"Mountain Hideout" Comic is rendering !

Hi! I have finally finished the 3D for the comic. Now all I have to do is render it out, then do a little compositing, add the script into speech bubbles, and release it :)

The comic features around 90 pages, more or less, because I reserved a few pages for story purposes. All images are rendered in 4k 21:9 resolution, at 1540 sample count. On average, it takes 20-40 minutes per image, so I will need around 2 days to render it, because about half is already done.

I aim to publish it this month, but I apologise in advance if I won't be able to do so. I have put all my free time into making this comic, which is around 300+ hours since I started working on it. I feel very satisfied with my work, and I have learned A LOT again while working on it.

Meanwhile, today, 27 june, Blender 3.6 releases! It features many speed improvements like rendering that loads objects into the scene 10x faster, and other performance improvements that would be amazing to have before :) Future work should be produced faster with this.

As for what to do for future projects, I plan to make a Q&A poll. In the last poll, the results were almost even, meaning some people like comics, others animations, others just render packs. I like all of them, but the most important thing to consider is production time, and how long can my supporters wait.

My ideas so far :

- The Timeline

Basically having a lore in my productions.

"First Time" comic where Ellie and Bolt discover sex together.

Then they volunteered to go beyond Jackson's safezone to explore more local areas which leads to a stop at the border of the safezone at the "Old Dam", where the animation takes place. Then beyond the safezone, while looking for shelter from the rain, they found an "Old Barn" to pass the night (barn animation). And finally, now we've reached this comic where they found an old wooden cabin. The previous animation was supposed to fill this comic, but the environment changed as I learned a lot of new better things.

Now I can continue that story by making animations / comics.

- Make random content

I can just brainstorm locations, and make minimum story render packs or animations. Also small things like "Beauty & Beast" render or quick renders like the garage couch missionary render.

- Change characters

I've already had a few requests to use other characters, or use the older version of Ellie. I want to use the older version, but I want to make a transition from the timeline by making a time jump or something. Plus, I will have to heavily modify the available older Ellie models, because I never liked how she looked from most of the art I've seen. It's just my preference, like with the younger Ellie model. I could recommend older ODDISH or ODD_3D renders that I quite enjoyed.

So here's a quick update while my PC is rendering. Meanwhile I will play with the compositing already, and put this on the online drives as soon as I'm done :)

Thank you all for your amazing support ! <3