Update

I want to give you an update on the various projects I'm working on and planning. I'll start with the main one.

I'm currently finishing up my Morrigan model. It's mainly down to weight painting. I've already weight painted her butt bones (which the original had none), and overhauled her hair bones and weight painting (which the original were not aligned at all). I'm in the middle of fixing up her necklace weight painting, and will likely have to improve some of the corrective shape keys for it as well. The last major hurdle will be fixing up the weight painting for her skirt. The main skirt itself has decent enough weight painting, but the leather straps are going to be difficult. The rest of the work to the model is pretty minor.

With the model work, I want to do a short loop with her. The poll is done, and the male warden has won the vote. I'm slightly disappointed because I thought Flemeth would've been a change of pace, but I'm also mostly relieved because that's far less work to do, and I have enough planned out as it is. I can probably wrap up almost everything with Morrigan except her skirt pretty soon, and begin work on her animation. The skirt won't be relevant to the animation so I can work on them in parallel.

Ideally, I'd like the animation out before the end of the month, but I know that's gonna be tight even if the animation goes well.

-

Smaller projects. I've also got a few mini project ideas I want to work on.

Recently, a patron brought up a good point about pinning a work archive. I'm pretty inconsistent about updating it, and I think it would be good to do. I actually want to go a bit further and create some art to represent the archive so it isn't just a boring block of text people skip over.

I thought about making a poster combining some of my favorite work, but it's hard to make something coherent when things don't match in tone, positioning, lighting, or orientation. I had the idea to make a series of quick pin-ups where I can keep things consistent. I want to take some of my favorite and most used characters to represent things. I think I'd like to go for 6 characters for a good variety. Miranda, Morrigan, and Jill seem like a good start. I'm not entirely sure about the rest. Feedback is appreciated.

Another small project idea I had is with cycles. Everything I've done in Blender so far has been with Eevee. Performance is a big reason for that. I built my new PC with a 3070 at the end of last year, and I briefly tried to play around with cycles. I'm not sure if it had to do with the card being newer or just Blender itself, but cycles barely functioned on my pc at the time with Blender 2.8. I mostly figured it was a vRam issue but perhaps not.

On a whim I heard about Blender 3.0 and Cycles X. Apparently, they're making some massive gains in render times. I went to try it out, and it was actually surprisingly usable. I even went back to Blender 2.9 which I currently use now to find that Cycles actually works decently on my PC. I used my recent Jill commission as a fully finished piece and was able to do many renders without crashing. I only crashed when trying to play around with it active in the viewport.

Lighting works quite differently than Eevee, so I'd really have to rework things for the aesthetic. I want to try to create a piece from scratch for Cycles. It'll just be something pretty simple like a poster, but I really want to see what Cycles can do. This is a pretty low tier project though because ultimately Eevee is still going to be important for animation.

-

Lastly, I've got some commission projects lined up. These have been really good at keeping me busy, so I'm looking forward to doing more.

-

One extra note, there's some pretty bad weather headed my way, so it's entirely possible I might be lose power for an extended period of time.