to this point, I've never wasted so much time on it. Let me tell you something, actually, no, that's for a technical breakdown.
I'll just say this - I spent about 4 days only doing the cum the way I wanted it to be, which didn’t even work in the end. So I had to redo it from scratch later on, without any add-ons or external software.

Simply lovely.

2. 4K render pitfall
Now that it’s past the 31st and time doesn’t matter anymore, I thought might as well render everything in 4K to get way more detail. I wonder how that would turn out.

Time-wise, it turned out pretty bad. At first, it was manageable, 3 minutes per frame… errrrrrr, sure, fine. Though I prefer not to go past 2.

It went up to 13.

Low-light areas, volumetrics, cum material - everything demanded an enormous sample count to prevent insane levels of noise that couldn’t be fixed with a simple NR. Nice.

Oh, btw, this is how it looked when I was done animating and setting up the scene. I thought it looked just fine, then I wiped my monitor.
It looked like garbage. Who made this?!

No amount of compositing at my level would be able to save it.

I kept working on it and got this.

Much better

3. New compositor
You know how they say, don’t try new things in production?
Naturally, I decided to try using Fusion as my new compositor, just to see what you can and can’t do in it compared to Blender’s.

It was actually quite nice, but I think I messed up so many things that it completely destroyed the preview. Anyway, that doesn’t matter all that much right now.

All these things combined turned what should’ve been a very simple animation into a complete nightmare to finish. But here we are, it’s done, and I’m ready to move on to the next one.

Pandora's box opened.

Now that the ice is broken, other options in terms of characters have become available. I still need to finish what’s already in the queue before thinking about what’s coming next.

Next one is "Cock Slapping" and thank God it's not in 4K.

Have a good day.