Dev Update #49 (Patreon)

DUN DUN DUN! Most of the work I hoped to get done in the way of presets and optimizations is now done. I picked up some other tricks along the way too. Render setup times are really only a bit more time consuming than I'd like due to dforce simulation times now (the thing in Daz that makes clothes drape pretty…or sometimes explode), but I have some potential improvements for that which I can likely implement before the next chapter. Right now I'm exactly where I hoped to be: 2 minutes to setup a new render and check it, if a render requires minimal pose changes; 4-6 minutes for something a bit more complex. New scene setups are about 15-30 minutes, and as I get comfortable, this is getting closer to 15. A bonus is that render times are better than I expected.

So that's the good news. Bad news is that April release is looking dicey. Maybe it happens if the stars align (my spreadsheet that tracks progress tells me it is still within the realm of possibility), but I'm thinking we are looking at a May release. I hate it to go this long between releases, but I still anticipate something happening that will take me 3-4x as long as I expect. Hopefully not, as a lot of these presets and other improvements I've done are meant to minimize that. But I hate to rely on everything to go smooth. It never, ever does.

Things are going smoothly otherwise. It's nice to be able to sit back and setup renders with all my notes for outfits, time of day, characters, etc., and pretty much everything I need available in my own custom folders without a lot of extra cruft. If I run into a small issue, I just add a to do item to update that preset with the correction. Then that gets done at the end of the day or the next. With visual novels needing hundreds of renders per release, it is nice for me to get things squared away to optimize for this specific workflow. If I was doing more one off renders or small comics, I'd have a different set of needs. I am looking for ways to distribute these time savers to patrons who also do visual novel development. Only issue is that what works for me personally, the man who created this stuff, could turn into something useless for someone doesn't know how to use it. I'll have to work on some improvements and short instructions for a lot of these things. Right now, that work is taking a backseat to the VN.

That's all for me. I'll be having some patron-only videos about some things I've learned going live soon. Talk to you all soon!

P.S. Enjoy the previews.