Updates (Patreon)

I managed to finish the second and final back cover image. This one went much more smoothly than the last one. You can see I applied proper depth of field and hopefully a tasteful amount of denoising. The promised 24 images of new content are half-way through rendering. It's smoking stuff. I'll turn the engines back on while I begin to post-process the final boss: the Suck Session front cover. I may need to hit pause and spot render in a few places. Worst case scenario: I finish the front cover late tonight and render the rest of the new content images overnight for a Saturday post.

      I'm moving up my timetable for the final release of the graphic novel by forgoing the following planned post-processing steps.

I purchased Topaz Photo AI a while back so you don't have to. Everything I run it through comes out worse. The denoiser distorts the fingertips. The auto light and color balancers take the i out of Ai and throw everything out of balance. I can't think of a single redeeming feature. I will not send my project through any of those processes to put a "final polish" on things.

      I am also opting out of applying additional de-noising. It smooths out the skin tones at the expense of making the surfaces look more cartoonish. The Blender Scene where Kojika and Visola hook up was rendered with the denoiser on by default. It's good to know that I may be able to get more human-like textures in Blender with the denoiser shut off. You can see the difference in aesthetics between that scene and the others. I think both styles look good in their own ways.

     Because there is such a tradeoff when it comes to denoising, I'd have to spend hundreds of hours hand-painting all the frames for even an arguable slight improvement. It's unnecessary.

     One additional post process that I will perform is in the area of upscaling. Some of these renders are cropped and I want every frame to be in at least true 4K. Topaz does have a dedicated upscaler program that truly is the best on the market.

     With those things in mind, I can't imagine I'm more than a month away from a release.

    In other news....I have Covid. I'm taking some time off from my day job to recover. I'm still strong enough to get some work done in my studio at a slow and steady pace. The extra time at home will make up for having to take a lot of breaks.

     In additional news, I've managed to successfully install the FULL 28GB version of FLUX. Very few rigs are powerful enough to run this but mine made the cut. Now I have no intention of turning this into an AI art page, but Flux may prove to be a cog in my pipeline for creating 3D props, sets, animations, and even characters.