Status Update

I'm currently working on a small animation loop. For the first time, I'm actually rendering out different angles so that if my first pick doesn't suit your fancy, there will be other option to see the scene. I've already rendered out two of the angles, and the other two should be done and ready for upload by the end of the week. After the scenes are rendered, it's simply encoding them into webms and then doing a censored version for Pixiv. 

I'm now going to talk about Blender:

For awhile now, a big topic in the 3D NSFW community has been Blender 2.8. If you don't know, I work almost exclusively in Blender to create my art. This month, I've been watching Blender development closely to gauge if it's the right time to move all of my work over to the new version. Thus far, I have been unable to commit to that process due to a few show-stopping issues that would make my workflow harder. Namely, they are waiting for the following issues to be resolved: 

https://developer.blender.org/T61578
https://developer.blender.org/T62094

On top of that, the development status of 2.8 means that it is still seeing rapid changes despite being in a "beta" state, and it is not really ready for production use. In spite of this, many NSFW artists have jumped onto it already, but for my workflow, I do not find it stable enough, in terms of not crashing and feature set, to commit the time to relearn Blender just yet. However, when it reaches that point, I hope to start being able to dedicate time to porting my projects to it and beginning to play around with what the new renderer, Eevee, could mean for my productions.

For those that don't know, Eevee is a realtime renderer, which is different than the current renderer most people use for Blender, which is Cycles. If you've ever wondered why most Blender animators work on short loops rather than long animations, it's because rendering in Cycles takes a long time, but comes with a level of realism that is unmatched by engines such as Valve's Source Engine, the engine of SFM. Eevee offers somewhat of a middleground. Though more similar to Source than Cycles, it's also more modern than Source, and without many of the limitations inherent to SFM. For me, it means a potential path forward towards longer animations. To emphasize, when most people interact with 3D graphics, they interact with games that measure rendertimes in the area of 60 frames per second for a 1080p. With something like Cycles, if you're getting 60 frames overnight, you're very well off. The current animation I'm working on, I'm getting about a frame every 20 minutes. On the flipside, something like Eevee will never match the visual fidelity of Cycles, but with the right tricks, it can get very close. I've played with it a little bit here and there to get a feel for it, and though I'm not 100% committed to making a full switch to it, I do feel that if I plan to make longer animations, it will be a must. Furthermore, certain effects, like godrays, are very expensive in cycles (volumetrics easily double render times), but by using some fancy tricks in Blender, it is not difficult to do a volumetrics pass in Eevee and composite it over a Cycles scene, then post process in other effects like DOF or Bloom, which are things I already do in post-process.

Stay Fresh.