Animation WIP 122816
Added 2016-12-28 18:16:16 +0000 UTCFun fact: chupathingys turn six years old this month. This was the very first concept drawing , which I posted on my Rooster Teeth profile on December 10th, 2010.
For our December 2016 shenanigans, I've finally made the leap to Blender's Cycles render engine. Compared to the internal render engine, Cycles is designed to turn out more photo-realistic renders with better lighting, shading, etc. One of its biggest benefits is being able to draw from GPU power over CPU power.
Even though Blender updates have trended more and more towards using Cycles, I've been leery of making the switch because:
1. I'm not trying to make photo-real renders
2. I'm rendering on a laptop (so GPU is not a factor)
3. Cycles renders generally take longer (again, on a gat damn laptop here)
4. I would have to reconfigure ALL the shaders in my project, as well as...
5. The compositing node tree.
The biggest hang-up for my past attempts to use Cycles was a lack of support for certain features that the internal engine does natively (wtf no billboards?) most specifically hair strand rendering and the way it interacts with my compositing set-up.
But...! After a week of tooling around and watching tutorials, I finally cranked out something that works (see above!) For comparison, this is my old compositing tree . And to my big surprise: the Cycles renders are a couple of seconds faster, even on a CPU! That's a big deal when rendering lots of test-frames.
I'd talk more about the tree and why I made it like that and why Freestyle can eat my shorts, but TL;DR version:
We're cooking with fire, now.
(There you go, Oro ;)
