First Update of the Year (Patreon)

Hey guys, have a lot to talk about but I'll try to be brief on each topic.

For starters, I've got a decent amount of poster commissions to catch up on, so I think that might be the primary content released as I figure other content out.

As for the movie, I've been going through screenshots of Omega from ME2 and ME3 to gain inspiration for scene building. As well, I want to go through some of the Mass Effect comics that take place on Omega. I want to adhere to Omega's architecture more accurately as that will help with the movie's atmosphere.

As personal motivation, I also want to write a proper story intro to the movie. I don't want to bog down animation anymore than it already is, so it might not even end up implemented into the movie. It could possibly work as a stretch goal to work in later when the movie is more complete. That said, I think it would help to maintain interest in the movie and scene building when the story is more grounded.

After that, I'll start work on scene 3 and then start going through the early scenes of the movie and get them to finished quality with sound and visuals. With a revamped scenebuild, solidified story, and early scenes improved, that should set the tone for the rest of the movie.

Lastly, I want to talk a bit of tech. I've actually been able to add another GTX 770 to my build. There was an older PC in the family that had been replaced, so this one was collecting dust and I was able to add it to my PC. Rendering in Blender scales linearly with multiple cards. I've done a some benchmarks and indeed my render time in cycles is basically cut in half. This is a pretty huge improvement as it is about equivalent to a single GTX 1080. This should help out significantly before I upgrade my PC fully. It means that I could possibly wait for the next generation of cards to upgrade. The main thing is that the second card is still useless for gaming, and I'm still capped out at 4 GB of vRAM for Blender.

Blender 2.8 beta has a number of performance improvements too. I've not done too many benchmarks with it yet, but the initial results are promising. Blender 2.8 also allows rendering with GPU and CPU at the same time. Let me know if you guys want to hear about more tech related stuff like this. I still want to do some more benchmarks, especially in 2.8.