Aegis Progress Update & Future Rendering in EEVEE (Patreon)

Howdy folks, this post is split in two parts: giving you the current forecast on the Aegis animation, and sharing the move to Blender's EEVEE rendering for future projects.

The Aegis animation is still coming together slowly, Pneuma is in the sessions ready to be animated  - that leaves about 2 remaining 'scenes' to animate and a few others left to polish. Rendering the final 2-3 minutes of footage in my current setup will take maybe 3+ days for final, and that's assuming everything comes out properly. As a result the release might see an early November push for the extra time that comes from bringing a voice actress on board to dub the footage, a few days of layering sound effects for everything, adjusting models, and re-rendering faulty frames if necessary. Admittedly burnout has also been a contributing factor to slowing down as this project has been circulating for months through constant direction changes, additions and redos, and frequent edits - I've learned to avoid these problems in future endeavors by planning model features and animations accordingly. 

This leads to the second topic - render times. The Aegis project and past projects are done in Blender's Cycles engine, which is overkill for what I actually need and stunts a lot of development negatively among other factors. Emulating several effects not usually supported by Cycles has also led to more time costs in rendering, such as ambient occlusion passes.  As a result I have been migrating my future project models and remaking shaders to the new engine on the side; the results are practically identical but the workflow efficiency, customization, and massively improved render times will make future content significantly easier to produce. I'll be demonstrating this more as you see content roll out.

Thanks again for your patience and support, this year's been weird and busy but you will see a lot more consistent content after the Aegis release.