Update 19/03/2024 (Patreon)

Hi all, 

I have an update for you. It's a bit longer than normal so sorry if it's a bit much but there are some fun things coming up.

List of discussions points:

· My workflow.

· Character Spotlights.

· Upload frequency.

· Patreon Chat feature and Discord?

· Plans to upgrade my PC workstation.

· Future animation possibilities?

I’m just going to give a little background to my workflow to start with. So I started with Blender doing the Tifa and Aerith renders and then I started to shift to mainly using Daz Studio. The main reason for this was that Daz Studio was very convenient to use as you could buy characters, clothing, hair, props, poses, environments, etc., that you could theoretically use with just a few of clicks and have a scene ready to render.

It is by no means perfect, but it speeds up the production process and gives a huge amount of choice when it comes to putting a render together. I have also been using Character Creator 4 for some character creation things, and that has been quite useful as well.

Over the last 2 years I have been building my Daz asset library and have over 200 different character models and a large collection of environments, poses, clothing, hair and props to use in my renders (Which all of my wonderful supporters have helped me to buy since I started my Patreon and DeviantArt subscriptions).

The other reason for using Daz is that I can make a body inflation morph in Blender and import it to Daz and use the same morph on multiple character models. Which is amazing! It takes time to create a good morph and if I can speed up that process, that’s a win in my books, as time is such a limited resource! I still would have to create different morphs for the different Genesis models that Daz uses though (I have mainly been using Genesis 8, 8.1 and more recently Genesis 9 models).

One problem I’ve had is correctly importing character models (without errors) from Blender into Daz, so I haven’t been using the Tifa and Aerith models I was using in Blender.

Which brings us to the next topic of the character spotlights. I have decided to try making my own versions of characters from media like Tifa, which will work with all the Daz assets and the custom inflation morphs I’ve made.

As you may have seen I have started with the 2B character from Nier: Automata, and I have already started on some other characters like Tifa. I will start posting these character spotlights soon starting with Tifa (which I’m excited about!). These are still mostly a work-in-progress so I am learning and trying to improve them over time (I like the Japanese term “Kaizen”, which I believe means ‘to continuously improve upon something.’)

I hope you enjoy the character spotlights I am going to start rolling out soon. Starting with 2B which I have already posted and shortly my version of Tifa (work-in-progress) will follow. More to follow after that and I will eventually also try making Aerith and others.

Another thing I am going to try and do is increase the amount I upload content. This will mean I will try to do more single renders or very short sequences of renders, as I experiment with the assets and programs that I have.

Patreon has a new chat feature that could be useful to discuss ideas and have a general chat, so I am looking in to this as well as the possibility of finally making a Discord group. More on this later…

Something I want to do at some point is over the next year or two is upgrade my PC workstation. The one I am using currently is over 10 years old now. (Although some parts have been swapped out over the years, like the graphics card.) My PC’s CPU is currently the major bottleneck and it’s struggling with the work load. The CPU and motherboard is so old now that I would have to replace both at the same time, so I’m saving up to try and get a fully new PC workstation. I through I would try and set up a donation goal for this if people want to help me upgrade my hardware, and as we reach certain goal checkpoints I could do something that you all might like. (still thinking about what that could be… I will take any suggestions into consideration) I will continue to look into this and possibly do a dedicated post at a later point.

A quick note on animation possibilities. I still have the ambition to get into doing animations but I haven’t been able to set aside the time to practice and learn the processes enough for longer animations. Also my current hardware is struggling enough with single image renders and I don’t want to push it to breaking point with extra long rendering sessions that would probably overheat my current PC. However, this is my long term goal, to eventually be able to make animations that are longer than a few seconds and with audio.

I think that about does it for this update. I hope it wan't too boring. lol. 

Character spotlight posts coming soon. Thank you all for your support!