Artemis DevLog - CH5 (Patreon)

Happy Monday!

Thought I'd change the main image up a little just for this week's post. Sort of a preview render and I liked how the weight of Kindra's parent's legacy looms over her as she contemplates. 

Progress continues to go steady, I'm wrapping up another scene today which leaves me with just two more to finish. Some scenes are 50 renders and most others are 1-200 renders. I should probably splice these scenes better, it's something I'm working on. For example, Kindra's walkthrough of the workshop in CH3 was almost 400 renders long (actually it was prob more than that). But this is all behind the scene stuff and it all gets placed into the code in the end, regardless of where a scene starts and ends. Anyway, I am really happy with the performance of the 4090 though as I'm noticing its performance with this scene in particular. The Halloween party had maybe 4-6 full Genesis 8.1 characters in key shots, with OBJ versions of characters sprinkled in the background. That took about over an hour to render at 1080 resolution. This scene has about 15 Genesis 8.1 characters and takes about 40 minutes, rendering at 4k. Granted the lighting is setup differently for this scene and lighting always impacts render times. Also, I render at 4k and downscale to 1080 to avoid using denoising. So far it's been a great method.

On the technical side of things, happy to report I just made a nice purchase on parts for an actual server. The one you've heard me mention here and there is a Frankenstein build of parts used from my past. x299 board and chip with my GPUs from last year, blasted with RGB ram that's screaming "kill me now". I mentioned the increasing size of Artemis as updates continue and how I wanted to host my own links for you guys. Mega/Google/WeTransfer will still be provided, but they all have their issues (except maybe WT). Mega with the obvious 5GB download limit, nice for updates bad for those who download the entire game. GoogleDrive has a download quota that easily gets railed on release days. With the server, you'll get personalized links that are one-time use until you click download again, where it'll get you another link. So, I bought an epyc processor and 512gb of ram and the GPUs are still good, so I'll be transferring those over. But I intend to use this server to send renders to, host links (more on this), host VMs for other things, and also do some After Effects/Premiere work for Artemis. All without stuttering or hiccups. I thought about just renting something, but since I have a background in IT, it'd be nice to just host this stuff myself, get a UPC or two... bada-bing. But these parts are coming in this week. However, I won't be putting it together until after this chapter is released as it's going to require some planning, etc. Which means it'll be Mega/Google/WeTransfer for CH5. But the update itself won't be 5GB so Mega links shouldn't be a problem. Also upgrading the networking I've got here for faster transfers between the server and better utilize my fiber line for downloads/uploads.  My upload speeds aren't terrible but isn't a bad idea to optimize things.

That wraps it up for this week. I'm gonna go refill my jug of water and get back to the grind. Stay safe and keep hydrated!

- digi.B