First of all, apologies for no updates; I wanted to wait until I had something substantial to report. Most of the animation has been finished by now, and it's a bit under 130 seconds long.I also managed to fix the issues I've had with rendering, which as it turns out were caused by my system's page file being on a dying SSD; still had to slightly reduce the light/shadow quality because the scenes are quite heavy but I've had no crashes since replacing the disk in question and I've successfully rendered the animation.What's left now is to wait for VO/sound design and then lipsync + fix a couple mistakes and then rerender, as well as render alts. While I'm waiting, I'll be working on some minor side projects - so if I post something else before the animation, that's why :) Thank you for your patience!