Developer's life - Renders part 1 (Patreon)

Hey everyone! 

I wrote This old post a while ago, and it didn't reach many people. I am resending it to all my supporters so you can understand what I am doing when I say I am tweaking an environment and why it can take time. And if you show interest, I might consider bringing this series back to life if and when I have spare time. Enjoy!

It's time for another episode of Developer's Life, the series where I show you how I develop the game and give you behind-the-scenes footage.

You can say that visuals are 50% of a visual novel. And you are right. Visuals are extremely important. In this episode, I will give you a high-level overview of the tools I am using and show you some new footage from the latest scene of Chapter 1, part 2. You will see how I transform a bland environment into a live, vibrating one and take it from raw to wow. I'll try to give you a taste of what it is to develop a scene from scratch. I'll take through the phases one step after another.
I want to keep it simple: I'll talk to you in my own words and share my own experience.

Let's start with the primary tool that produces a lot of 3D visual novels today: Das Studio. DS is software that lets you manipulate objects in 3D space. There are more advanced tools that allow you to sculpt 3D models, but I am not using them yet. Although I want to learn them, they don't give me any edge, and learning from scratch is time-consuming, time that I don't have now. This won't push me to release more quickly; it will slow me down for now.

Let's take a look at how the software looks:

This is where the magic happens. This is the workspace where we can start dropping some characters, environments, props, and lighting to create a scene.

The next scene takes place in Mercy and Dianna's home kitchen. Let's load it into the program.

Here, you see the kitchen in texture mode. This mode is pretty light on PC resources, and I can manipulate the object in the space, see the textures and colors, and pose the characters and the props. This program has several rendering engines; the one that gives the most realistic rendering is Iray from Nvidia. Let's switch to it and see the result.

This kitchen looks good, but it is quite a dark image. I want it to look great. I'll walk you through the steps that will make it great.

The image below is an in-progress image.

Let us concentrate on the kitchen wall, for example, how the tiles differ. Look at the lighting and how it breaks on the tiles' cracks. Look on the left how there is no texture for the kitchen wall. Look at the dull fruit bowl on the countertop. Let's zoom in on that and understand how we change things to look much better.

First thing, let us look at how it looks. We zoom into it.

 It doesn't look good. It is supposed to be oranges. It doesn't look like oranges. It's ok if we don't zoom in on it and look at it from afar. But you can see that this has a low definition and low polygon count. It's not round; it has rough edges. Although we can fix it, I don't like it. It's not realistic enough for me. I'll remove it and change the countertop to make it look different. I'll discard the bowl, move the kettle to the left, and add a big, expensive automatic espresso machine fit for rich people like the Mayers family. I'll also change the left part of the kitchen and copy the same pattern the kitchen has on the right. For all of that, I'll add new immersive light that will light the whole room, and this is the result:

I also changed the countertops to HD granite and removed the pattern. I changed the fruit bowl of the pairs to lovely, vibrant fruits that I sorted myself from the props I had in my library.

This won't be the final result because I will add stuff inside the transparent counters.

And now you understand why it takes time to modify and transform an environment from good to great. It already looks much, much better. Now, we need to add more props to make it even better.

I'll show you one more environment, both as it looked raw and after I added my touch to it.

Before:
It started with literally nothing.

After:
I have created a new space from props. I added every little detail here: the plants, shelves, tables, school logo, lights, the floor, everything.

Quite a change, don't you think?

I don't want to overload you with information, so we will stop for now. Next time, we will explore where we get the objects, how to add them to the software, and how to use them in 3D space.

Feel free to ask any questions. I uploaded all the images as attachments so you can look into them in detail.

Thank you for reading,
DogCat