Status Update: Getting better, Loving the move to C4D

Sorry all for it being quiet. managed to pick up COVID.....again....  This time from my doctor's office on the 28th of July...It kinda kicked  my ass but thankfully not as bad as the last time. mostly just extremely  tired and can't focus on anything. Feeling better, now I think the only  things left is dizziness,shortness of breath and one of the worst, most  persistent lower backaches I've had since the last time I had covid T_T  

Some updates. The next page is mostly done and just needs to be refined  and rendered, then the page after that is going to be especially fun.  These will actually be the last two pages in Blender/EEVEE. Because the  big news of this quarter is that the move to C4D/Octane is going  extremely well! Picking up with page 20 of the comic we will be in a  brand new rendering engine. expect more teasers soon! I'm loving the  move so far. Cinema 4D is providing much less....resistance... than  blender was.

Blender was often forcing me to redo huge portions of work for no  apparent reason because of either depending on sketchy plugins that I  can't work without or because of updates breaking huge portions of  supposedly stable functionality. For example we are stuck on 3.4 unless I  want to completely rebuild my fur system....again..Which I simply don't  want to do.

So if I have to basically start  from scratch I might as well move to  something that is more reliable in a production setting. I spent a  couple of months trying to make Redshift work for my needs, while the  quality was great the performance wasn't quite what I wanted from it,  Especially since network rendering required additional very expensive  license purchases.

So I made the jump back to Octane. I had used Octane a lot in my  previous, much less lewd professional life and I had a lot of experience  with it. I wasn't sure it could handle what I needed from it but the  good news is that in a resounding YES it can. Plus Octane allows  multiple network GPUs with only one license. The quality is satisfactory  and the consistency is a breath of fresh air. It's not to say that  C4D/Octane never crashes, because in the world of 3D everything crashes.  But unlike Blender I find that things don't break for literally no  reason as often.

While I am very familiar with C4D and Octane from my past unfortunately  most of my knowledge and experience was in Archviz and  advertising...sooooo..not exactly super applicable to doing elaborate  character work. It's been a new set of tools that I'm not completely  familiar with so there has been a long learning process.The good news is  that I finally feel like I'm learning a workflow rather than just  learning the next workaround to a progress ending bug like I was in  Blender.

Don't get me wrong, Blender is an amazingly powerful tool, And It's  never fully leaving my workflow, it's just too good at things. But I  have started to say that "Blender is the best tool for every SINGLE  thing in 3D, but when you try to bring it together into a production  scene it falls apart" Plus it's hard to beat the affordability and  financial safety net of opensource and technically free(Barring the many  necessary plugins) C4D and Octane represents a huge investment and a  significant financial risk because of it's cost. But I'm hoping that in  the end it pays off in quality and speed of production.  

Thank you all for your patience, hoping to share more amazing content soon <3