On the Topic of Alternate Angles (Patreon)

A lot of people have been asking and I wanted to explain why  providing additional renders with different angles isn’t so simple as  you may think. Some of you will say you just rotate the camera, click  render and voila - a new angle. It may be true for simple scenes with no  lighting or props but things couldn’t be further from the truth.

Imagine  the 3d scene for an animation as a movie set. Everything is made to  look good from a certain angle. I build my scenes for the camera’s  specific viewpoint. I put the models in front of the camera and add the  background behind them. Rotate the camera and you’ll see an empty scene,  weird clipping that is hidden from the viewer and strange deformations  that look horrible when viewed from a different angle. Also there’s  often depth of field play involved where the artist might want to switch  focus between one or two objects and that cannot be replicated from a  second angle. 

Then comes all the lighting. There’s often more  than ten, sometimes twenty or more light sources in my scenes. All of  these would have to be moved and rotated so that the shot looks as good  as the main angle if we are to make an alternative view. Rim lights, for  example, are really bright and illuminate an object’s back side,  showing the viewer only a slight outline of color from the main angle,  while at the same time the object’s side that you don’t see is  incredibly bright from another angle. 

Finally, among other work,  there’s the render times and going through the whole process of adding  extra post effects in Adobe After Effects or Sony Vegas for example. The  artist has to redo these since the whole scene has changed and the  position of actors and objects. 

I don’t mind rendering and  editing variants with different clothing options since it’s mostly  waiting. Still, with top tier high-end rigs, render times in SFM are one  of the shortest but still not exactly short. For example a 10 second  animation in 60fps and 1080p can take an hour to render in SFM or few at  the very least, when you have higher render settings. Of course, after  that comes the render in After Effects that will be around 20 minutes,  and the conversion to webm for another 5 minutes. Multiply this by the  number of different versions we have to render like for example with and  without watermark, 720p / 1080p, VR / normal, etc.

In conclusion: I always provide versions with alternative outfits when the model supports them, futa / female versions when it makes sense, and alternate camera angles can sometimes be with rather small changes but I don't want you to think it's because I'm lazy.

Thank you for reading.