Update

First, as always, I’d like to thank everyone for their comments. I haven’t posted anything recently, but as some of you may know, I’m doing a bit of research into rendering alternatives for future CGI animations. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that people like to feel informed about what’s going on, so from now on, I’ll attempt to provide some updates with regard to progress, even if that doesn’t involve posting actual artwork.

In addition, (and as a change of pace from work on the CGI animations) I’m going to try to do some one-off pieces of artwork each consisting of a single ‘frame’ only. Whatever I start to do always seems to grow in scale (and effort required) as I develop it, so as a counterbalance to that, I’m going to do some stuff that strictly consists of one frame only, keeping to that as a kind of rule. These one-frame efforts could also function as a precursor to more ambitious projects.

With regard to the CGI side, I’m progressing OK on “Snapper” using Unreal Engine 4 as the renderer. I’d already briefly considered Source Filmmaker as a possible candidate for producing animations, but after receiving a comment about it, I took a more in-depth look. It’s certainly got some good points (such as automatic lip-synch and creation of the animation within the application itself), but the process for preparing custom models is extremely involved, and the rendering doesn’t seem to be as good as the physically based rendering available in Unreal. It looks like Blender will get a real time PBR based viewport renderer in around a year’s time, and if that’s close to being as good as the UE4 renderer, then that would be terrific! It would mean being able to do everything (apart from editing) in one application, with instant feedback on the final render. In the meantime, I intend to produce some stuff using Blender + Unreal.

“Visitors” is on hold at the moment, but with a little more work, the next frame will be finished, so I’ll be posting that before too long (probably shortly after I upload “Snapper”).

Regards.