Law School Episode 6 - Devlog #8

Hello everyone,

Last week wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped. The plan was to work on the first cutscene of this episode, and I did start it, but I had to cut it short because one of the voice actors still hasn’t gotten back to me. There are two characters in that scene and some of their lines overlap, so doing only one side felt weird. I stopped early, which also meant I didn’t get the break from still renders I was badly hoping for.

On top of that, I got super sick over the weekend. I didn’t work at all from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. It was rough, honestly I can’t remember the last time I was this sick. I’m on the mend though: I hit my daily render quota today, so hopefully tomorrow I’ll be back to full speed.

On a bit of a bittersweet note, it’s time to pay my respects to my main rig’s 4090. I swapped out the GPU and, just as I suspected, the crashes I’d been dealing with stopped completely. So I think it’s time to send that bad boy into retirement.

This was the very first 4090 I ever bought. It spent its life working nonstop in the render rigs before moving to the main rig when I picked up the 5090s. It didn’t last quite as long as I’d hoped, but I guess things just aren’t built to last like they used to be.

Rest easy, buddy.

Another good news/bad news situation: my render rigs have been running 24/7 for a few weeks now, and my queue is finally empty. Thing is, I average about 30 renders a day (that’s my daily quota), while my render rigs can churn out anywhere between 40 and 60. So when I go a long stretch without posing animations, the queue empties faster than I can fill it.

Honestly, it’s a good problem to have. But it also stresses me out, because idle rigs make it feel like I’m slacking. That’s partly why I was so excited to get started on that cutscene.

I have a few ideas to fix this, and I could talk about boring stuff on how to get a 5% increase in quality in my renders, but honeslty the best course of action is just to lock the f*** in and get more renders done.

On the bright side, I wrote the last two scenes of day one. They’re massive, around 4'000 words combined... for now. I say “for now” because I’ve reached the LEWD part of the last scene, and I always write those as I go. I know what happens and what they’re going to get up to, but I never plan the dialogue since I like leaving room to improvise.

I actually had to rewrite the dialogue leading up to the LEWD scene because I went overboard. Things went from 0 to 100 way too fast, so I dialed it back. Still, I think you’re in for a treat with this one.

The scene right before it, the one I’m working on now, is not fun to make. The characters are sitting around a table, there’s a lot of talking, flashbacks, the whole thing. That means building new environments, loading characters, dressing them up, and then coming back to the main scene where... they’re still sitting at the table. It’s boring and time consuming to create, but I think it’ll play well thanks to the flashbacks. I’m hoping to wrap it up today or tomorrow, then move on to the final scene.

Anyway, let’s talk numbers:

Static renders: 1'015
Animations: 39
Story content: 15 scenes written (14'960 words)

That’s 107 renders, 1 animation and almost 4'900 words since last week. No idea how I got that close to 5k, I thought I was around 4.1k for the week, but I’ll take it.

It also means that once the LEWD scene and the dialogue after it are done, DAY 1 will end up a decent size, which is funny since it was supposed to be the second smallest day of this update. My 72k word prediction might actually hold!

That’s it for this week. I’m heading back to work, and in the meantime, I wish you all a great week.

MisterMaya