About time I updated the improvement chart~ It's been 8 years now, that's a very long time! Can't linger on the thought too much or else I'm gonna end up feeling old :p

Since last time, improvements haven't been quite as intense and obvious as they were, so you might have to look a little closer on those renders to see the differences. There's this concept on 3D art that 80% of the quality is 20% of the work, and 80% of the work is getting that last 20% of quality, and my first 3 years were definitively me figuring out the "easy" 80% of quality XD


So, to explain the milestones:
Leo... is Leo. lol. While it's not a quality milestone, having my own sona was definitively an important step worth celebrating... never would I have expected people to like him as much as they do, and I'll always be grateful for that <3

The model update was when, thanks to DA and FA *nudging* me, I decided to do some more radical changes to the models, fully commit to the whole underlining lore I started thinking about, the whole "10 years later, post war" sonic timeline I work on... so everyone looks older and have some unique feature that the original official designs didn't.
What I'm calling the "detailed" update is more of a collection of a bunch of tiny detail improvements that happened over a short amount of time, the biggest ones being glove fuzz and improved texture and the 3D eye effect.

The head update was when I discovered the free-flowing mouth technique that a sonic animator was showing off on twitter, and decided to try to implement it on my model. It was a huge jump in quality, maybe only second to the 5 toes update... being able to have 100% of control over the mouth allowed me to much better expressions a lot faster, preventing any sort of ugly pinching or weird deformation of the muzzle shape (Check THIS post out for details on this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/43160384/). Along with this, I also improved the armature for heads, specially Sonic and Leo, along with a whole vore-ready mouth setup.

the 4K update was technically a hardware upgrade, I got an RTX 3060 at that time and, with the new power, started rendering stuff at 4K resolution. Around that time i also started using a new shader setup to make the characters more saturated and shiny, for maximum eye-candy.

The omegafeet stuff is just a silly name I gave my grueling, painful quest for a vector-based foot texture, which would theoretically give me infinite detail. After banging my head against the wall for a while, I eventually broke through and did it, a perfectly crafted footprint pattern. To go with it, I also made a brand new foot model, featuring a lot cleaner geometry and immense improvement to the tops of the foot.

And finally the AGX update, which was... basically the only update which I was FORCED to do. Blender updated some shader and color management stuff under the hood, allowing for a lot more realistic lighting and environments. Problem is... that color management stuff isn't a big fan of high-saturation blue. So basically it was Blender holding me by the neck and saying "You WILL learn how to color grade your stuff. The hard way." Took me a few days... or weeks... to get used to the new stuff, and while by himself Sonic doesn't look any better, you may even argue it might look a bit worse honestly, but when put on a properly lit environment, everything just looks more correct and realistic. I've gotten so many compliments on my recent stuff on how it just looks better now, and I think this has to do with it. Plus I DID learn how to color grade my stuff, so... yea :p


And one last thing, another major "update" was... the launch of my Patreon last year, it's been a wonderful success and gives me so much more security, allowing me to worry less meeting a commission quota every month and letting me work on more creative or big projects, like the pawday animation I posted a few days ago. So to everyone that decided to directly support me, a thousand thank yous, I hope I can continue meeting and surpassing your expectations <3


So... that's that! All left to say now is THANK YOU to EVERYONE! Monetary support or not, I appreciate each of every one of you that appreciates my silly art, thank you for joining me during all these years, even after so long I'm still as motivated as I was day 1, it's an honor for me to be able to call this a job and have all of you along with me!