LewdKeyframe
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Renamon WalkCycle and Style Input
🕑 Added 2023-04-24 21:48:16 +0000 UTCHeya! So, I've been rather busy with the character on trying to deal with a million problems that just kept appearing with the character's rig. Specially the legs, because unlike simple human legs, which are very easy and straight forward to rig, digitigrade legs on the other hand are a pain in the butt.
But I think most of the quirks have been removed from it and it should be good. To test it out, I animated a simple walkcycle to test the rig. However, I'm also looking for some input on something before moving forward.
You see, the program I use to do 3D is Blender, and it comes with two rendering engines. EEVEE which is a Rasterization Render Engine and Cycles which is a Path Tracer Render Engine.
EEVEE is essentially, a game engine. Which means, that EEVEE uses optical illusions and trickery to get an approximation of how light behaves in the real world. Keyword is "approximation". Because no matter how much game tech improves, it's only an approximation.
Cycles on the other hand is a Path Tracer, which means, that this rendering engine uses many mathematical formulas to accurately replicate the way how light works in the real world to create an authentic look.
The way how light works in the real world is by the Sun emitting Photons which will then hit on every surface they encounter, bouncing around until they hit our eyes which then gets processed by our brain allowing us to see.
Cycles, does the same thing with some control. A light source in Blender will emit Light Rays which represent Photons, which will hit every single object they encounter multiple times bouncing around the scene until they hit the "Camera" object which represents our eyes.
What I'm trying to get with all of this is that, I can use either engine, but each one will give different results. Take a look at the renders:
This is the EEVEE Render:
EEVEE will give "decent" results at very fast speeds. As reference, each frame from this WalkCycle only took 12 seconds to render. Which is very fast.
Cycles Render:
Cycles gives the best result in just about everything but each frame took 1 min and 20 seconds to render. And I wasn't really using a high sample count. Only 256 samples, which is why the Cycles version looks somewhat blurry. In reality, I would probably have to use close to 1024 samples to get the result you see in the picture posted above. But that took 3 min and 12 seconds to render just a single frame.
So, it becomes a question of quality or quantity. If I decide to use EEVEE, I can create longer animations, maybe even 2 min long without having to leave the computer on for several days of rendering. But, I would be missing a lot of features from Cycles and in general the quality would be inferior.
But if I use Cycles, I can really try to squeeze out as much detail and realism as I can from every single animation. The drawback would be that animations would only be about 30 to 40 seconds long, and it would probably already take several days just to render an animation like that.
But some of you might be asking, why not just endure the long render times and go with Cycles anyway? Well, let's do some math. Let's use the render time of the walkcycle. If I wanted to render a 2 min long animation which is 2880 frames, and each frame takes 3min and 12 seconds to render. It would take me 153.6 hours to render, or 6.4 days. But because I won't leave my computer on 24/7, it's going to take more or less 12-14 days of rendering. And in the meantime I can't work on anything else either because rendering takes all the processing power.
But this is why I don't want to make a big decision like this by myself. My Patreon has gained a lot of positive traction and I think it's better to listen to all of your opinions on the matter.
Should I use EEVEE for less quality but longer animations, or Cycles for more quality but shorter animations? Or maybe the third option where I use Cycles and we'll just endure the long render times, I would personally like to avoid this simply to spare my computer parts.
Please comment and give your opinion. It will greatly help me make this decision.
