Well, DPC completed 20 animations this week, inching his average up to 16.1 animations rendered per week. There's not much else to go on; my hopes for static render counts two weeks in a row were always far-fetched. As this was another above average animation week, my guess is static renders would be around 100 for whatever that's worth.
We also get a new metric, total animation frames. Does anyone know if animations play at a consistent frame rate? If so, we could at least compare this to his total animation duration stat from a couple weeks ago. At any rate, here are the charts:
DPC estimated 200-230 animations two weeks ago. Currently he has 209 completed and 10-15 more to pose for a single scene (no word on a queue though). Unless that scene is the last to animate, he seems likely to go over that limit. My understanding is that DPC plans out scenes before he actually "writes" them, so the remaining scenes he mentioned may have already been animated. But given DPC still seems uncertain about how much is left to do, I suspect he'll add some more animations beyond the ones he mentioned. At the very least we should err on the high side of that estimate.
It still feels like statics are going to be the bottleneck. DPC already blew Episode 6's animation total out of the water, so his comment about how big Episode 7 will be is almost certainly in reference to statics. Since I'm desperate for
something to analyze here, I tried comparing the ratio of statics to animations for past episodes: it's about 21:1. (Interestingly, it started at 25.5:1, dropped to 15.6: 1 by Episode 5, then shot back up to 20.6:1 for Episode 6.) Based on that metric and assuming 230 animations, that would correspond to ~4830 statics. If DPC keeps his current static render pace until animations are done then kicks it up to 300+, he'd reach that mark around mid April.
But that's just a shot in the dark. At the moment, I think the only thing we can say for certain is that a March release is now off the table. Beyond that, we need to get some idea of either how many statics DPC wants for Episode 7 or how fast DPC will crank them out once he's cleared the decks of everything else (and preferably ideas of both, of course).
