Dev Update! 6/10/24

Hey, friends! Hope your week's off to a great start! Sorry for the late update, but I found myself bogged down with some work I had to do in my yard, today. Then I figured, "Hey, it's such a nice day.. Let's clean out that garden shed!" Then I found a colony of ants that had made their way inside, and I had to evict them, before sealing up any cracks they could use as a means of entrance. Soon a few hours had passed, and I'd taken up more projects than I'd planned..

Lesson learned: Just leave the shed alone!

Turning to more enjoyable projects.. At present, I'm slowly rendering through the opening scenes of Chapter 10. Having a lot of fun with it, so far! It's always interesting to have certain personalities interact with each other, and Nicki/Mason is a neat combo. They're both kinda dorks, but in opposite directions.

I did hit a small snag with rendering, but got over it pretty quickly. See, I'd been waiting until after I finished Chapter 9, to update Daz Studio to the newest version. You just never know what fun new things are going to break, when you update Daz. Lights in a scene may look different, certain assets may stop working, etc. So, it's always a good idea to wait until you're well and truly done, to start screwing with stuff.

Which turned out to be a good idea, because my graphics drivers didn't want to play nicely with Daz, and I wound up uninstalling and reinstalling stuff. Now my renders seem to take a little longer, and also Daz seems to be eating up more memory. Oh, and the Depth of Field function for cameras seems way more finicky and harder to fine-tune.. But, I got everything working, and I'll just have to get used to these new wrinkles.

Besides the normal process of writing, rendering, editing, and fighting Daz, I got to try my hand at doing a little background graffiti. This isn't really in my wheelhouse -- I have terrible handwriting, and I was never one of those people that could really draw letters. But, it was a fun little challenge, and I think it came out pretty cool -- for something you'll really only see in the background.

Also, just a little reminder, but I tend to post a lot of random, one-off art on Discord. Such as Brittani, here! So if you're not part of the community, you may be missing out on some little goodies!

That's about all I have for you, today! I'm hoping that, by month's end, I'll have an idea of when I'll be able to release Chapter 10. I'm aiming for somewhere in August, but beyond that, the future's a bit opaque. Until next time, take care of yourselves -- and as always, thank you for your support!