Month end progress report (Patreon)

I'm a little late in writing a progress report because I forgot. But, as the saying goes, better late than never.

Let's start with the bad news. Unfortunately, Chapter 10 will not be ready this year. Although I'm making good progress, there's still plenty of work to do. I'll be finished in December with pretty much what I had originally planned: the whole of Rick's story (Rick-Miri-Ashley hike/Rick-Ashley hike/Rick-Miri at home + Sunday afternoon), and the flight with Cora and her companions. In fact, as you can see in the pictures, I've already gone beyond that, I'm already in the lunch scene with Cora. Overall, I estimate the current level of completion of Chapter 10 at around 75-80%.

The second piece of bad news is that the summer PC failure unfortunately had an unpleasant consequence. To speed up rendering time, I'm using two tricks. One is to delete everything that is not visible in the image (unfortunately a bad feature of Daz3D is that it also deals with objects that are out of the camera's field of view during rendering). I also use a script to reduce the size of unnecessarily large textures. As an example, Rick and Cora's ring has unnecessary 4K textures when they take up barely a few pixels in most images.

And this is where the problem starts, because I have stored the downscaled textures in a separate folder. I didn't have a copy of them, because I only store them temporarily. Usually I delete them as soon as I finish a scene in a location, but this time I kept them because I went back to several settings for different characters and didn't have to keep resizing unnecessarily large textures. Unfortunately, the folder was lost when my hard drive broke. So far I have had no problems with this, but it is a big problem with the island scenes. Most settings now look like this:

As you can see, the textures have been lost, I have to set them up again, which unfortunately adds to the work time. Essentially I have to do what I wanted to avoid by keeping the settings.

But there is good news. I created 254 pictures during November, and these are just the new ones. In addition, there have been some improvements to sections that were previously completed. For example, when Rick and Cora were saying goodbye to Jake and Beth, sometimes Rick was wearing his coat, sometimes he was just wearing a shirt. This is now consistent, no dressing or undressing between two pictures.

I have also made additions here and there, with a few new pictures. For example, if Rick was hospitalized in Chapter 4, then in Chapter 10 Argay now apologizes to him (if Rick was traveling with Cora), and that's an extra point to Rick and Reg becoming business partners.

When will the chapter be finished? For now, I'm guessing February if I keep up this pace. But this could be greatly improved if I manage to buy the new VGA in January. Also, the problem of the lost textures will slowly be solved, because I have already fixed the summer house, for example, so I don't have to redo it.

In the meantime thank you for your kind words, your honest criticism and thank you very much to my patrons for their support. And I'm still available on Discord or here, if you contact me about anything, I'll answer. Maybe not right away, but I'll do my best. Or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Be good and take care of yourselves!