The "new" Patreon and a fancy new Unreal Engine Shader (Patreon)

Hello Supporters!

I wanted to share some sweet renders I've made today, and also let you know about some changes our friends from Patreon have introduced. This affects how we can/have to communicate going forward. Grab a drink and have a quick read, or scroll ahead to the pictures if you're in a hurry.

The New Patreon

So Patreon (like all other tech companies) are in a constant state of flux. It's been 10 years since they came to be, and countless platforms have now natively integrated the financial support features that we've come to love. As such they want to innovate for the coming decade, and some of those innovative features are a shop, a new fuzzy logo and the way we can communicate on Patreon.

The logo is now a fuzzy non-descript letter P that apparently is as vague as most creator's visions, and the shop feature is a welcome addition through which I may offer private sessions like I currently do over on Ko-fi. The messaging thing is a ad trickier: up until now, you and I can only communicate privately via direct messages. It's restricted to text though and we can't share screenshots, nor can we communicate with multiple users at the same time. Discord alleviates all this, but Patreon decided they'd like their own Discord-like feature called "chat", and it's now available on my account.

While this is a nice touch, it's currently only available on the new Patreon mobile app, NOT on Desktop. You may get a message saying "Jay started a chat", but all you get is a barcode without an option to access said chat - unless you whip out your phone. At the same time, the old messages feature is currently only available on Desktop and NOT on mobile, or rather it's a tad hidden and I can't access a central "messages" option anymore like I could before. This means I may miss messages you send me due to that aforementioned state of flux.

We'll see how this pans out, I'm sure it'll change before we know it, I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you see weird things happening. If you're game, drop me a line in this new chat feature and we can hang out as a group. It's like the YouTube live chat without video and well... probably not live, more like on a time delay 😄

Cadet Shader Tests

Let's talk about merrier things, namely that new Cadet Shader by Michal Patton I've discovered yesterday. It's a rather complex real-time post process volume that adds a painterly effect to your output. Check this out, it's one of JoeQuick's Toon Characters:

I'm still fiddling with sliders, but I'm excited about the myriad of parameters I can adjust and get something completely different out of Unreal Engine. Here's another variation:

As a comparison, here's what my boy looks like with regular lighting.

Very different indeed. We can change the strength, bring our own textures, and it should work with animations too. I'm looking forward to digging in over the weekend if I have the time. 

And speaking of the weekend, I've got a couple of videos I want to record on my list: one is about packaging a character for distribution, and another installment of Daz to Unreal in German. 

Until next time 😎