Artemis DevLog - CH6 (Patreon)

Happy New Week!

Things continue to be productive on my end, as usual. I'm still in the writing segment of development, and last week, I spent a lot of time catching up on technology in the real world When I conceptualized Artemis, which was back in 2020. AI was barely scratching the surface. Fast forward to today, things have exploded in various ways. From art to how we go about our daily lives. And while Artemis is a sci-fi story, I still like to research and adapt a bit of reality into the narrative. While, of course, taking some of that sci-fi liberty to elevate things. Like Artemis' endoskeleton, for example. Graphene is an actual material but couldn't make up an entire skeleton with today's methods and technology. The same goes for space-based solar power, which isn't as farfetched as you might think. And also for one last bit of technology that has yet to be revealed but has been a motif throughout all releases of Artemis—especially this latest update.

I also did some Blender training and am very excited to hone my skills there. I eventually plan to move away from DAZ. DAZ is a great program, but for the work I do, it's become a bottleneck. When working in a scene, I sometimes need to either fix something or modify a mesh or whatever. DAZ has tools for some cases, but they are mostly hacks rather than actual solutions. For example, MC's shirt has a single button that was a pain in the ass. In Blender, I can edit the geometry and delete it altogether with no middleman. In DAZ, editing the geometry just caused more issues than before. Same for Kindra's hair. There's a morph to set her hair behind her ears. But it still clipped through her ears, so I had to export the hair to Blender, mold the hair to fit, then export back and create a new morph. And when it comes to posing, things move that really shouldn't move. Blender just takes away a lot of the exporting/importing, which allows me to just focus on the scene and edit things on the fly. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm also happy to say I finally made more progress on the shirts. I ordered another sample from a different company, and it should be here next week for me to review. If the quality is excellent, I'll move forward with this company. This would be nice because if I had gone the screen printing route, the shirts would have been really limited as I would have to ship these out myself, and I'm trying not to add more on my plate right now with development. For those new, I commissioned a design of DJ Kink and created a World Tour shirt. All the cities listed on the shirt are cities that you guys had requested. So it's as if DJ Kink toured your hometown.

That wraps it up! Thank you everyone! Stay safe and cozy!

- digi.B