Text Update 8 June 2021 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, hope the start of your week is going well so far. We don’t have much to update you on regarding individual projects at the moment since Miro is still getting caught up on the CyPunk and Circle of Love Patreon short animations. We do have some general updates, however, which we hope will interest you.

First, over the weekend we updated the Patreon archives and refreshed the download links for the month. Since we published the archives for the first time in late May we were only adding about 10 days of content, but we still wanted to give you a heads up that it had been done all the same.

Second, we’ve finished up our first go at adding text to the Patreon image sets. We ended up going the visual novel route and paired Flying High up with the Renpy visual novel engine. We’ve exported a version for PC and Mac to start. We’ll be posting that right after this text update, so you can read more about the specifics in that post.

Next, we want to report more on our journey with Blender. For those of you who don’t already know, we do all of our animations in a software called Maya. Blender is an open source alternative to Maya, and over the years it’s been significantly improved to the point that it’s now a very viable alternative for our productions. Miro recently tested out the current version of Blender and believes we should switch our Patreon production soon, and the main production team over eventually as well.

This switch won’t impact Bloodlust: Lanessa - Blood Crown pt. 1, which we intend to finish in Maya, but depending on how well the port we discussed last week goes, we may consider moving Blood Crown pt. 2 to Blender if it makes sense to do so. For all future short animations, however, we’re hoping to start working in Blender from the beginning.

So what makes Blender a better choice? Real-time rendering. We currently spend days and weeks rendering cam tests to get the final version of our animations looking the way they do. With real-time rendering we can see the results of our work almost instantly, whether that’s a small change to our lighting settings, a tweak to a character movement, or swapping in different environment props. Want to see what a few extra trees will look like in The Seed of Rebirth environment or if the changes we just made to Lanessa’s hip animation made her look less wobbly? We can now find out immediately. Likewise, little mistakes like forgetting to turn Cerene’s shoes back on after working on her toe animation won’t matter anymore because we’d know immediately instead of hours later when the cam test is finished.

It’s also possible we can save a lot of time on final rendering in Blender as well. Miro tested a popular Blender rendering engine called Eevee and found it’s pretty close to the unbiased rendering we currently use in Maya, except a frame takes just 3-4 seconds to render. With our current workflow, a frame can take 10-15 minutes to render. Miro suspects that with some tweaks we can get Eevee to export the final quality we want, possibly even matching UE5.

For now it’s a no brainer to at least jump in and do some test renders. Since we’re not sure how long the port of the Flying High girls will take, miro is going to run his initial experiments with existing, Blender-ready character models. You’ve probably already seen some of these models around in the wider 3DX community, as most of them are based after game characters. Having said that, most of the characters we’ve seen so far are in need of a major boob upgrade. When we have some camtest ready, we’ll show these to you so you can see how the quality compares to our current Maya setup.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you have any thoughts or questions, let us know in the comments!