zigzagg

I figured it out!!!

Added 2022-12-15 06:50:53 +0000 UTC

...Although not quite as expected. As a sort of last-ditch attempt, I went and gave Blender's EEVEE rendering engine a shot. Unlike the rendering engine I usually use -- Cycles -- EEVEE is closer to a videogame engine like Unreal or Unity than to something Pixar or Dreamworks would use for their movies. It's less physically accurate, and just in general more finnicky. BUT it's raster-based, so there's basically no noise. For the longest time, it could not handle fur very well. Last time I tried, a year or so ago, it kept crashing on me.

But this latest version... it works! I uploaded a side-by-side comparison (1st image is EEVEE, 2nd is Cycles). Now, these 2 images will never look identical. That's a fool's errand to try and achieve -- and I still need to tweak a couple minor things like the shower stall glass in the right of the frame. But the EEVEE version does look pretty stinkin' good! If anything, there's more fur detail because noise tends to obscure that. And it renders in under 2.5 mins per frame, which is faster than even the noisiest attempts I made with Cycles.

So we're back on track! I'm gonna go to bed now (because it's like 2am and I have to be up early tomorrow). But tomorrow after work, I'm gonna make a couple more tweaks and put the render back in the oven!

Thank you all again so much for your patience! I try to post every week, but then sometimes this happens. 3D art can get a bit unpredictable like that. And I don't wanna just post a noisy meh thing, and go, "Yup, here you go!" Y'all deserve better!