whatthesims
patreon
Welcome to the First Production Post - Eastwynne (Making Of)
🕑 Added 2022-06-12 05:28:12 +0000 UTCThis is what I've been working on for a while~
It's wild that I've finally started the animation side of production for Eastwynne. This series has been soooo long in the making, but I'm not even mad because it wouldn't have been as good when I first started working on it.
Some production info:
- This will be rendered in Blender using Cycles. I know that's gonna be insane for render time, but I plan on using a render farm*. Why Cycles? Okay, so, this was originally going to be in Unreal Engine 5, but it was taking hours to export the FBX files of the scene and that just isn't practical. If I have to fix stuff after exporting, then imagine having to wait hours again π€ Why not Eevee? To put it simply, I don't really like Eevee. I'm very envious of anyone who can it make it look good but trying to figure out the lighting is a doozy.
* Speaking of render farms, why Google Colab? Typical render farms are so expensive oml Like $5 or so to render 10 secs of animation??? Not saying it's not worth it but that's gonna be a lot to render a full episode. I want to stress that if you have to re-render things that's a pretty penny. This is why I'm always looking for a render farm that offers an unlimited plan and I only know of 2: Google Colab and RenderStreet. Google Colab is cheaper than RenderStreet but arguably harder to set up and RenderStreet is more expensive but easier to set up. Speed-wise, I want to say Colab is faster since it's using a GPU to render while RenderStreet's unlimited plan is using CPUs. I'm going with Colab because it's honestly not too difficult to set up and it's $10 per month vs $50.
- I've moved on from using Sims models. I'll continue to use Sims CC for the sets, hair, and clothes, but the actual character models themselves will be Daz 3D. Why? I'm not good at sculpting to get the Sims 4 sims the way I like them ππ
- You can watch a preview of the first scene here β¬
οΈ
This is going to be a learning experience for me but I'm so excited ππ½ππ½
If you have any questions about the process ask away~
Comments
Dee
The problem is the Daz 3D characters. This isn't completely confirmed but my best guess is Blender doesn't like the rig or the shape keys attached to the meshes. Trying to animate and edit animations in Blender using the rig/shape keys is a major pain. The FPS drops significantly during playback and it's laggy moving bones. I don't currently know of a solution at the moment, maybe changing to a different body/facial rig system would help? I may actually look into that if it gives better results. I realized this didn't really answer the question, but because of the problems with the Daz 3D characters. This is leading to Blender having some kinda issue processing them, so to export the scene (including the characters and set) to FBX so I can import it into Unreal means it's taking hours for Blender to actually export the FBX. It's taking a very long time to process the data for the export. If you're just using Sims for your characters and sets, this shouldn't be an issue at all, FBX export should be very quick. If you're using any characters and objects that aren't Sims and are difficult to work with in Blender (making the program slow and etc.) then you might have a problem with export times.
K
hi ! i love reading about your process, you truly inspire me!! i wanted to do my own project in UE5 too, i was watching tons of tutorials for it but after reading about export time, i'm nervous. what do you mean by taking hours to export FBX? does this mean that when you rendered a house or something, getting it into Unreal took hours?
