Life updates...and an apology.

[If you don't care about life updates, jump down to the TLDR section!]

Hey everyone!

It's been a rough few months, but only because things are changing in a lot of ways on my end. As many of you may know, I was in the hospital for a week in March, and without going into much detail, it was a life changing time. I was effectively told I was on a very dangerous trip toward a sudden death, and that things needed to change immediately, and drastically.

Many of my friend came to my aid in countless ways, and that's been my last few months, trying to make those changes to my life to literally keep living. The honest truth is that those changes aren't being made quickly enough. But one thing did change.

While I was in the hospital, a friend called in a few favors and got me a full time job with insurance benefits, which were sorely needed. I've been relying on income from Patreon and Gumroad for my income for almost a year now, but that does not come with insurance, and the amount of content I was having to create to sustain that was incredibly unhealthy. I was frequently not sleeping at night trying to set up scenes, editing, or trying to find some way to take unused content and cobble it together into something presentable so I could keep my lights on. It was bad, and arguably what caused my health to decline so quickly.

I've been working this new job for a few weeks now, and it looks like things are going to work out...but that has come at the expense of having time to produce the usual amount of content I have for you. 'Clueless Self Care' was pretty short comparatively, but it was also some of the highest detail I've put into a render set, which is why it's so short...that stuff takes a *long* time to render. Literally 30 minutes after I posted that story, I was driving to the airport (having stayed up for the previous 30+ hours) to get on a plane for on-site training for my new job.

Excuses! Right? The truth is that I haven't been producing enough content lately, and it's been bugging me. I thought I could shift into this job and keep content going like usual, but I haven't been able to, and both my job performance and content output has suffered. I always used to pride myself on being the 'bang for you buck' creator, where a small subscription got you tons of content, and that hasn't been true in recent months. I deeply apologize for those of you who haven't gotten what I hoped to deliver lately. I promise you it's not for a lack of trying.

TL;DR!

Okay, UE, enough chatting, what's this go to do with us? What's changing?

First...I'm not going anywhere! Not yet, at least. But the *amount* of content is going to have to change.  I was producing almost 300 images a month at one point, and that's just not really sustainable anymore.

Second? More consistency,  higher quality. As I mentioned before, high quality renders take forever to render, but assuming I'm not immediately diving into another scene, I can focus on other things for a while.  It'll mean less content, but the resolution and scope of the content will change. I frequently have to sacrifice quality for time, turning down the resolution of character maps because those couple of extra pixels means 6 extra hours of rendering an animation.  I don't want to do that anymore.

Third...focus on animation. I've been branching out into other tools for animating, and it would be a shame not to put this 3090 to work more often. I have a friend who is interested in doing some voice work for me, and she's got a cute voice I want to work with. I wanted to have that project ready this month, but well...time.

The short of it is that I have to find a way to make this sustainable and not literally life threatening for me, but also provide you quality content worth the value you pay for, and I'm very sorry I haven't hit that standard lately.  I'll make a post in a few days with some updates on what to expect in the coming weeks. I'm working on Serial Experiments 4, but I don't want to give a timeline on that just yet.

Thanks for your support, as usual everyone!

-UE