12/1/2019 WIP Stuff and Status Update.

Megaton Meg says Robo is OK!

Hey, sorry I've been a little quiet the last 2 weeks or so. I have been getting work done, butt I've been going through some personal struggles. Part of that's money, but part of that was an important thing that I needed to address and learn about myself. My perfectionism was getting self-destructive. I got kind of obsessive about the Marah thing without making a whole lot of visible progress on it. I tried to work on it, but I've overwhelmed myself with all sorts of nonsensical details that don't really improve the finished product all that much but waste a ton of time. It's been kind of a running thread with a lot of my work, and I finally came to the conclusion that the perfectionism needs to stop.

Does that mean I'm gonna do crap work from here on out? Absolutely not. I'd argue it's the opposite. I feel like I've learned that I need to just breathe deep and take in the big picture. Programmer mentality is definitely not helpful for art stuff, nitpicking inconsequential details for hours instead of just focusing on a finished piece. Regardless, I needed to take a break from Marah, so I did some 2D art stuff. I also needed to start catching up on commissions.

My last week has been immensely productive for drawing, and today for commission work as well. Got quite a bit of the retopology done on my next commission piece. I intend to try and do as much of this commission as I can over the next week or two with some drawing here and there.

As for Marah, I'm going to reassess the animation in a few days and see what actually needs fixing. I got way too nitpicky and even listed some non-issues with my to-do list, and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels by nitpicking so hard. Sometimes even butchering things by accident. So I'm gonna see what really needs to be done, do it, render, and move onto the audio editing phase. On top of that, I came to the realization that I need to render it in Eevee instead of Cycles. This basically means that it'll have uglier water, but render in 19 hours instead of 19 days straight of 24/7 rendering. I don't think anybody comes here to see beautifully rendered water, so I think that's an acceptable compromise.

But hey, I've been improving the lighting and color balance and stuff. So that's something!

One last thing. I've been really, really tight on cash here. I may end up having to look for a part time job to make ends meet. Kinda depends on the commissions I get this month. We'll see. Either way, now that I've got my head straight, I'm gonna get myself in gear. Expect to see more stuff from me in the coming weeks. For now, I'll see you guys around. Thanks!