Weekly Report Number 99.

"I had to remove the image of the four shirtless men because maybe that's what's causing the issues. First time in almost two years that I've had problems with a post. Apparently, a shirtless man is classified as nudity... That's why I can't make public posts or I have to be extremely careful with them."

Hi guys!
Since I don't have any spicy images to share this week, I decided to make this post public.

This week was full of experimenting, headaches, and the occasional insult thrown at the screen, but I’m moving on... there’s no time to dwell on things more than necessary.
I'll give you a deeper explanation about those headaches later, but first, the important stuff.

This week I created 3 new locations for the competition and rendered 94 new images. In the pictures above, you can see two of those three locations. You'll get to see part of the third one when I explain the whole headache situation xD
This brings us to 103 images for the next update... and for anyone who hasn't been following the other posts, I've already created over 2,000 lines of code, plus all the images and videos of each one of the characters for the new info interface. It goes live near the beginning of version 0.6 and it's already completely done and operational.

Another thing some of you might have missed from the private posts... These images are for version 0.6, but they're just one of two paths. This is what you get if you go with the "Safe" route, designed for those who'd rather not see the girls on MC's team getting into strange situations (you know what I'm talking about).

The last image is from moments before the men have to start the race and do their thing. After that is when the headaches begin...

Those 94 images from this week actually cover 5 days instead of 7, because I’ve been stuck since yesterday dealing with some absolutely necessary and unavoidable problems.
Don't worry, nothing's wrong, it's game-related... I don't have any problems xD
After the men start the race, the next task is animating Josephine running and having a mishap along the way. I’ve had the scene in my head for a bit and this was the moment to bring it to life, so it was time to try hair animation for the first time. Pay attention to the fact that I said "was"...
Do you want to see something complicated and a bit technical? No? Okay, no problem, here it is anyway xD

There are hairstyles in DAZ that come ready to animate (though it's still easy for them to be a pain to work with), but Josephine's isn't one of them. So I have to do everything myself. As a first step, this literally involves painting the hair to create weight maps... this is what I got on my first simulation attempt to see how effective my painting was.

Weight maps define which parts of the hair don't move, which move a little, and which move the most... My first attempt at painting was bad; the nape area should've stayed still. I spent a few hours on that until I learned how to paint it right, but shortly after, I ran into a bigger problem I couldn't solve. Josephine's hair simply refuses to obey the laws of physics xD
Those two long ponytails move by themselves and defy gravity; it's no joke. At that point, I was so fed up that I just threw Josephine to the curb.
Next on the list was Sophia. First try and the painting came out excellent; even the first simulation attempt, wind included, was really good...

It seemed beautiful... it seemed... I didn't do anything but add some side and front movement to the neck, nothing sharp, just smooth motions to simulate the head moving while jogging. That was it, and the hair started to explode. You've never seen hair exploding? Too bad, because I didn't save any images of it. I'll show you in some other public post so you can laugh and say "what the hell is this?"... Yep, that's exactly what I said, and I wasn't in the right headspace to take a screenshot...

Another couple of hours trying to tweak the values on my own so the hair would behave like hair and not like fireworks... Nothing. Almost ready to give up, I consulted Gemini, which usually gives me good results on technical stuff... So I followed its advice and achieved... nothing. Total crap, bye Sophia.

After a few minutes of cursing and a cigarette break, I got back to Josephine, set on animating everything by hand. Enough with the shitty hair simulations.
I haven't reached the hair animation stage yet. What I'm about to show you is something else... This was my first attempt using my usual tool, the FoM (Fuck-o-Matic)... Scrapped it because I couldn't get the timing right; it's a pain in the ass trying to animate someone jogging, even if it's not a full-body view.

That animation is obviously incomplete, no expressions or anything, just partial body movement... but that was enough to know it wasn't going to look good.
Actually, it was scrapped mostly because of a technical timing issue. That GIF is slowed down quite a bit. The animation was created at 40 FPS, keeping in mind potential timing problems, like having to speed it up or slow it down when encoding to make the movement more realistic. But the damn thing turned out so fast that even at 23.98 FPS, it still looked rushed, and anything lower than that makes the video look choppy... So, between doing it all over again with FoM or trying something else, I chose something else.

I went back to my roots, animating with Puppeteer, a tool included in DAZ that not many people use... Megan’s orgasm animation (by the tree) was done with Puppeteer, and then I just removed frames since back then I couldn't afford to render at full FPS because I didn't have the hardware.

I needed to hide some imperfections, and I think few things help more with that than camera movement and orientation.
So, for a change, we have another weird animation. This time the camera was parented to Josephine's hips. Check this out, it's not finished yet either, and I'll explain from there...

I'm still undecided about tweaking the motion curves to add some smoothness at the point where the feet (which you can't see) hit the ground and the next step begins... I need to do a test render first to see if I should leave it as is or change it. Having the camera on the hips might make it look like the character is jumping... but that's not actually the case. This is the same animation with a fixed camera on Josephine and no extra movement.

As you can see, the movement is almost linear; the rest is just an illusion... You can also see the camera movement focusing on Josephine, that's where the magic is xD

Such is the developer's life. Lots of cigarettes, thinking, cursing, and the happiness of seeing things turn out well in the end. I should be rendering the animation by tomorrow, and then the competition is back on. The men just started, so there's going to be drama between them, between the women... and even more when the guys start closing the gap.

And one last thing before I forget. Someone thought they found a possible mistake in version 0.5.8 during the conversation between MC and Kaoru. I get that you might think I missed something, and I’d have no problem admitting it if I did. Like way back when I had issues with save files and load points. I publicly admitted that was my bad because, honestly, I didn't know what I was doing... But that’s not the case here; it’s not an error. You’ll see what I mean in 0.6...
To avoid spoilers, all I can say is that the character mutations are caused by a virus (which I guess was logical to assume if you’ve been following the story), and viral infections aren't always effective with a single contact. Even HIV doesn't have a 100% transmission rate.

Stay safe, and never forget to love what you're doing. If you get to do what you're passionate about, it's honestly one of the best things ever. If you've read this far, thanks for sticking around... see you.

💖💖💖

Damn, I forgot something again... the Alzheimer’s is hitting hard. The hair style poll ended a little while ago with a clear winner: Option One (Double pigtails) won by 22 points against 15 for its closest competitor (normal hair). So, we have a girl with a great body, a "slight" physical issue, tons of freckles, and a hairstyle that makes her look cute, even though she actually has a filthier mouth than Emma and Pamela combined xD

EDIT: I couldn't leave it like that. I went to DAZ and ran the simulation again just to show it. This is the hair exploding during a simulation. And once it happens, it just keeps growing and growing; this is only the beginning.