LuxXeon posted at 5:43PM Wed, 04 September 2019 - #4361216

Well, your physical health is always top priority over anything, so I hope you feel better soon. Now that we know what you're goals are with rendering, I'd say Eevee will be the ticket for you to get the type of results you want. The quality which can be achieved through Eevee are so close to Cycles in many cases you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. Especially if your goals are NPR, then Eevee will certainly do a better job than Cycles in far less time. The trick is just to learn the settings and how to configure them to get the best results from Eevee, and to get your hands on the best shaders for the job. The true benefit of Eevee is that it will work on almost any hardware from the past 8 years. So your current rig should be more than enough to get some stunning and almost real time renders out of it. Let us know if you have any questions down the road and good luck.

Thanks, LuxXueon. I had come to pretty much the same conclusion. I think my next step is probably to use some MB-Lab figures and try to figure out the basics of the kind of rendering I want to end up with. That will give me a bit of an idea of just what level of modeling I need to do, and what kinds of materials I need to work with, to get the end result. I'm sure refining that will be a process, but I don't want to do a lot of detailed modeling and materials creation that's irrelevant in the render. I've watched a bunch of tutorials on toon shading in Eevee, with or without Freestyle, and I think what I want to do should be pretty manageable, but I haven't had the focus to actually sit down and do it. Maybe tomorrow...