Devlog #28: Miniatures and Cuddles (Patreon)

This is the story of a dumb dev with a dumb idea for a dumb joke that required 6 hours of setup and 8 more hours of posing.Hello there! I'm gonna get the housekeeping out of the way first: only got 2 and a 1/4 scenes left to render, IN THEORY. I'm still on the pace of being done with rendering by next Sunday (the two scenes left have sex scenes in them and those always take a big longer to pose). Now, for some actual devlogging:I've had this idea since chapter two of having a scene with the roommates sitting around and playing a game. At first it was going to be some videogame, then a card game and finally I landed on having them play Dungeon and Dragons.I got the idea, wrote down the script, came up with the joke, all set......except life is never that easy, innit? (the images that follow are from the testing stages and not representative of the final product)So... DAZ studio has no good "miniature" asset. None. "Ok" I thought "I'll just make my own! I'll just dress a character up in fantasy armor , shrink it down to miniature size and it's done!".Well, not quite. The model may be shrunk, but it's still got more polygons in one of it's boobs than the entire Crash Bandicoot trilogy for the PSX. Also, the textures occupy the same amount of VRAM no matter how big or small the object is.After almost bringing a GPU that can run Baldur's Gate 3 on Ultra at a stable 75 fps (...the 75 is because my main monitor has a 75hz refresh rate) to its knees, I realized had to change approach.Many ideas were floated around. - Billboards wouldn't work (for the uninitiated a "billboard" is essentially a PNG of a character, posed is such a way that you can't tell it's 2-dimensional. I make extensive use of billboards in crowded scenes). The scene needs to be shot from many angles.- Layering different renders was a possibilty, but a time consuming one and I'm never satisfied of the results whenever I do it.- Don't have the miniatures. Nah... I like my D&D very tactical during combat, not a fan of "theater of the mind" when it comes to throwing Fireballs.So, I went technical.A combination of varying elements including scripts that resize textures, shaders, models from older generations (less stressful on the GPU, but worse looking) and clever camera positioning.It's been a long while since I had to work around hardware limitations (though these are not exactly "limitations" and more "at some point there is a bloody ceiling, you twat") and, I'm not gonna lie, I kinda had fun with it.All in all, I spent a bit over 14 hours of work for 40 renders and a joke. The joke being "lesbians play D&D in the most serious way possible". Was it worth it? IDK. For me it was, it was fun and when everything finally worked I was hyped. The scene will still need to go through post processing to fix some minor mistakes.Also, the miniature on the right is my Paladin/Sorcerer Leana. This is my way of immortalizing the legendary PalaMilf with my IRL D&D campaign reaching its conclusion.Thank you for joining me for this slightly more in-depth devlog, see you all next week!