DevLog: Anya's Glow-up (sneak peek inside), Scene 6 Progress Update, RAM Upgraded

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

TLDR:

• Anya reworked (Thanks Bat!)

• Blender EEVEE workflow

  • Fuck it, I'll just buy more RAM (to 128GB) - no more ViewLayers

• Scene 6 progress: 80 images + 1 soundtrack done

• Discord Server is live

• Exclusive tiers coming (eventually)

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

• Scene 6

  • 80 images done

  • 🎶Music + 🔊Sound Design (In Progress)

    • Finished 1 soundtrack

• 🧹Housekeeping

  • Discord channels and roles + connections to Patreon

  • DevLogs will now only be available on Patreon to consolidate workflow and focus on community building (no longer on Itch.io)

• 💅Polishing

  • Writing - removing non-essentials, fixing inconsistencies, and streamlining the story to provide a more well-rounded experience

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

• Anya's rework is finished 🎉 (scroll down to Sneak Peek for a preview)

• Scene 6 continuation

  • 🎶Music + 🔊Sound Design (In Progress) - Working on 2 additional soundtracks

  • Re-lighting to accommodate Anya's different skin

• Blender Workflow wasn't exactly a success (Scroll down to Technical Corner for more info), but it was still a good learning experience. Still added a few minor and helpful steps to my rendering workflow.

🔮 Coming Soon

What I'm planning to work on next:

• Scene 5 rework

  • With Anya's rework, the Blender Workflow, and also a RAM upgrade, reworking this scene will add so much benefit. This was the first scene that was made completely within Blender and EEVEE renderer. I have learned a lot and have been working on a workflow that will be useful to make this scene a much better experience.

• Adding a "Gallery" to the menu

• Exclusive and available for a limited time Patreon "Foundation" tiers are coming!

⚙️ Technical Corner

I gave Blender's ViewLayers another shot - "ViewLayers" allow the renderer to split the image into different layers; for example, you could do Character 1, Character 2, environment, etc. and render each of them separately - then you stitch them together in post-processing. This can work, but has drawbacks:

• Shadows, reflections require additional render layers + compositing; this multiplies in complexity every time you add a render layer

• VRAM/RAM utilization varies significantly depending on scene complexity and layer setup

• Increase in render time

• EEVEE's render pass limitations make compositing more complex than Cycles workflows

When I go down the "ViewLayers" route in the future, remind me that it most likely won't work the way I think. 😪

HOWEVER! As an alternative, I upgraded my RAM to 128GB which will help me get around some of these limitations anyway. VRAM was partially the issue, but RAM was a bigger issue.
If there are still some memory issues, ViewLayers could still be an alternative for specific use cases, though EEVEE's render pass limitations make this more complex than in Cycles.

Here's my RAM upgrade

👀 Sneak Peek

(BEFORE) Anya's Glow-up

Anya's Glow-up

Also bonus points for reaching this far. 😉

💬 Community Corner

Thank you to everyone who joined the Discord server (link is on the About Page).
We'll have standard Discord server growing pains; I'll have to learn and modify settings here and there, but it's been going well.

Question for you all
The ViewLayers weren't successful in skirting memory problems, but honestly these technical rabbit holes are half the fun of development. What other weird workflow stuff would you want me to ramble about in future devlogs?

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️