Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board

TLDR;

• Switching from EEVEE to Cycles

• Adding a dedicated render machine

• Amazing progress on current scene

• Planning to rework old scenes once Chapter 1 (part 1, part 2, and part 3) are released

Preface

Let me start by saying: "I'm a huge idiot". I can't believe I've been such an idiot for such a long amount of time. I'll fully admit: I'm a slow learner. BUT I learn the ins and outs so that I can become fast in the long term. This scene has proved that. I'm approaching finishing this scene, and it's barely been 2 weeks! In addition, I'll fully admit that renders prior to this scene are not up to par on what I wanted. But I'm finally to a point where I'm very confident in my speed, workflow, assets, and skill set - and I'll be reworking previous scenes most likely after Chapter 1 is fully complete.

When I switched from DAZ3D to Blender, I saw an opportunity with EEVEE's rendering engine. If you didn't know what that is, EEVEE is similar to a game engine; it prioritizes speed, and is less realistic and less accurate - but again, you gain speed. EEVEE provided 4K renders in under 2 minutes. EEVEE looked pretty damn fantastic, if the scene was simple enough. But as you added other characters to the scene, added the environment, props, etc., lighting becomes more and more complex and tedious, because every shot, you have to move the lights around. It was one of those things that you've got a blind-spot with for so long, that you just don't see it until someone tells you, or you see something new. I'll show you why I was blinded for so long.

Take a look (try not to compare one to the other; yes, EEVEE has slightly lighter color hair) - but just take a look at each of them, individually. They're roughly equal in the fidelity and high quality detail.

EEVEE left, Cycles right

Because, look, while these images are not 100% the same, they still look about equally good!
EEVEE (on the left) took 12 seconds to render, while Cycles (on the right) took 84 seconds to render.

The problem isn't here with one character - it's when multiple characters are introduced, and there's a giant environment to account for, and there's many lights, and there's extra props, etc.. The lighting system begins to fall apart and you need to add more and more lights, move some around, add this, change that, fix that, in order to get it to look somewhat okay. It's ironic, EEVEE is a fast renderer, but the amount of set-up and constant tinkering is astronomically high.

Take the comparison below as an example.

The first image after I changed to Cycles (EEVEE left, Cycles right)

Now, do you see why I was such an idiot?! (EEVEE left, Cycles right - she's in a glass elevator in the 2nd pic, btw)

✅ Last (2) Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

Scene 9 (~85% done)

If you read all of the "Preface", you might be wondering, "Ah, man. That sucks - you'll have to re-do a lot of things."
Absolutely not! I almost always had the mindset that textures, models, environments, and characters should be able to swap between EEVEE and Cycles without much headache. And I'm going to tell you my friend, that paid off so much. The only thing I had to change was a few lights here and there.

Let me tell you my progress in just two weeks: Nearly finished!
In just two weeks I've accomplished these things:

• Converted the interior of PRISM to a Cycles-friendly

• Posed about 130 shots (2 characters)

• Rendered all of those 130 shots in Cycles (about 10-20 minutes each, still in 4K)

And I'm so pleasantly happy to tell you that I'm just so overjoyed with this progress - it goes to show that I am increasing speed and solidifying my workflow.

⚙️ Technical Corner

Rendering Farm

Okay, it's not as great as it sounds. The "farm" is just a 1x1 meter shack in the back of my decrepit back yard.

I inherited a mid-tier PC from 2017: AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA 2080 8GB VRAM. I installed Blender's Flamenco, which is Blender's render farm software. Unfortunately, because the GPU is so... so mid, it just instantly crashes because my renders require around 18GB. Anyway, EVENTUALLY, once I get a new GPU for this machine, I'll be using it as a dedicated render rig. Which might be happening soon because I'll also be getting a 3090 soon.

Bye EEVEE

EEVEE is going away, nuii was wrong (again), it's a good lesson to learn.

Okay, so here we go. EEVEE was good for simple things, but I guess, as I got more and more complex, so did the lighting difficulties and all of the complications that go along with EEVEE. It was really great, really fast, and showed mostly okay on most girls - but it was atrocious for Anya; not sure what it was about her but it was so difficult to light her properly and make her look good.

Then came the problem of the interior of the PRISM facility. I really don't want to get into the specifics too much, but think of EEVEE as a game engine. It's strengths are that it runs VERY fast. We're talking 4K renders within 2 minutes. The downsides are many - lighting a very large interior of a building, with only some small characters being lit, and with the global illumination not being 100% accurate - it all just falls apart.

I had been planning to eventually switch back to Cycles anyway - but the very large interior and atrium of PRISM made the strengths of EEVEE disappear. I fiddled and altered the lighting of the scene SO much, that the "SPEED" aspect of EEVEE was no longer the case. As an example, on one scene image (for EEVEE) I spent maybe 30 minutes to 60 minutes just tinkering with the lighting and trying to get it look right; now multiply that by like 150 images, it quickly becomes a nightmare.

Conversely, ironically in Cycles, I actually removed the entire lighting setup and the image was just lit naturally by the scene and it looked WONDERFUL - saving me SO many hours, and in addition we get a visual fidelity bump.

Now let's talk numbers - so far, the rendering speed has not been atrocious. De-noising has also helped. For example, I've been able to put a 10 minute time limit and still get wonderful looking images. (scroll down for the Sneak Peek)

👀 Sneak Peek

💎 Hidden Gems

Check out the latest updates to these amazing games!!!

Moonlight - Episode 2

Demon Seed - 0.4

💬 Community Corner

I'm gonna be real; I feel silly. After seeing the output that Cycles has produced... I'm remorseful that I released what I did. While I love the story - I'm very unhappy with the previous renders. Eventually, possibly after Chapter 1 is fully released (there's three parts), I'll most likely be redoing all of those renders.

See you in the next one! ™️

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️