Dev Logs : Things That Take Time
Ordinarily speaking - we create a scene, move things and people around - press render - and voila, we end up with a gazillion images that we can stitch together and connect with some words and we end up with a Visual Novel. If we're lucky - we get some naughty bits out of the end of it also.
But sometimes in that process we hit a development wall. Mostly it's in the "create a scene" part where everything crawls to a halt because we're setting up the scenes exactly as we want it.
In Chapter 3 we end up with a few scenes in a famous US city - go on, check the above image to see if you can guess where.
Unfortunately, said famous US City doesn't exist as a package anywhere I can find (I may be wrong - but if somebody knows where, then let me know in the comments .. too late now .. but .. !!)
So that means that said famous US City needs to be built from scratch with the assets I have available to me and a little creativity.
As I found out to my cost - this takes time. About 2 days of time just setting up the scene by kit-bashing various bits and bobs I have lying around, referencing maps and plonking things down roughly where they should be. And this is before we get round to any rendering.
The painful bit? I probably only need it for a few renders! Doh!
Another painful bit came a little later. I wanted a scene in a club within said famous US City. That's great. I have lots of clubs available! This won't take too long to find a suitable one, set it up and for me to get rendering!
Clubs in place. People are in place. Lighting is fine ... well .. hold on. Wouldn't it be good .. being in a club .. to have some strobe lights flopping around to give the right effect? Now, I don't mean animating .. just the lights swinging around the club from image to image.
Well there was a problem. I had a lot .. A LOT .. of lights .. and it very quickly became a pain in the ass rotating each light around from image to image. And that would just be the ones I could remember to move.
But I'm full of bright ideas .. Why don't I write a script in Daz to loop through all the lights in scene and randomly spin them around from image to image! Brilliant! I'll do that ..
.. But that would mean learning Daz Scripting Language first. Another Doh!
Another 2 days later .. we have our press a button and run some code swanky light spinning extraordinary script in place ...
Now I just need to move the people around and render shit out. One final Doh!
We ARE getting there. Honest guv'. Have completed 3 scenes since the last Dev Log just .. a few .. more to go ..
Wonder what pointless thing I can come up with next to "help" me out .. ?