The FabPharma Board - Monthly Briefing - June '18 (Patreon)

This month I'm pretty excited to bring you some pretty big news. As I briefly mentioned in discord, I've managed to get a much-needed hardware update consisting of a new workstation loaded with 4 1080ti's.

Now I can finally say I've got a pretty decent rendering rig, which opens up a few possibilities including more still frames, bigger resolutions, and finally a really solid step to including animation into the monthly offerings in some shape or form!

So as you can imagine, I've been pretty excited about it ^^ coupled with a few other factors, this should take production into a much better direction that was otherwise hindered before by hardware limitations.

However, this month kinda took a hit from the time spent setting up the new rig. Between tweaking card settings, asset and software migration, and fighting with windows 10 to make it actually not blue screen and play nice with the cards, it took me quite some time to get everything in somewhat stable order for production. On that note, windows 10 absolutely blows... I've never had this many issues pop up with an operating system as I've had with this, to the point I'm seriously considering just grabbing a copy of windows 7/8 for the sake of stability (to give you guys an idea, the rig blue screened a grand total of 17 times throughout this month's production, and that's not even counting pre-patching/updates crashes). 

So for now, the new rig is relegated to being a network slave, basically allowing me to use the video cards for render power with less hiccups if it crashes along the way. Not the most optimal setup yet, but progress nonetheless ^^;

So this month I wrapped up Sadie's story arc (for now anyway), seems most of you liked the cliffhanger twist at the end, so I'm glad the writing for this issue paid off :) there's definitely quite a few lore hints and a lot of story development going on in this issue, and I feel it really required that extra bit of work to make it special.

Looking forward to this month, I've already started tweaking the girls for the upcoming sets, both Denise's transformation as well as Hitome and Cali's story reboot, now formally set within the FabPharma universe on a more definitive note. 

Speaking of the large set, this time around I'm going to be approaching it more along the lines of issues. Since these sets take a few months to complete anyway, I think this approach should add the cool story and layout element you've seen in Sadie's story arc to the images. And since I've finally settled on a skin material blend I'm mostly happy with, consistency through the set should be a lot more... well, consistent!

Don't worry by the way! Same as Sadie's arc, I'll be delivering the set both in regular full res images as well as in comic format :)

Expect at least a rough start of this set in the comic month. There's still a few upgrades I want to work into the girls' meshes before moving forward.

Regarding Denise, we'll start working on her at some point next week. Similar to Sadie's start, I'll be posting a general overview of how the polling will work for our soon-to-be plastic babe, and we'll get started on her soon after.

On animation, I want to dedicate a few days to making something... we'll see what comes of it ^^

So I think that's it for this briefing! Time for me to crash for the night.

- bd