Status Update! Super Long Post! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!  I just wanted to say thank you for you continued support and belief in me!  It means a lot, you have no idea.  I'm still hard at work on the new update.  If you look at my trello, it'll look like not a whole lot has been progressing but I can assure you a lot has been moving forward.  I've been working on things all over the place and haven't gotten the tasks where I can straight up check them as being finished.   I'm not sure where to start so I'll just jump right into it.

So I've working on all sorts of stuff.  Some may sound kind of insane and I've kind of been all over the place trying to get all of the tasks moving forward.  Just so must to do @.@

I've been doing some focus on Blender to figure out some things for increasing my productivity speed for the long run.

So was learning how to create shaders and work with node style programming essentially for 3d I didn't realize that with 3D applications, when you're creating materials, most of them are completely custom made.  Like the other programs for the most part tend to have material libraries but even those are custom made from a bank of shaders and what not.  When I started learning about that, it was blowing my mind.  So this here is a render test using two different rendering engines that Blender uses called "Eevee" and "Cycles". Cycles is a raytracing engine that creates hyper realistic renders at a cost of incredicly demanding performance.  You can't run this live at all.  Eevee on the other hand follows simulated raytracing and prebaked formulas to calculate light paths similar to essentially how game engines run. This render is from Eevee.  Render time of 0.6sec

 This rendering is from Cycles.  Render time of ~8 minutes.

 Another thing I was working on was creating a custom refraction shader.  So you know how light separates when it goes through prisms and what not?  I created a custom shader using the nodes and help from google to simulate that same effect.  As you can see the light separating showing the red green and blue within the glass material. This is my node tree.

 I have the flats and the inked lines in here but dang it took forever.  I still need to paint in the lighting so that it looks correct.

 I still need to go over with a shading pass, I have the peeps draw up in the scene as well.

I still need to color them but I'm going to use the same base colors from the previous image and just need to do the actual people.

 One of the other things I've been working on is possibly moving more into a hybrid 3d for environment design.  Like further than just knocking up a quick outline for perspective so I've also been trying to figure out how to make Blender render inked lines as a separate layer on top of rendering out the flat cell shade and if possible, render the shading as a separate image as well.

That way with all of these separated I can't import them into clip studio paint pro as individual layers like how I hand draw them and can still finish out the lines and add in more detail but then I wouldn't have to hand draw the bulk of the lines as well.  It always takes me a good while and the speed increase I got from using a 3d base for perspective was very helpful but I'm still not happy with the speed in productivity so I'm looking for more efficient routes.

 So as for the exterior of the cafe, I got this looking pretty decent, the outlines are drawn in as well started to get a toon shader setup to how I like it.  Or at least the basics.  But these layers aren't separated like I wanted.

But I was able to do it.

 Still haven't figured out how to render just flat colors with no lighting but I think I'm getting closer.  So I'm working with these lines right now in Clip Studio and am happy with how they turned out.

I've got other environment views prepared as well.

 So this'll be the view of the music stage. 

That was all over the place haha.  I didn't really know how to organize it quick enough so I just threw it all into the post.  But yes, work has been progressing steadily.  I just need to keep plugging away.  Thank you for your patience.  

I've also been screen recording myself as well and will upload more videos when I finish recording those processes.  People seemed to like them.  I don't know if I'll get into streaming while I'm working as that's going to be super boring.  It's essentially going to be me for 8 hours being like "wtf" at the screen the whole time....then bam...work poofs out of nowhere haha.