Update (Patreon)

Hey guys, I appreciate all the feedback and support from last week, and I've put a lot of thought into it. I've still been busy and likely will be for the rest of the year due to the holidays.

I guess I'll start by talking about the movie. What I have done is go through loads of Mass Effect props to re-make some more Omega style builds. I've got a lot of suitable props selected and some ideas... though I haven't really translated it into much. It seems I've hit in inspirational low for the movie, which seems all too easy when Mass Effect is as irrelevant as it is these days. Nonetheless, I want to create a better plan for the movie. Part of me wants to bulk out the movie with more story, animations, and keep all scenes for variety, and part of me wants to strip down the movie to the top 5 most favorite scenes so I can just finish it.

The other update is on Blender 2.8. The beta was recently released and I've tried it very briefly. The real time rendering engine Eevee hasn't impressed me too much, but I've not had much time messing around with it. It looks decent but the shadows have been fairly glitchy. That said, it wasn't ever meant to replace the realism that Cycles provides. It can certainly do the job of much faster render times. With some effort and optimization, it may be a reasonable for animations.

More importantly though, the UI is so much better. They've defaulted to left-click select. For anyone who hasn't used Blender before, it used to be right-click, and you had to go through menus to change it. That in and of itself isn't so bad, except that Blender had a habit of terrible hotkeys and UI. The next big one is spacebar. Pretty much any program ever has spacebar as play. Old blender was like alt + a. It was pretty awkward and it also wasn't an easy hotkey to change. What time I spent messing around animating in Blender was made so frustrating by fucking up simple hotkeys. There's also layers, called collections. Before, layers were just boxes with no labels.  Now, collections are pretty much equivalent to SFM's group system with labels and icons.

There's more to play around with and adjust to, but initial impressions of 2.8 are fairly good. Usability just seems so much better. 

I think that I've been stressing out about my projects much more than I should. You guys have been really supportive, and I've set my own expectations much higher. I'm going to try to relax a bit more with the busy holidays. Plan out the movie better. Play around with Blender 2.8 more. As a bonus, I'd like to get some sort of SFM loop done too just so I can do some animation.