I'm back...again.

Let's just say it's been a shit year with lots of headaches and depressing things going on.

But now I'm finally able to work on animations again. The Aerith one I was working on earlier this year is nearly finished, and I also got a Halloween one with Marie which I can hopefully finish coming week. 

There is a good chance that these will be the last animations that will be longer than 5 minutes though. I started to realize that I start off with a lot of enthusiasm planing the whole thing out, but once I worked on a single piece for a couple of days, I just wanna get it over with and move on. It stunts my creativity and work flow. Plus it's really hard for me to judge how much time I have to invest. Sometimes I get a minute or two of animation done in an hour, sometimes a single 10 second shot takes me two days to get right. So going in with the ambition of doing "5-10 minutes" simply doesn't work for me.

The other reason I wanna move away from these short films is the rendering software I use. Source Filmmaker is amazing. It's easy to learn and it can run on a potatoe. But it has it's limitations. Even simple things like editing textures is a massive timesink of exporting, editing, importing, realizing it doesn't look good, rinse-and-repeat. But most importantly, it really starts showing its age. Reflections are rudementary, AA is basic and buggy, light sources are limited, polygon counts are low. This is a game engine from 2009. It can look fairly nice, but the limitations are brutal and it needs a ton of trickery for even simple things like bounce lighting or proper reflections. Finally, SFM is horribly underperforming on a modern system. No 64-bit support, no multithreading.

The obvious choice is to move on to Blender. The "problem" with Blender is that it is extremely powerful. It's not as simple to just pop-in some models, fiddle around a bit and voila, you have an animation loop. It's gonna take some time for me to wrap my head around it and make full use of its capabilities. I also don't know yet how well Eevee is gonna shape up compared to full on path tracing in Cycles. In an ideal world, we would have Eevee with some path tracing similiar to how most game engines handle RT at the moment. 

For the moment, I will begrudgingly continue to use SFM and figure out Blender as we go into next year.

For those who have supported me continuously despite the lack of content, thank you. Hopefully things will go better from here on out, for us all.