An update and an apology for the lack of content

I really hate putting up walls of excuses for why things have been slow, they make me feel unprofessional and like a disappointment but I might as well atleast let everyone know what's been going on.

I have unending gratitude to all of our supporters and I want to thank you for your patience. I understand why the number of backers has been dwindling a bit lately. between noone really being in a great place financially and the lack of content hasn't exactly made it and amazing value.

First, as for what HAS been getting done behind the scenes. The animation scene has been fully updated to the blender 4.2 beta, some changes happened that required me to rework basically every material. And while I found a clever solution to a lot of the limitations of eevee that aren't remedied by eevee-next by doing hybrid renders combining Eevee and Cycles that doesn't really help too much with the animation since I have to manually render each pass separately and composite them in post, attempting to render them all at once still crashes blender, which I hope will be fixed by the full release of 4.2 but I'm not holding my breath. The developers have also changed how light probes work in eevee-next about 5 times during the development of 4.2 which has been stressful to have to keep adjusting the scene to resolve huge changes in lighting.

Eevee-next has opened new doors for how I can pull off the quality I'm looking for without prohibitively long render times for animations and has made things that were impossible in previous versions viable but it is still an experimental version so that is always an extra challenge. but I'm very happy to be at the cutting edge on it and be ready to take advantage understanding it more ahead of it's final release.

So I've had to work around those limitations for the animation so that they don't create artifacts or drag the quality down too much. and my complex softbody rig created a complication in the most unexpected of places, breathing. Every method I tried to get working to make convincing breathing ran into roadblocks mostly due to the fact that shapekeys/blendshapes and surface deform are mutually exclusive making what should have been a simple process into a nightmare. Thankfully Aeva was able to work the rig enough to get a passable solution that doesn't look out of place meaning all I need to do is finish up the pacing and the outro and the animation will be ready to render.

and once the animation is finished the rest of the pages should go nice and smoothly until the epilogue animation but that thankfully comes after the final page so it's less of a roadblock.

As for why it has been so....dead...content wise...

This month has been a barrage of issues that have kept me from working nearly as much as I'd like to. Between getting sick again and adapting to living with a new roommate. it's been a few years since I've lived with anyone who wasn't a romantic partner or family so in spite of them being awesome it's been a challenge to adapt again.

As for the sick part. I hate having covid, it's like getting gaslit by a virus, feeling just good enough that I feel like I can get back in the swing of things just to crash as soon as I push my self even a little. Constantly wondering if I'm just depressed, lazy or if the virus is still kicking my ass. The constant low grade fever points to the latter though. The cough, headache and flu like symptoms only lasted a few days giving me a false sense of recovery only to get hit by more symptoms later. the waxing and waning is exhausting wondering if I'm "better" or just in the eye of the storm. I am back to having the memory of a goldfish and the fatigue and brain fog makes me feel like I have brain damage >_< Stacking covid on top of life long auto-immune issues is a nightmare I don't wish on anyone.

We have also been working on preparing for renovations that my parents have decided on diving into and also doing a lot of repair work around the house to get ready for painting. The weather hasn't been helping much either. If climate change and global warming is a myth it's the most convincing myth I've ever had the displeasure of enduring. Where I live used to only got above 75F/24C a few days of the year. Houses around here don't have air conditioning and more than half of this month has been above 85 during the day with severe thunderstorms in the evening which I can't really chance running computer hardware during. We live in the highlands of our area and practically on a small mountain so lightning strikes that fry electronics are a yearly occurrence for us and even with really good surge protectors I just can't justify the risk.

We have literally had record breaking temperatures every week for the past 3 years in all 4 seasons and it's been a nightmare.

Money hasn't really been great either though I can't help but feel responsible for it. Part of me keeps arguing that if I could just..you know...stop being sick, depressed, anxious then we wouldn't be having so many problems but that just keeps repeating the loop. Our savings have pretty much completely dried up and we have been having to tighten our spending at every corner which means less options for appeasing my ADHD snowflake of a brain.

We aren't in any risk of being homeless or starving any time soon thankfully but the financial situation has lead me to focusing on making sure we stay in the good graces of my family and making our presence here worth it and keeping stress down for my parents. I've had basically no energy for dealing with stress which has lead Aeva to have to pick up a lot of slack there and I'm incredibly thankful to her but it has meant that she has less energy to devote to helping with projects. I also suck at delegating work which I'm desperately trying to get better at but it's tough when it feels like I can either choose between overcoming anxiety or having the cognitive ability to perform tasks. I've found that my ADHD meds flat out don't work when I'm sick which is apparently not uncommon but I had no idea it could be this dramatic. It's been like wondering if my meds have been replaced with sugar pills the past few weeks.

Again...Thank you all for your patience and support