Blender Update (Patreon)

You've seen the Blender images I've posted already, so you've probably been waiting for me to say more about Blender.

I've not made a lot of progress on the next movie because I've been testing things out in Blender, but it actually may be quite relevant...

Things sort of aligned this way. There's a little bit of a lull after the release of a big project. It's also the first opportunity to really try Blender since its official launch of 2.8. It just so happens there's a really high quality model for the main star of the next movie. Now that the dust has settled with a new month of patreon, and the active patron count has barely budged, I wonder if I need to make the engine switch.

I've run a bunch of tests and played around with Blender, mostly eevee. The eevee renders are quite promising. The quality is good. It's a different style but quite possibly better than SFM. Render times are quick. Those posters I made took around 12 seconds to render. For reference, the average frame time with The Normandy's Bitch was about 6 seconds. The Normandy's Bitch took about 4 hours total to render, so that means a movie in eevee could be doable in around 8. Set to render overnight, and that's not unreasonable.

The main reason I struggled with Blender before came down to rigging, lighting, and shaders. Lighting and shaders were hard to work with mainly because of cycles' performance. Render times also ruled out movies. 

Eevee fixes most of those problems. I can set up lighting with ease. The quick render times make short movies a possibility. It also has the added benefit of working with cycles. I can set up lighting and materials with eevee and use cycles to render short loops and posters. The render times have also been improved with cycles so that even those might only take a few hours for a short loop.

The Ashley model has a great rig. The generic males are available too. I've only done basic scenebuilding and some storyboarding in SFM. It's entirely possible to upgrade The Promotion to Blender... now.

I might need some more practice with posters and short loops, and it might slow the movie making process as I get used to the UI, but this might only delay The Promotion's production by a few weeks. 

A few questions remain. How well will I be able to set up models for future movies? How quickly can I adapt to Blender's UI for animation?

If I can get through a little more practice, I think this might actually be a strong opportunity to really learn Blender and improve the quality of future work.

The most important question... Do you guys like it? The Ashley posters have gotten a lot of likes, but not so many comments. What do you think if The Promotion were rendered at that quality? It's a change in style, but is that an improvement? Would you like the engine switch?