Progress Report, 26/06 - 20 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another in the line of our weekly progress reports!

Graphic card is still going strong, and shows a remarkable difference in terms of render times compared to the previous one! SFM in particular is much quicker, and Blender shows a clear uptick in capacity as well. My hopes is that with this I'll be able to, at least for SFM, run with quality overrides in terms of camera quality for at least one, if not more, angles whenever I deliver content from the program in question, meaning a stark difference in especially shadow quality compared to the usual fidelity. Lots of quality in that damn sentence.

LotW2 is still underway! In good news, I believe I've managed to resolve the most finicky and difficult scene, from a technical standpoint, at this juncture and hope to have it set up for animation very soon. In bad news, I think we will overshoot the projected release window at the end of this month, owing to the graphic card incident, brutal work schedule on account of the pandemic making my colleagues prone to stay at home, and the currently on-going heatwave which absolutely murders productivity among me and my northern peers. It cannot be understated just how poorly accustomed we are to heat: when I grew up, -30C wasn't uncommon during winters, and I vividly remember playing outdoor hockey at -37C at one point. Now we're hardly getting snow, and summers makes me want to go to the arctic or the likes just to flee from it :)

I've had a little time to poke around with other projects, and briefly managed to hack together a somewhat semi-functioning Syx from Endless' old project files over in Blender, but I am yet to see if it actually can be used for anything. Commissions, as always, are underway, albeit slowly - I simultaneously want to get to everyone I've promised slots and concepts while I am terrified of rushing anyone's commission and making them unhappy with it. Thus, taking my time is the only path forward.

The Monday Loop I pushed will, from the looks of it in terms of time (as of writing, I have about an hour before I have to head into work for another late Friday shift), finally land on Monday in place of that loop. This means I'll hopefully have time to give it sound and the attention it needs over the course of the weekend. My apologies, but I none the less hope you'll like the end product.

As always, thank you so much for your continued support, and for all of your kind words! These are chaotic, hectic times where the world seems to throw everything it's got at us. I hope you're holding up, wherever you are, and that you're spared the worst of it.

Take care of yourselves, your loved one, and each other!
/DH