Nearly There - Brig x Mercy Progress Update (Patreon)

Small update for all patrons so you can see what's been happening :) This kind of R&D will be really useful for my future animations!

With the animation finished I was planning on using Eevee to render this video out like I did for the first Overwatch one, but the much better quality of Cycles was too alluring, so I've been doing a lot of tests to see how I can get a middle ground between the two - reasonable render speed but with Cycles shading.

Initial Eevee lighting:

Here's how I started off with a similar Eevee setup to the first animation. Next I switched to Cycles and made some adjustments, resulting in an early sunrise look which I wasn't happy with:

After redoing the lights the immediate jump in quality over Eevee is amazing!

Much better I think! And that's before full color grading/post processing too. Unfortunately this would take a very long time per frame to render and there are 600 frames total, plus I wanted to do multiple angles and variations on the dong size. So now I began doing optimizations:

This first one doesn't look too different, most of the changes were to strip the materials of everything outside of the camera and slightly reduce the light ray bounces. Doing so shaved off a minute or so but that still wasn't enough to be feasible.

Next I remade the skin shader. My own skin shader isn't fully photoreal in order to reduce noise, but I think it looks pretty great for CG, however it was still too intensive for fast renders. With a rework of it that sacrificed some physical accuracy, I was able to cut my render time in half!

One last edit of the lighting to optimize it even more resulted in this final look which shaved off even more time from the render:

I'm very happy with the results, and once I've got the physics baked and polished a couple of issues then this will be ready to set rendering!

Long One tier subscribers: I've recorded all the video for the behind-the-scenes of Harley Quinn on the train as well as the Clara Lille walk animation, I just need to edit it together. They'll be up soon!