Ersatz | Switch to Cycles (Patreon)

Hi everyone,
Firstly, Trench Dogs should be out on the 24th of August if all goes well!

Now onto the post:
With the help of the Patreon, I can afford a renderfarm now! Previously, I was rendering Ersatz on EEVEE due to technical constraints, but now I can comfortably make the switch to Cycles.
Going forward, the visual quality of everything should be a lot nicer. I've also been playing with Blender's new compositor nodes, namely the paint filter.

Generally, I don't like these because a good painterly look should have paintstrokes that are deliberate (the same applies to painting in general). A haphazard post processed paint filter will, in my opinion, make your render look a bit blurry and messy. However, the new paint filter is really customisable, so I used it a little to give a subtle canvas look. I really like this style and I'll keep using it for this animation.

On top of this, I made my own procedural paint stroke instancing thingy, which I did have in the pilot but that was using public domain textures.
What I've done now is setup a system that's something like this:

1. print out a sheet of grid paper
2. paint a bunch of strokes within those grids
3. import a picture of the painted grid paper into blender
4. in the shader node, set it up so that blender randomly picks from a set of texture coordinates that correspond to an individual cell of the grid whenever the plane is duplicated or instanced

This should end up with a lot more variety in the paint strokes in a given shot.

This animation is a sort of tech-demo, animation practice, and quaint lore thing all rolled into one, but I'm very happy with how it looks. I think I've improved a lot!

Again thank you so much everyone! I would not be able to spend so much time and effort improving things without the support of the Patreon.