ZMSFM
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December hiatus update! + Schedule + We're so back! #4
🕑 Added 2024-12-30 18:52:37 +0000 UTCFinal Update post!
Helloooo!! This will be my final update of the hiatus month!! It's been insane, I got so much inspiration, I had so much fun playing games and learning new things about Blender!! Honestly felt amazing and can't wait to go back to animating!
As much as I love making images and always wanted to spend more time making them, perhaps because I made too many of them this month, but animating is simply so much more fun to me! :D
This post is gonna be about the things I learned this month and... Well there's quite a bit of stuff to talk about so I will try to keep it as short as possible and perhaps go more into detail in future when I use them in animations :D
Schedule
For my return from the Hiatus I definitely had to bring you some Resident Evil action! >:D Plus I finally played the 3 Remake this month so I definitely had to make something!
Then it's gonna be a Marvel Rivals animation! While not a big fan myself of Marvel especially since Thor Love & Thunder, I want to make one and see if you like it and eventually if you want more I'll make more! :D
Other than that a Mass Effect animation and the return of our beloved Monthly Customised Animation!
Here's what I learned this month!
Figuring out a style:
Two of the biggest issues I had in the past were:
Not having a light setup
Wanting to be Cycles but using Eevee
Well something I learned is that you can't come up with a style and stick to it. Your personal style is something that develops overtime and can't be forced upon yourself!
But I spent a lot of time figuring out a lighting setup, I've written all the main light effects and tricks I personally like and how to setup the lights for Cartoonish and Realistic scenes. Basically I created a guide for myself on how to light a scene. This not only has drastically improved my light but also made it waaaaaay faster for me to setup scenes, improving both my mood and the time I can dedicate to smaller details. Absolutely life changing improvement!
As most of you probably know I use Blender EEVEE render engine and I always advocated for how amazing it is. Nevertheless I always wanted to achieve Cycles's quality in Eevee and it was one of the things that pushed me to improve and learn more and more about realism in Eevee.
Truth is that it's just silly to want something to be what it's not meant to be so I stopped trying and paradoxically in these last few days I managed to achieve a way higher realism and quality than before! I just focused and dedicated my time into making Eevee a better version of itself and it paid off! I can't wait to show you what I've been making for next month! :D
List of things I learned!
New Brush Tools.
Figured out lightings setup.
Improved the constraints, modifiers and materials for cum covered variants.
Improved a lot my knowledge when it comes to working with liquids: Cum, Squirting.
Better usage of shadows both in cartoonish and realistic settings!
Usage of sheen node to increase sharpness, create rimlight, improve cartoonish scenes and more
Manipulating the world and scene in a more free way, no longer focusing solely on how things should look realistically but how things can look to improve the composition and beauty of a shot. It's a 3d world, I should manipulate it for artistic purposes not only for realism.
Light linking, Exclude lights from affecting certain objects or make it so certain objects won't obstruct the light. Amazing feature especially for creating unique light effects.
Improved both my shadows and raytracing settings
Layer animation addon, one of the most life changing addons that allows me to animate way more accurately, way more details, faster and cleaner. On top of that introduced me to NLA.
NLA (Non linear animation) I'm still testing and learning it but it has great potential for the reasons listed above.
Layer weight node, for many cool effects.
Simple VFX effects through the use of textures, a trick that they've been using in games for long but I never thought about using.
More studies on soles, especially the texturing.
Drawing scenes beforehand as when drawing it's easier to come up with angles I usually don't think of, then using a split-screen on the viewport to have the drawing/storyboard as reference
Rimlight from the use of large point lights to fake rimlights where light normally wouldn't reach.
Learned more about light probes, how to use them better and solved an issue that caused light flickering from using it.
EXR render format. Another amazing thing I learned is to render in EXR instead of PNG, I'm still testing it and learning how to work with it efficiently but it's been one of the best things I learned this month.
How to work with EXR files in Premiere though as I said, I'm still learning. But I'm aiming to transition to Davinci Resolve and step by step get closer to cinema standards! :D
How to work with render passes, how to combine each passes with eachother in the compositor and create a beauty render for Eevee. Only issue so far being with the Depth of Field but will figure it out soon I hope.
And to end. how to create Depth of Field in the compositor finally achieving one of my dreams. Full control on the DOF.
Funny enough... That's not all, many other things I'm still studying!
In conclusion:
Well this month has been amazing, I learned so much and relaxed so much and I'm so glad I decided to take a break because it's been so instrumental to my personal and professional growth. Maybe the best thing I learned is that I really like animating and no amount of relaxing and free time can keep me away from studying and learning more about Blender!
See you next month frens! Happy new year and thank you for your amazing support and company through the years!! :D
Comments
Trapped In Neverland
Ah ok! I think I was just getting the folder links from the discord but relying on Patreon post for the titles so I’ll try to check out discord ones. New releases folder would also be cool if it’s not too much extra work! Thanks!
ZMSFM
Hihi! I actually write the titles of new releases when posting on Discord so if you have Discord you can check the releases from there :3 Unfortunately I can't do more on the platform for reasons. But if it's a big issue I can in future create a "New releases" folder where I put the new releases of the month! :3
Trapped In Neverland
Glad to hear the process was so successful! Very much looking forward to your new work flow Super duper small request for the future posts when animations are up: For whatever reason when navigating the web browser based drop box, it doesn’t let me consistently sort the folders by newest modified so sometimes finding what the new animation actually is (as you will usually only say the character name and which main folder it’s in) can be hit or miss. Small nitpick but personally I would super appreciate it if you could either include more in the post to tell which animation is actually newest or perhaps let me know if I am missing some hidden filter option to get the sorting working correctly. Thanks and happy new years!
