Tifa takes one for the team (Patreon)

She couldn't let Aerith stand on the frontlines, melee fighter that she is. It's time for some risky, close encounters and skin-to-skin contact.

OK, jokes aside, I decided to continue the 'Eldritch Vacation' project this week. Last time, we got a wholesome video with Tifa and Aerith chilling in the woods.

This week, the clothes come off, and the massive tentacle appendage sees some action. Yes, the huge thing from last week. I originally chose a big appendage because I wanted it to look impressive right from the start of the video. Now I am stuck with my choices and have a hard time fitting that oversized "thing" inside Tifa.

But that is far from the important thing here. The pretty outdoors location, two girls at once, and the upcoming tentacle mess could make this a very pretty but also complicated movie, being a blessing and a curse at the same time. I can comment on this further, but first, let us look at the important stuff.

I uploaded one new video called 'Tifa takes one for the team' on my file storage sites. This week's scenes are in there. The animated scenes are over a minute long in total, and then there is a preview of the scenes I am currently rendering. The scenes are of the highest quality I can create, so check it out; I bet you'll like it.

Additional notes on the creation of 'Eldritch Vacation'; feel free to skip it if you want:

I am creating this video in a slightly different way than everything I made before. To keep it short, Blender has two modes available for rendering (producing) an animation: a fast render (eevee) that creates footage that looks kind of like a videogame, and a slow render (cycles) that traces all the rays in the scene to create beautiful natural lighting and shadows at the cost of hideously long rendering time.

Something like a 20-second animation (one scene) can take easily 20 to 30 hours to render in cycles. In my previous videos, like 'Eldritch Christmas', I could get away with using fast render because it was a small, well-lit indoor scene.

Not this time. 'Eldritch Vacation' takes place in a grove with the sun shining from above, and the fast render makes all shadows in the scene look terribly flat, especially faces. And thus I am forced to use the slow render, which takes forever.

That's why I composed this week's video of one minute of animation, followed by a bunch of still shots—these are the scenes I still need to render. Luckily, I did most of the animating this week, so I'll just spend the next week rendering them, and the update one week from now should be considerably longer.

Later on in the movie, location will change (spoiler: tentacles will have something to do with it), which might improve my workflow once again. At the very least, some very pretty scenes with nice, realistic shadows should come out of this ordeal.