Lae'zel Preview (Patreon)

I wanted to get something up here for Christmas, but EEVEE is still finishing my animation. Just having YouTube on has created a few minor artifacts in a few frames I'll need to rerender later. If I start rendering in DAZ with my Blender operation running, it'll cause all kinds of chaos.

    I realized that I already have plenty of slides to share with you...1100 of them and counting, in 4K. I've got Lae'zel in all kinds of different poses throughout this animation, though she really mixes it up in the ending which hasn't rendered yet.

     So here's a preview of what's to come before the New Year. EEVEE has gotten a lot better with the latest update. It's not as high-fidelity as Cycles but with a little post production, I can get decent stills out of it. I plan to have future animations rendered in Unreal Engine which will give me the best of both worlds: the quality of Cycles, and real-time rendering speed. I'll be able to capture all of the subtle reflections that you get with DAZ renders and real-world lighting. You can see the difference between the animation quality of The Clone Wars, vs the more recent Tales of the Jedi. While most of the character models are upgrades, the added ray tracing makes these current cartoons look much more like live-action.

     Speaking of Unreal, I purchased an on-sale comprehensive Unreal production course that will take me through beginner to advanced levels. I'll be sinking my teeth into it next year and upping my skillset more than any year before.

     I was also able to upgrade to the latest version of Filmora for free, having purchased a perpetual license long ago for a much older and less capable version. I'll be tearing into that program next year as well. I'll likely repost the upcoming video once I've learned enough video editing to be dangerous.

      I also want to go through an advanced tutorial for Affinity photo. You need a certain amount of Dunning Kruger effect to take action in this business, but I'm not as clever at photo editing as I need to be: particularly in the area of lighting and color balance, though there have been worlds of improvement compared to early posts.

     I plan to get much better at lighting my scenes next year. Animations need to be more or less shoot-to-print as fixing them in post leaves fewer options, though not as few as I imagined.

     I'll be looking to add spring bones to Blender character models to produce jiggle physics, something the Veilguard team apparently lacks the capacity for learning. I was thrilled to find out these jiggle bones will transfer to Unreal. For interactive scenes where hands touch breasts, a cage system will need to be figured out, and I'm looking to take that on too this year.

      2025 will be a year of many animations where the more popular scenes from this year will be taken to the next level. I think animated $ shots, though GPU intensive should not be that difficult to pull off. I definitely have the hardware firepower for it.