thanks! It really helps that nothing is animated- I think if I wanted to animate this, it would probably take another 12 months at least 
Iāve been neglecting my 2D during this project- in a perfect world, I would have time for both, but since I live in a very imperfect world, Iāll probably take a break from 3D for a bit before my next project. I also donāt have any major ideas right now for a new project, so itāll be good to sit back and let concepts ruminate 
Nice Work!!
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
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Even if this would be only 7GB this seems to much.Blender needs some optimisations for huge scenes.Great NPR render.
The more I think about that figure however, the more I donāt understand it. Is it purely because everything was in separate files? Itās not a workflow I have used in Blender.
The scene is not that complex, so why is it so massive? For comparison, I made a scene (wip) here that I consider to use fairly lazy techniques in terms of optimisation. For example, the creatures are separate rigged models that use UDIMs for texturing (10 tiles, 4K per tile - which is overkill, completely). The plants are assets (none are particularly optimised) instanced via geometry nodes. The only areas of comparative simplicity would be the seafloor, which is just made from an ocean modifier on a plane. Both scenes use NPR, but my scene was constructed from PBR textures that were edited to add detail to NPR - youād expect it to be heavier. It renders in about 3 minutes on my 3060 (Eevee).
I suppose it doesnāt matter now the artwork is finished, it just strikes me as odd that it required so much processing power. Unless I am missing that the meshes all have 8 subdivision layers or something 
The linking problems are because of grease pencil line art. Through extensive testing, I learned that linking any grease pencil line art from one file to another, no matter how many strokes, takes 70 GB of RAM, crashes 80% of the time, and upwards of half an hour. Clearly thereās some massive memory leak problems in grease pencil
Congrats! amazing work, love the design of the submarine
While I see that a lot of concept work and planning has gone into this image, I nevertheless have to admit that I have significant readability problems with this. Simply put, without further background reading I wouldnāt even remotely be able to understand whatās going on, or what Iām supposed to see here at all.
It isnāt even clear to me on what kind of environment Iām looking at here - is it unspoiled nature, or a kind of undersea waste dump site?
The female diver - who I know, from reading descriptions, must be somewhere - is hard to spot because the shape is so complex and lacking contrast towards the environment.
The whole āunderseaā aspect isnāt too clear IMO, without all the context given via explicit description. More (stylized) godrays to connect bright spots at the ground visually, and volume scatter/absorption could have helped.
All in all, I appreciate all the asset design work, but IMO the final image doesnāt really sell the effort.
Thanks for your input here, these are really interesting points! Iāve had a few people comment about the readability, which I think speaks to intention vs execution. One common critique is that the divers are barely visible and blend into the background, which is especially interesting because that was exactly what I wanted. Thatās not to say the critiques are wrong, I agree, the execution of that detail is overall poor. Iām just not sure Iād do it that much differently at this point, even with the critiques, because it fits my intention.
The godrays should definitely be stronger, though, Iām 100% in agreement there. They were the last thing I worked on, and I was so worn out from the endless crashes that I didnāt put as much care and precision into them as I should have
