Current state of things: Still alive, still working.

Overview: The first two pages of Alone in the park exposed some major issues with what I thought was going to be a pretty straight forward setup. But I've managed to get most of them resolved and the remaining ones I've come up with workarounds for and have implemented them in testing but it's just a matter of cleaning up the scene again to get it looking good.

Page 3 and 4 of alone in the park are fully posed and set up, they just need some lighting and shading tweaks to be ready to render. Page 5 is 90% done. Script writing through the ending of Alone in the park is complete. I'm not sure exactly how many pages it will end up being as I've been dividing it up as I go into "what feels right and flows well" I keep running into issues of "This would be better if it was divided into two pages if I threw in a few extra shots for pacing" and so far I'm enjoying this workflow much more than the old one and once the other issues are sorted out it will probably be how I handle all of the comics moving forward. 

I am still confident I will be able to get 3,4 and 5 out this month.

In other news Aeva has been hard at work on our next major animation and it's going very well. She is putting the finishing touches on the setup on the first section and it should be ready for render soon. 

We have also been finishing up the initial design docs for the game development concept. We really struggled on finding a project idea that was both feasible and engaging for our small 2 person studio. It's a struggle to try and pick a specific idea because it's so easy to dream big but realize that you can't pull it off without a much bigger team and much more funding. but I think we have settled on something that fits our skills, available technology and limited time budget. All while also building something that we would both enjoy playing that incorporates our interests without falling afoul of taboo subject matter.  I look forward to sharing a more in depth reveal of the project here very soon. 

The above is the TL;DR You can skip the section below unless you are curious, though it's mostly me venting about the problems I faced with Octane and with my own personal issues. 

As always for more realtime updates on the state of things feel free to join our discord and hang out. Ask questions and be social. I am trying to stream more on Discord and have started streaming on Piczel instead of Picarto as I can't afford to keep premium on Picarto right now

Comic Technical stuff:

There have been five major showstopping issues holding up development of the comic but I think I have worked them all out in one way or another

First, The native hair/fur shader within our chosen renderer has been coming up short for me in a variety of ways. The shading struggles with strong lighting like outdoor scenes and it has been resulting in very flat, low contrast looking textures for fur patterns and I honestly couldn't accept the quality. Especially with high contrast,low saturation fur patterns like Jushara.

The only functional solution has been to write my own shader from the ground up which took almost a week of building it up, layer by layer only to tear it back down repeatedly when I found it's performance too expensive or the quality insufficient. I'm mostly happy with the results but I feel like it's still lacking some depth and features. when you are dealing with millions of three dimensional curves even tiny calculations add up quickly. while other, simpler solutions end up requiring the main sampling of the renderer to be turned up to the point that it harms performance everywhere else. It's a subtle push and pull to find something acceptable both in appearance and also have it be renderable in a reasonable amount of time

Second, Render times. In initial testing, every single component of the scene seemed to be on budget. Especially since the environment cleans up after just a few dozen samples. I was excited and confident that it would be smooth sailing but once the characters and scene were brought together it introduced an issue. The scene cleans up in just 45 samples while characters were taking over 600 to sufficiently remove noise. Unfortunately this forest scene has been a worst case scenario for the renderer and render times of 30 minutes plus per frame is eyewatering even for a comic. especially when you might not notice a minor error until  it's very much too late. The first two pages took over 20 hours of hands on rendering, subtly tweaking and tuning to get things working right. And reintroduced the one thing I was trying to get away from by changing renderers, Having to tweak every shot to have it look right. I isolated the main issue to be the fact that the tiny fur geometries don't get along with the mostly bounced lighting under the tree canopy. leading to huge amounts of noise. The only functional solution is to split the lighting systems into one for the environment and one for the characters. Which is also a challenge to have them match up well. Thankfully this renderer has a very robust light-groups system which makes it actually possible however there are some caveats

Third,  Light-groups. While this should be the simple solution to the problem there is a bit of an issue. Curve systems "Like hair and fur" Don't have the necessary tags to properly control what light layers they are visible in. an apparent oversight by the developers that I have bug reported but who knows how long it will be before it's resolved. There isn't a straightforward fix to this but I've found a workaround. Simply inverting the lightgroups for the environment and it's lighting so that it expects the opposite setting from every object on those layers. It's not exactly an elegant solution and it's confusing to work with because half of the scene operates on inverted values to the environment. but it's the best I can do at the moment

Fourth, This one is a bit more frustrating as there isn't really a solution or even a proper work around for it. There has been an issue where turning on the render preview is fine but turning it off freezes the program for upwards for a minute. which is a pain since this is something that must be done frequently as the renderer will sometimes get stuck looping the first sample or it will fail to update an object, or it simply is too heavy on performance to leave the render preview on while editing poses or geometry. I spent 4 days narrowing down what was causing it because it was intolerable to work with, having the opportunity to get up and go get a coffee is one thing when it happens every hour or so but when it can happen several times in a row. Switch to preview to see how lighting works, switch out, wait a minute, change something, switch back in, switch out, wait a minute, change a pose, repeat.I could easily lose an hour to this bug per day. Plus this bug propagates to renders,tacking an extra minute to the end of every render before the program becomes responsive again. Finally I isolated it to a very irritating bug with "baking textures" While it only takes a few hundred milliseconds to compile the baked texture, when switching out of render mode or preview mode it takes over a minute. I am guessing something is wrong in the code that unloads the texture, or dumps it from memory. This is a major issue as it's a required function to make use of the voxel displacement feature when working with dynamic textures. Something that I use in the terrain, characters, trees, rocks and frankly, the voxel displacement is 40% of the reason I am using this renderer in the first place. The bug exists in the current stable build, the beta build, the alpha of the next release. but DOESN'T exist in the previous major version, Unfortunately that version is too old to work with the fur system......great... There is no solution to this bug at the moment and the only work around is to have a fallback shader that doesn't use the voxel displacement at all as a proxy while working with the scene, and switching to the full version when rendering but this can lead to inconsistencies in the alignment of geometry and is a nightmare to deal with. I have filed a bug report but have not received a useful response

Fifth, At least this one had a proper solution and I just had to figure it out. Unfortunately the function isn't very well documented and I was having trouble passing attributes from procedural objects to the renderer. Essential for a lot of things in the scene to render properly. Eventually I found the right combination of settings to make the attributes appear properly but it took a couple of days of trying every combination while going back and forth on the possibility that it just wasn't possible which was demoralizing. I'm very happy I found a solution to this as it was a complete showstopper otherwise. 

Demoralized is probably the best way to put the whole thing because these issues have been overwhelming to deal with and it's lead to a lot of anxiety over whether moving to Octane was the right choice. I honestly love the way it looks when it's working properly. The physics based shading system just makes sense to me and the power of the voxel displacement means that in theory I can make environments 10x faster than I could if I was restrained to basic geometry or using adaptive subdivision. Plus it's immune to the pop in and performance eating issues of adaptive subdivision and besides the bug with baking textures it "just works" The idea of going back to Cycles or Redshift makes me shudder and groan. Those may be better for a bigger team, with more of a standard pipeline but for essentially a single artist,since Aeva is only a programmer,animator and amateur sculptor. Environment design, topology, texturing and lighting,shading and rendering are basically completely up to me alone. 

I haven't given up but it has definitely been exhausting. And the real life issues going on around me haven't been helping too much with my stress levels. 

RL issues:

This past couple of weeks have been a mess due to medication issues. Recently I finally started real ADHD medication and it was like a night and day difference, I found my self working full proper days of work and getting tons of progress done on everything. I thankfully used that energy and focus to get everything up to date and set up with the new renderer sans finishing Banana's fur groom. Suddenly I wasn't struggling to work every day but instead was struggling to not overwork my self. It was easy to accidentally put in 10+ hour days. which went on for a full month, until it came time to refill my prescription. But when I got my prescription filled I found that it was partially filled with my old generic and the majority was filled with a new generic which unfortunately seemed to not work at all for me. It was like I had all of the side effects and none of the benefits, I was back to struggling to focus, couldn't motivate my self to get to work. Initially I was scared that the medication in general had stopped working for me but I had a few of the other generic and upon trying them again I found that I was suddenly feeling better again.  I've never had this much trouble with a different manufacturer of a generic before where the alternative simply didn't work at all even though it was the same medication. You could convince me it was entirely a placebo if not for the headaches, loss of appetite, insomnia, agitation and post medication crash still being present. but in the end it simply wasn't doing what it was supposed to do. And anyone who takes ADHD medication knows it's hard to get your medication sometimes in the best of times and right now the shortage isn't helping... Thankfully as of a few days ago I managed to get back on the version that was working for me and it's starting to even out. But I've still been having really bad mood swings, depressive episodes and anxiety spirals. And my dysphoria has been worse than it's been in a year for some reason. 

and now apparently there is a progesterone shortage so my brilliant doctor switched me to an entirely different medication. this would probably not bother me if not for the fact it's in my medical records that the last time I was given this medication, within a week I experienced a deep vein thrombosis, ended up in the ER and was on Heparin for 2 weeks... needless to say I'm not trying that again and will look at other avenues to get the correct medication though I might have to pay for it out of pocket.

I am in a very unique situation with my physical self that goes well beyond the scope for Patreon, I may write something about it at some point but I worry that it would venture in the world of oversharing and is quite personal..Long story short I have a very hard time dealing with the lack of solutions. It's one thing to have plans for how to improve one's self in the future, things to work towards. Ambitions and hopes of feeling comfortable with your self. but it's a very different and lonely experience to be unique enough that even the fringe paths of dealing with things are closed off to you. No amount of money or power can really open those doors for me and it's hard to keep a smile and optimistic view when it feels like the healthiest thing to do is to simply write off my real world existence. If you are curious or want to know more, I'm an open book but I like to try and keep the Patreon a professional space. Feel free to reach out to me on Discord or Telegram, just please include a brief mention of why you are contacting me so I don't assume the message is just random spam. 

More RL stuff: 

Beyond my own personal issues life in the middle of nowhere hasn't exactly been convenient. 

Apparently amazon no longer delivers to my area at all so I'm cut off from my primary way of getting access to things that aren't available locally. and for reference, We don't even have a full size walmart within 30 miles of country roads. Restaurants here come in two sizes. "American Diner" and "McDonalds" and my budget doesn't really even allow for much else. 

It's an odd experience after living in a major city for 7 years to miss KFC and know the nearest one is over an hour away.

Also within the past month

Our tractor,which we depend on for snow removal on our 400 foot driveway, experienced a diesel runaway on the day after the first major snow fall...Which will hopefully be covered by warranty since it's less than a year old

Our TV died, 11 days outside it's warranty. it rebooted randomly then turned off and simply won't turn back on again.

Our clothes dryer died. and it's a weird Chinese thing because my mom didn't want a normal one so repairs are out the window. 

our primary 4 wheel drive vehicle had to be repaired again

Mice ate the wiring in one of my studio speakers which would be almost $700 to replace...so I guess I'm going to try and repair it. But hey, I got a new soldering iron. but  I haven't had headphones compatible with it for years and it's a professional workstation keyboard so it doesn't have internal speakers. Back to FL Studio and my cheap midi keyboard for now. 

But..yea...It's been a month.. 2024 is so far been anything but boring. 

If you made it here, I'm sorry for the wall of text and also thank you very much for your time and I hope you are having a very good day <3