Community update: The future and the return of older projects.

So over the past year I have been studying making my work better with Blender and particularly focusing on learning eevee and eevee-next inside and out. getting the rendering engines to behave has been an absolute nightmare if I'm going to be honest XD the biggest problem has always been VRAM usage more than anything else. Especially Eevee-next which uses almost 30% more than Cycles or Octane and also has about 2gb of overhead for it's lighting and volumetric system. To make matters worse the nature of how eevee-next works makes rendering in layers impractical to impossible. But through a lot of deep diving research I have managed to make it efficient enough to alleviate most of my problems. and as a fallback I have been studying Cycles as well, though I haven't quite been able to achieve the quality of fur rendering I want out of Cycles, it still looks more "Realistic" than I would like. and I feel like it puts the models too deeply in uncanny valley.

At the moment the Oura comic is nearing completion and I'm planning on one more short comic before I start my long term comic. But in the meantime with Aeva's help I think I'm ready to revisit Beating the heat and alone in the park. I'm not exactly sure how I want to handle alone in the park. Octane was an interesting experiment but in the end it didn't achieve what I wanted from a rendering engine which sorta left that project in limbo.

I'm considering just remaking it from scratch since it was only 5 pages in when I realized that it was simply not going to work out using Octane. but I still really like the concept. there was also the question on whether or not it was allowed under Patreon's new policies which were very much in flux at the time. and I wasn't sure if plant monster sex was okay even if it was considered very much welcome. Though I haven't seen many people having issues with "monsters" especially in a sex positive setting so I'm definitely interested in continuing the project.

As for Beating the heat chapter 2. This is probably the biggest news. I'm in the final steps of updating the characters and scenes to be ready to render with the new tools and my refined pipeline. the characters are receiving a pass on their fur shading and grooms as well as some minor tweaks to their face shapes to better fit my improved understanding of how I want the anatomy to look. but in other words. Beating the heat chapter 2 should be receiving new pages soon!

I also want to start making more short animations now that I've worked out most of the worst lighting bugs though things might not be completely perfect but I won't know until I try. This past year has been a lot of trial and error and a pretty massive learning experience.

In spite of the things going on in my little section of the world I'm doing my best to stay optimistic and I will keep doing what I love and expressing my self as long as I can <3

You are all awesome and to those of you who have stuck with me through it all I thank you from the deepest part of my heart, I truly appreciate you and if it weren't for you I wouldn't be able to do this. And for those that have left due to the drought of content I do hope that in the coming months I can inspire you all to feel confident enough to give me another chance. Thank you again.