Good time of existence!

Let's not waste any time and get straight down to business.

Today's topics are:1. [Overwatch - Club Blowjob] - animation overview.2. Next animation outline.

1. Overview

Did you watch it? How was it? It was my first animation rendered in Eevee, and let me tell you - it was... just fine. Nothing to write home about, but nothing outrageously bad either. I managed to make it 2:30s for a 2K frame, and it felt like a breeze after Cycles.

And let me tell you, it exceeded my expectations. I was expecting something really bad - light leaks everywhere, broken shadows, etc. Turned out you can make it look decent if you know what settings to adjust.

Now, the question is - would I ever use Eevee over Cycles if I could use Cycles instead?

ABSOLUTELY not, it's a toy compared to Cycles, alright? Let's not get it twisted.Couple things:

It has low-quality lighting.

It doesn't have as many passes, and the UV pass is missing.

It's not as "real-time" as some people like to claim, showing how they can shit out a frame per second. Good one - now set realistic render settings and show me how real-time it really is.

And you know what? None of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. You can make it look good later if you know your pipeline and account for it looking bad in the first place.

The real deal breaker is this - it can't render in tiles. (what?)

That means if you hit your VRAM cap, you're done. It doesn't go slow - it crashes. Before you hit "render" you can select additional passes you need to be included in your multilayer-exr. Each of this passes must be present in memory for a frame during the rendering of that frame, and if you render, say 4k, each of this pa. TLDR, rendering in tiles saves you a lot of memory, cause now an engine doesn't have to keep every pass for a frame in a buffer all the time and if you don't have that and you can't fit everything into your VRAM - you are fucked.

Now imagine this:- You start rendering and leave the PC.- You come back and nothing is done.- Weird. You start it again, wait a bit, then leave.- You come back, only 10% is done and nothing is running.

Why? Well, because during rendering you got a spike in VRAM usage, hit your cap, and it just crashed.And the thing is - it doesn't spike always, but it spikes sometimes.It's not guaranteed there will be a spike, but there might be. One time I had to restart it about 5 times just to finish a single frame and move on to the next one. I'd say it crashed about 20 times total, and you always need to be around and keep an eye on it.

Also, It doesn't have "Persistent data", yet somehow a frame after the first one always require more memory. Weird, why? If I have to guess, I would say it's related to some kind of engine optimizations and

Currently this is the biggest problem for me, and I wonder - what would happen if instead of 2 characters there were 4?

Okay, let's take a look at some images.

While it was indeed Eevee, this is how the original render looks:

Aye aye aye, it is what it is, kind of a Tinder situation over here.I'm sure it was possible to make it look good in 3D, but knowing in advance that it would be a club scene with lots of moving and colored lights, I decided to keep it as plain as possible and do the rest in compositing. This way you're not locked in if you don't like what came out of the render, and you can adjust almost everything.

This was the first test, and I'm glad I decided to change the lighting and keep it neutral.

A touch of compositing magic and we got this:

I've heard Arcane used the normal pass to relight their scenes, but at the time I didn't know what that meant. Now I get it, this time I used the technique myself and managed to transform this plain render into something more colorful - and even made the lights move.

An interesting bit was syncing the light flashes to the music beat using MIDI. I thought I would have to manually animate them, but it turned out everything was already taken care of by other people - you just need to know about it and apply it.

What else? I think that's pretty much it. Oh, you can find more materials about this animation on the cloud drive. There are different animation passes as well as individual images from the compositing progression, so you can go back and forth yourself and see the difference between each change.

2. Next animation

Another Overwatch one, this time with 4 characters on screen. I liked this one, but I think the next one will be better. I think kinetic energy enjoyers would appreciate it.

I was trying different aspect ratios and poses/variants, and I think I'll keep the first one at 2560x1080. I want to keep it wide.This is pretty much it for now.

Take care.