Progress Report, 10/02 - 23

Hello everyone and welcome to another brief progress report!

Somewhat brief in the work department at least as what I have to report is that work, simply put, continues.

In terms of the plans ahead, I'm endeavoring to drip-feed the comic over the near future with weekly updates, as to have it finished as soon as possible, making it the prime focus before I move on to fully focus on the Ivy animation piece. While I'll no doubt be poking away at the latter whenever the opportunity arises, the comic has been in the works for so long now that I really want to emphasize its progression, along with the fact that I am, honestly, highly motivated to work on it and to see it all reach completion.

We've got a lot more pages to get through, having just crossed the halfway point (page poses are done now up to page 66 in Blender) of the main comic, and there's a small "outro", and a small epilogue to get through as well on top of it. On the massive upside, my new GPU facilitates these heavy load scenes incredibly well and renders them out at a fraction of the time it took previously. I truly cannot overstate what a massive difference it is to my old card, so thank you everyone for supporting me and thereby enabling me to get this upgrade!

To juxtapose with my old GPU, singular scene poses could take anything from 15 to 25 minutes to render out, and if I spotted some glaring issue that I hadn't seen in-engine, all I could do was capitulate, fix it, and then sit down and not touch my computer for fear of it all crashing for another 15 to 25 minutes - each and every time. My old GPU effectively had to cannibalize system resources owing to its paltry 6GB RAM, and the scene itself was thus an incredibly laggy mess that was extremely prone to crashes and freezes, where moving a single light, something that should take seconds, could take me a minute or two of fiddling around if it decided to be particularly annoying.

As you might imagine, all this was quite a demanding endeavor in terms of both time and patience, so being able to actually work within sensible time frames is, honestly, what has enabled these recent updates and which will continue to do so - barring some kind of freak catastsrophe that sees my computer (or me) explode or similar.

Knock on wood, things seem incredibly stable, and it seems my cable management is still decent enough to maintain good airflow, the card never really spiking above 70C even on heavy loads. As much as the 4070 Ti has caught flak for its pricing and, shall we say, less than stellar marketing campaign, it has been a godsent and a savior for my work here.

I'm feeling highly optimistic for my future work in this regard, with a rig that can now, adequately, support my more ambitious endeavors. Projects on hold owing to earlier limitations will soon be resumed, and as the comic reaches its conclusion, I endeavor to poll the community in what the next comic project should be about. Lots of things in the works, as always, and it's all thanks to you and your support.

In that sense, thank you, so very much, for your continued support and for all of your kind words. As winter slowly marches on, so too must we, for there is no stopping the coming of spring nor the content I have coming your way. Hope you're doing well out there, and that you're looking forward to what I have in store :)

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH