First of all, I feel all better now from a nasty flu and can return to my day job on Monday, among other things, which is of course good news for me, but it also means I no longer have time for responding to that AMA (Ask Me Anything) blog post, since I regained my energy and would rather spend that time working on a new Punk n' Gunk cartoon. Sorry.

Speaking of my future Punk n' Gunk efforts, you may have noticed I recently uploaded a sort of "test animation" with Imabunny recently, where in the description I said I basically managed to use a texture map the size of a Super Nintendo character sprite for ALL the assets of the scene to save on render times.

This tutorial that went somewhat-viral a couple months ago was my inspiration for trying a weird new technique that involves using EXTREMELY tiny gradient image maps and overlapping UVs:

The reason I bring this up is that I basically had an epiphany while working on this. It took me far less time to make, particularly texture, than if I had used the more "triple A video game"-inspired workflows I learned in college with software like Maya and Unreal Engine 3 and 4. My cartoon designs look perfectly fine with simplistic gradient textures with basically no detail (e.g. a fur texture or a normal map bumpy texture), and it fact it looks better this way--it avoids the dreaded "This Will Be Graphics in 2013" look that particularly plagues live-action remakes of once-cute children's characters, the most recent examples being the uncanny-looking dwarves in Disney's recent Snow White remake or the Minecraft Movie (though the latter seems to be doing well despite how much people mocked the initial trailers).

It's like how I recently played Spyro: Re-Ignited Trilogy, compared it to the PS1 originals, and thought that, while Re-Ignited undeniably looks a million times better on a purely technical level, the original PS1 Spyro games look and, most importantly from a graphic design standpoint, READ better with similar less-noisy gradient maps making up the textures and the fact the originals didn't have dynamic, triple-A realistic grass literally obscuring the collectibles you need to complete the game. To be fair, the remake added some new mechanic as a sort of band-aid to the common modern-day gaming problem of the graphics being TOO detailed to make it clear what you can and can't interact with, and it's at least a little less hokey than the "yellow paint on interactive objects" you always see in modern games, but it's a good lesson for me (especially as someone who doesn't seem to live in an area with other artists I can call to make a small indie team, and has to basically make everything myself to ever get any projects done) about the importance of readability and clear composition over adding extremely fine texture detail that most people won't be able to see, especially in the likely event they are watching the heavily-compressed YouTube version of my latest animation on their tiny phone screen. Now if I had the privilege of finally working with a ginormous VFX team on state-of-the-art computers that let me add as much details as I want, and my CG efforts are ultimately best seen on a giant 8K Imax theater screen, then yes, I can and should be spending months on end just "pixel-fucking" each 16K-32K texture to near-perfection, but I've finally figured out as an solo animator that not only should I simplify things for the sake of my sanity, or the fact that you are unlikely to see such fine details in web-optimized videos anyway, but because, as the cliche goes, "limitations breed creativity" and I seem to get more appealing results (at least for cartoon-y characters) if I DON'T use the full grunt of my hardware and its RTX 3060 GPU, just because I can.

Speaking of my hardware, learning this method also seems to have alleviated quite a bit of my personal anxiety about the frankly nonsensical "tariff" situation right now in the United States ensuring that GPUs and 3D-capable computers (among many, many, many other much more important expenses) are needlessly expensive and I should put off any plans I originally had about upgrading to faster hardware. Not only does making my texturing workflow more "solo-artist-friendly" help with the readability of my future 3D animations and my ability to get anything done in a reasonable time, but it makes me less reliant on hardware-damaging (but faster) GPU renders and I will hopefully be able to make my current setup last much longer, ideally until about 2029, and ride out this unavoidable political nonsense--AND reduce the amount e-waste I add to the environment if I can learn to make my hardware last 10+ years instead of just 4 or 5.

It's funny how even in CG animation, having a skilled human behind the screen is still extremely important. I thought I always needed the latest and greatest GPU to get faster and faster renders, but no, it turns there's plenty I can do to optimize my 3D scenes and not rely on "brute force" rendering. The interesting trade-off is that I am actually now using the more realistic (but slower) Cycles render engine, as opposed to the faster-but-less-realistic Eevee, and relying heavily on proper contact shadows and global illumination to help light my scenes, yet it is still faster than what I was doing before because I optimize my scenes, AND it's all on my CPU, no GPU needed. It's like having my cake and eating it too, and I don't need to worry about misguided tariffs against China until or unless my current hardware literally disintegrates out of existence in the near future (I think Americans currently have to pay an extra 145% or 245% on anything remotely made with Chinese parts, last I checked. Good job, Americans, voting for a guy that seems to understand even less how the economy works than in his first term was TOTALLY a smarter choice than voting for the scary brown woman).

I guess, TL;DR, my whole point in saying all this is that if you want learn 3D and Blender, but are worried your computer can't handle it, there are ways to make it work at least for the sake of simple solo animations, and you don't need to make your first 3D animation efforts look "triple-A" or "Hollywood." In fact, if all these hideous Disney remakes, live-action video game adaptations and so-called triple-A video games with immersion-breaking "yellow paint" that refuses to run on your PS5 (even if it was exclusively made for your PS5) are any indication, it may actually be BETTER for your art style development to make something simpler and more stylized that does not require faster GPU rendering at all. It's gotten to the point where standard "Pixar"-like rendering and character designs tend to look "cheap" to laymen audiences nowadays (even if that's the exact opposite of the truth, PBR rendering is EXPENSIVE), and people crave more stylized, 2D-like CG animation, such as the ones found in Flow or the Spider-verse movies. Don't let the fact that your computer is unlikely to be a $4500 fancy CG workstation stop you from at least dabbling in Blender. At worst, you may have to download an older version of Blender (2.79 seems to still be the most popular version) and render with the Blender Internal render engine instead, but of course earlier Blender Open Movies were rendered with BI and still look a million times better than 1995's Toy Story, it's all about the skill of the artist, even on outdated versions of Blender.