(Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress!)

Following last week's successful Blender transition, experiments with Blender's Eevee rendering engine have been ongoing. While initial tests show render speeds up to 10x faster than our current setup, fine-tuning lighting and material settings is needed to match the quality standards.

• Blender's Cycles Rendering Engine
  Physically accurate, light-based, but very hardware intensive and time-consuming.
  
  
• Blender's Eevee (10 x faster)
  Real-time, rasterized rendering with physically-based materials, offering speed and interactivity at the cost of perfect accuracy.
  
  

Technical Optimizations

Alongside engine testing, necessary optimizations have included:

• Reducing character texture VRAM memory usage from 8GB to under 1GB per character
• Baking complex shader networks into simplified versions
• Scaling texture resolutions from 4K to more efficient 2K/1K formats

These optimizations will benefit performance regardless of which render engine is ultimately chosen.

Current Progress

Scene 4 of Chapter 1 has reached a milestone with completed environment modeling and character posing. The lighting and final renders are on hold pending the optimization efforts and potential Eevee transition.

Blender Migration Update

The switch to Blender continues to prove its worth:

• Significantly faster posing workflow
• Improved customization options
• Enhanced overall productivity Though we occasionally encounter stability issues with more complex scenes, the benefits far outweigh these minor setbacks.

Looking Ahead

Focus remains on:

• Completing the Eevee rendering engine tests
• Finalizing character texture optimizations
• Implementing the optimized workflow for faster scene completion

It's exciting to see the progress, week-by-week. Even if it hasn't yielded renders, it's yielded valuable knowledge and more solid workflows. ❤️

Don't forget to check out the progress on the Trello progress board.