Tatiana interview, Desire Tier and up! (Patreon)

So, here comes the first half of this month's exclusives! Included are the five interview pages, the five textless render versions, and two additional freebies. Why the freebies? Well, what I'm about to explain has no bearing on you if you're enjoying the content on a 1920 x 1080 resolution screen. But if you're on a higher res, read ahead.

So as explained in previous posts, I had the whole situation with the broken 2080 Ti. I had to RMA that and make a trip halfway across the country to get it back to the reseller in order to save myself some time. When I picked up work again, I was rendering on a single RTX 2080 Ti instead of two of them. Meaning my render times for Patreon content had effectively doubled from what I had anticipated.

It's still a fast card, but this particular Tatiana scene requires a lot of iterations to get it to look right. So I made a compromise: render at a lower resolution, and then AI upscale. Now, I normally do this when I upscale from 1080p to 1440p, which involves no quality loss and saves me soooo many rendering hours. This time, due hardware shortage, I rendered it out in 720p and then upscaled, ie I upscaled by 200%.

For comparison, rendering the above shot in 1440p takes an hour and a half. In 720p, it's 30-ish minutes. Which is also about what it would take at 1440p if I had two cards instead of the one. See the math?

My point is, the upscale from 720p to 1440p involved slight quality loss. It's still HD imagery and finer details are maintained remarkably well, but there's some blurriness where I wouldn't want there to be any. Maybe that's me setting crazy standards. But I'm not upscaling by 200% again, because it's not according to the standards I like.

It's obviously the result of having to compromise this month, and while I somewhat believe that if I hadn't mentioned it, most of you wouldn't have noticed it, I'd still rather be honest about it. I kinda feel like I cheated to get here, but the alternative was getting in a really tight bind around christmas and I wanted to avoid that.

With that said, I think it all still looks pretty good. But I promise to never do it again :D AI upscaling will continue to be a central part of my workflow, but I was clearly expecting too much of it this time around. That said, hope you enjoy!

 UPDATE: SET MOVED TO INDULGENCE TIER