Law School Episode 4 - Progress update #13

Morning!
Last week was another great one again.

After dealing with some IRL stuff and only getting a few renders done on Monday, I felt a bit disappointed. So I started giving myself little daily quotes when I woke up, like “Today, I’ll get 40 renders done,” instead of saying the usual “20 is the minimum and then we keep working until we stop.” Aiming for a real number keeps me more focused, I think. I stuck with that plan all week and it worked out great. By Friday I had around 150 done, if I remember right.

I’d been putting off some animations for a while, since I heard about something I wanted to try out on a specific scene.

To simulate gravity with clothing, Daz (the software I use) has a feature called DForce. It works fine for still images, but for animations? Total nightmare.

That’s where my dawg Marvelous Designer comes in. It handles clothing simulations way better. Long story short, I figured out how to animate movement in Daz, send it over to Marvelous Designer, simulate the clothes there, send it all back to Daz, and render it. Took a bunch of trial and error though. I spent around 12 hours learning how to do that and went to bed very late. But here’s a little something I ended up with:

I also tested it with other animations, like clothes falling off the character and all that, and it looks awesome. So yeah, my animations are officially on another level now.

Oh, and about those late nights... I went to bed at 3am and 7am this weekend. When I’m learning something new, I just get completely locked in. Can’t stop. But I love that mindset, and it really shows in the output:

Static renders: 2,209
Animations: 46
Story content: 42 scenes written (34,680 words)

Another +200 renders week AND a few animations on top of that. Super happy with how it’s going.

Now, this DAY 4 is a big one. Already hit 600 renders, still got two big scenes and three short ones left. It’s probably gonna be a +900 render behemoth by the end. Hopefully I’ll wrap this one up sometime next week and move on to the last part.

I really like the pacing in this episode. There are big scenes with LIs mixed with shorter ones that move the story forward and build the plot. It kinda sucks that not everyone will see every scene depending on their path, but that’s just how it goes. That’s why I’m not doing a kinetic novel or a harem.

One thing bugging me though... I keep getting random internet crashes. I’m 99% sure it’s my Synology, but I have no idea how to fix it. Might actually yank that thing out the window soon.

Anyway, progress is solid. DAY 3 is fully rendered, DAY 4 is rendering now. One PC’s doing animations, the other’s handling stills. The 1h–1h10 per image time worries me a bit, but the renders look great, so I’ll take it.

On the final note: a little 4 and a half years ago today, I started this thing called MisterMaya. Today, we reached 5k members on Patreon. I'm beyond grateful for this to you guys. It means the world to me, and I'll keep working hard to take this to the next level.

Alright, that’s enough yapping from me. Back to work. Hope you all have a great week!

MisterInsomnia