Progress Report: 06/02 - 26 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to another in the line of progress reports!Chapter 3 of the EDI comic is finished in terms of its posing etc, so it is in the process of being rendered out. It is my hope that I'll have everything ready by next Tuesday, where comic panel making will begin. A February release is looking effectively inevitable at this juncture.Lulu's project is also making progress. The intro got some more polish (and I'll no doubt revise it more in the future, even if its overarching structure won't change dialogue is still sometimes hard to get right) and I've began to create Blender sessions where all the project's scenes will play out. The primary backdrop will be a game of Blitzball played on a TV screen, shaping the events of the sex scene in the room, which at this juncture is planned to be about 10 minutes in length. If I was to guess the intro's length, I reckon it'll last somewhere between 2-3 minutes itself, with plenty of shots of sex scenes of its own. A de facto "outro" isn't in the plans at the moment, though I do have an ending of sorts in mind, but we will see where script writing leads me as I begin to carve out scenes and poses for the main section, dialectically playing off the Blender sessions against the script and the script against the Blender sessions to see what comes out in the end.Cycles rendering is very stable for the Lulu session, though predictably slow. The main sex scene's 10 minutes alone, rendered at the pace of my low-sample test rendering, would take about 250 hours to resolve, and I naturally have plans for higher sample renders than my test renders. I'll no doubt come up with a way to get it rendered once it's time for it, but this is also the nature of long-form project rendering that simply has to be contended with; this stuff, it takes time, and it'll just have to take as long as it needs since Eevee (which is much faster) is not stable enough to render the scenes I have in mind, and would invariably crash or suffer other issues. Thus Cycles it is, and with that in mind, I keep striding forward.A small hardware update has occurred as well with the purchase of a Noctua NF-A14 iPPC-3000 to act as my chassis back fan, and while it is very much as noisy as the reviews noted it has resulted in significant temperature drops across the board. A heavier test-render had my GPU barely break 70C in Eevee (whereas ~80C was the norm previously) and Cycles rendering barely pushes it above 50C at times. CPU is also comfortably and strictly maintained below 80C even under heavy load, which I will take as a sign that my thermal paste re-application was done correctly as well. This means longer, sustained render periods are not as big a cause of worry anymore in terms of system wear, which isn't just great for the sustainability of my rig but also for my anxiety.The weekend's shenanigans were mostly eaten up by model work, which means we have some Gallery changes:EVE (Stellar Blade) added to galleryKarlach (Baldur's Gate 3) model updateMinthara (Baldur's Gate 3) new model added to gallery, replacing the old oneShadowheart (Baldur's Gate 3) model updateAnd I believe that's it for this week's report folks! As I slowly mosey on over towards the bed to rest, I'd like to thank you all, so much, for your support and kind words. The Less Popular Ladies animation is slated to land on Monday if all things go well this weekend, with the schedule continuing to roll as always. I hope you're all doing well out there, and please do take care of yourselves as well as each other!/DH