Community update time! Whee, it's been a month...again... but optimistic all around.

Pretty much nothing but exciting and positive news this time around. Things have been a little quiet but a lot has been going on.  as always, my community update blogs are walls of text..So if you aren't up for the full article there is a tl;dr synopsis at the bottom. 

But before the details of the good news, lets look at how I got to this decision and the outcome. 

Things have been rough the past year for a lot of reasons but as I've gotten my self together,
I decided to stick with it because I was really loving how things were starting to look. but I really was struggling with the limitations that were placed on me by hardware that was built on a very tight budget out of outdated components. and Aeva has been in an even worse position than me, basically working with a second hand system of a half dead GPU, not enough RAM,aging storage and a CPU that was a hot, unstable nightmare from the start. 

I honestly did my best, I tried. I did every optimization I could imagine, I even considered compromising my style in order to improve workflow.I told myself "Other artists can do more with less" But in the end I came to the conclusion that then I wouldn't be being true to my self.

I even tried to convince my self that I was overreacting and being overly dramatic. that it couldn't have been as bad as I thought it was. A good artist never blames their tools right? I went so far as to record my self to see how much time in a day I was actually spending waiting for things to process, how much time I spent waiting for my software to crunch numbers never mind the time I spent waiting for renders. Plus I was struggling to have the entire scene loading at once so often times I would find that a shot that looked good with my optimized proxy would look off once the entire scene was loaded. I even considered going back to eevee just to squeeze a little more out of my setup. when I went back to review it what I actually found was that I really wasn't exaggerating. 

Almost a third of my work day was being spent, sitting around, waiting for things to bake,process,compile or even just waiting a minute at a time for blender to switch modes, or struggling to achieve all of 1fps while posing which was destroying my precision and making me do everything repeatedly. 

It was destroying my motivation. I would start a project, being excited and optimistic and by the time it was ready to start bringing it together the performance issues would start to creep in and by the time it was ready to start rendering things. every little tweak and change was just killing me. Many times I would come up with a cool technique, just to find when I tried to implement it that it was too expensive to actually be usable. Then I would go back, redo it to be more optimized over and over until I had bled it dry of any sort of creative freedom in the name of performance. It was overwhelming and demoralizing and I was starting to dread every day of work and starting to get the feeling of "Just get it done, who cares if it's not just right" But that's not what I wanted out of it which hit my motivation even harder. It was hurting my confidence and I was feeling the imposter syndrome creeping in every single day I sat down to work on things. I even considered giving up. The lack of content meant that we were bleeding subscribers which was hurting my morale even more.  I started to fight with thoughts like "They left because I didn't deserve it" and "Maybe I should just give up" 

I didn't want things to end like that but I wasn't exactly in the financial situation to just fix it on a whim. We are basically just scraping by on money and I have basically no credit, No debt but I've never managed interact with the financial system enough to be able to have a line of credit. I tried to find some commissions but my name isn't big enough to find much work. 

My family was starting to see how much it was stressing me out but how much I was still trying to make it all work and my dad approached me about making a deal... He's always been supportive of me making a living out of what makes me happy. and while he doesn't fully understand, nor want to understand exactly what it is that I make he is atleast vaguely aware so I don't have to worry about him, finding out and being angry about it. 

So he proposed a sort of business loan to get some of the major roadblocks out of the way of our creativity.  Though the terms are a bit unorthodox. 

To make the long story as short as possible, I made the promise to do everything in my power to be ready to take over the complete financial responsibility for the household once my dad retires in a couple of years. In exchange I was essentially given a budget to built Aeva and I workstations that can not only do my current job, but if necessary get back into my old, more mundane and less interesting but still 3D art based day job and help my dad with his business more. This gives me a deadline of about a year and a half from now to reach the point of showing financial promise, whether through commissions, comics, games or what ever to be able to take over the household income. Considerably shorter than my old 3 year deadline. but I feel like it's going to be worth it, The injection of funds means that I'm no longer going to have to cut corners or give up on ideas because we don't have the processing power to make them happen. 

I fully plan to make the best of all of this and do everything in my power to make Khavran Creations my full time job though even if I fail to do that I don't think I'd give up on it. The work I'd be doing on the side would certainly be less stressful and might even inspire me to work even harder at my art. but rest assured I'm not ever going to give up on telling the stories I want to tell.  Needless to say all of this has been extremely stressful and tiring but even more exciting. My mental and physical health has been greatly improving over the past few months and now I have the opportunity to shed the other limitations I have slowing me down. 

TL;DR synopsis

I put together 2 new top of the line workstations for Aeva and I to free us from aging and flaky hardware. The two systems are identical in every way but color. One system in white, one in black. The build if you are interested. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YYypJy

We now have enough rendering power that full quality animations are on the table in the future! and I no longer have to worry about not being able to render the scenes I make for the comic and having my work time drained away by waiting for things to process.

With great power, comes great responsibility. In this case, my financial responsibilities are going to be going up considerably in the next couple of years so I have a huge amount of motivation and pressure to make all of this work and be worth it. 

Bonus news! Aeva and I also joined an NSFW gamejam and it's going pretty well! I managed to model 3 characters and a BUNCH of assets in just 9 days. now we are working on some final polish during the revision phase and I can't wait to share more with you all!

Comic pages should come out a LOT faster now, with less struggling with hardware related limitations and performance issues.