Dev Update #48 (Patreon)

So, what has old Roy been up to? Thought I'd give an end of the month check in here as I've got some great progress to report. This is going to be a long one.

As I mentioned in my last update, I've been working on ways to reduce all the decisions I need to make per release. Since there are usually a lot of choices per scene, and even many from render-to-render, it would be much better if I had a lot of things not only decided beforehand, but also tested and customized for what I need. Daz will never be a drop people in and immediately render thing, but there should be ways for me to make this easier. I'm not the only dev with this idea either.

So it's time to reveal a bit of what I've been working on. There were some issues that needed to be fixed with some characters. Some weird things that you may not have even noticed, but that made things like posing, expressions, and certain camera angles a massive pain. Those are pretty much resolved with my Genesis 8.1 conversions for main or secondary characters. In addition to that, I now have a large library (anywhere from 35-90 per character) of expressions uniquely suited to each character. Plus, these match my ideas of what different expressions look like, rather than the label applied by some Daz PA. This also helps with certain characters, like Estrid & Eliana, that are a bit more difficult with expressions that don't make them look extremely weird. In addition, I finally fixed a ton of outfit issues for the characters and saved these as wearables for easy use in renders. Going forward, I'll gradually build out the wardrobe for some characters, and this will make it much easier to ensure I don't get weird things like vacuum breasts with the busty gals. Even the background characters got some massive overhauls with presets like full res, low res, and very distant, all to help VRAM usage and loading times.

Lighting and character placement in scenes is yet another difficulty that I've just been dealing with per scene with gradual changes each release. I am sure I don't have lighting completely figured out, but I've got a much better handle on it now. Minimal noise, much improved render times, and realistic/interesting lighting for scenes. I've broken down each environment into areas where I'll place characters. Lighting and cameras are already setup here, with just minor adjustments for things like character height and angle that will need to be done once per scene. I've even got it setup for areas where I might place multiple characters. My new camera rigs immensely helped here, and I've got generic lighting rigs that helped in this prep, as well. Most importantly, possibly only to me, is that lighting from practicals (lamps, sunlight, etc.) is right around where the characters will go. The only thing I'll have to tackle is when I setup the lewd scenes, but I figured I'd wait to do that until I start doing those scenes in the environment. Chapter 7 will have plenty of opportunity there.

That really leaves posing, and I am working through a set of my own poses for males and females. I've some ideas for variation beyond the standard stuff I'm creating, but poses are one of the most difficult things. You don't want clipping, larger characters (or those with large breasts) cause problems with poses designed for standard Genesis 8 characters, and a lot of poses will magically transport your characters in a scene or apply an expression too. Very soon I'll have a library of poses that I know work with my more full figured characters, with small adjustments needed based on body type. I'll also have a complete set of partial (upper, lower, and, if needed, hands and feet) poses here. To round things out, I'll have my own presets for holding things like goblets, jars, and weapons that I use in TBaK.

Now, why all this work? Well, it needed to be done for me to have any hope of regular releases in the future. It also needed to be done so that, when I inevitably find ways to improve, I can quickly update a preset or two without having to go through and change dozens of things. I've already seen this be helpful with the few issues or corrections I've needed already. This all reduces my mental load when I'm working on scenes for the game. Instead of checking about 20-30 different things, I'm checking around 3-5. It reduces the potential for redos, which are always annoying, and it has reduced render times, as well. And did I mention that I'm doing high res thumbnails for all this stuff, so I can have a clear idea of what it will actually look like in a render? Beats the very small Daz preview thumbnails with a lot of assets, I can tell you that.

Here is how these improvements (even though they aren't completely done) have helped, so far. Typically the initial setup of a scene, and by that I mean an environment with characters, would take me about 1-3 hours. Then each render in that scene would take me 7-25 minutes to setup. If I had substantial pose changes, characters interacting closely, or say a clothing or lighting issue, I'd easily hit 25 minutes (sometimes more). In a release with well over 1000 renders and around 30-35 scenes, you can see the time involved here. It's why so many VNs do that classic first person perspective with high shots and mostly only expression changes. Those are quick and much less error prone. Now, with a scene that has most of the things I need as presets already, I'm spending about 20 minutes on initial setup and about 2-4 minutes per render on setup. You can see the massive improvement here. With my systems, I never had much of a concern with render times, but those being lower means that I can more quickly preview things and helps ensure I can easily get renders completed overnight in the render queue.

So all this is both to reduce my risk of future burnout and deliver excellent releases more quickly than I have been. Oh, and allow me to have more of a life outside of my full time job and this VN. For those of you anxious to get your hands on some of these presets for your own use, once I put everything through its paces in Chapter 7, I'll be happy to share what I legally can (some stuff uses purchased texture packs and other stuff that I cannot redistribute). I've included some previews of things here in the post (NONE of these are game renders). Almost none of these have postwork, and they were designed to help me test various presets and changes before I moved forward with them. Talk more later!