Progress update: Drink your milk (Patreon)

Beware, this is gonna be a more technical post!First of all, I'm almost done with Femshep's anim. It's been a struggle because it's on the longer side and, worse than that, I had to figure out audio for 4 characters. I think it's in a good place now tho, I just sent it to Evilaudio and only need to make one last polishing pass.Second of all, since people won't shut the f... I mean, everyone loves a climax, I've been trying to figure out how to improve that. If you want to do fluids without compromises, you have to use Cycles (Eevee, my preferred render engine, cannot handle transparency and murky fluids gracefully).That's straight-up not viable for me, I don't have a spare PC to render for a month straight. Even with a renderfarm, it would take far longer than I'm comfortable with. And I already crash out because of my output.HOWEVER. That's just the most brute-force approach. A long time ago, I've heard that you can make a render in Cycles and comp volumetrics rendered in Eevee into it to MASSIVELY cut down render times. I've been obsessed with this idea ever since, but could never put it to good use. Until now, when I realized that you can do the opposite.So, the animation is rendered in Eevee, as usual, but without the man milk. In the .blend, I have two linked scenes and view layers. One is for Eevee, the other is for Cycles, with everything except for nut butter set to Holdout (this renders objects as transparent, letting you put it over another render). And... it just works!

This method lets me render sticky white stuff with a much better shader that I, hopefully, won't have to tweak for every scene. At the low, low cost of 1 hour of rendering for 10 seconds of animation (which I can probably reduce).Images aren't final yet, but you get the idea. Very excited about this, in theory this could help with rendering glass as well.Anyway, that's it for now. Have a good weekend!

(this is also a stress test for both platforms' ability to add captions to images, I realized too late that I should've slapped some text on the images directly. Both patreon and substar pass with flying colors though!)