Dev Update! 2/19/24

Hey, friends! Hope everyone's well this week.

First, a quick little status update! Two big(ish) milestones for the chapter were hit this week: I passed 300 total renders, and I'm roughly at the midpoint of the chapter. Now, that doesn't mean the chapter will only have 600 renders, and it doesn't mean I'm half-done.. But, if the chapter was broken down into Act 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, I'm currently halfway through Act 3. 

However, I need to loop back to Act 1 and fill in a missing story branch, and I expect Acts 4 and 5 to be bigger and more complicated than the stuff I've already done.

Confused? Good, me too.

Working on this game is never really a straight line from A to B. Sometimes I go into it with one idea, and then I get a better one, and have to make adjustments. Sometimes I realize I set up a plot point a couple chapters ago in one branch, but not another, and I need to either bring things into alignment, or lean into that divergence. 

The whole process can be a bit chaotic, but in that chaos there's a lot of fun to be had. One thing I often reiterate is that this story is kind of a perpetual first draft. Due to the update schedule, I just don't have time to edit, revise, and put forth the best version, every single time. So, I just launch myself into it headfirst, and hope for the best. So far, so good?

Speaking to the rendering side of things.. I hit a little bit of a wall this week, and had to get creative. Alright, so here's the situation: there's a scene where Guy and Risa enter this fancy location, and I really wanted it to have this sterile, ominous feeling for the interior. Now, this set has a designated interior which I hoped to use, but after trying a few dozen shaders, lights, edits to the location, etc.. I just realized it wasn't going to work. So, I scrapped that plan.

Then, I went searching for an appropriate location I could sub in. Something that'd fit with the exterior location, while still giving me the look I wanted. And I.. Turned up nothing. Nada. 

Having exhausted Plan A and Plan B, I moved onto C -- taking an existing location, and making it new. I dug through some of the environment files I had, and ultimately settled on one we'd seen before, back in Chapter Two. After some shaders had been applied, and some objects deleted, I was on the right track. 

But, for this scene it was important that I have a few statues. Easy enough! I tossed a few Genesis 3 figures into the scene, re-textured them with a marble shader, annnnnnd.. Ate up all my VRAM. So, onto Plan D. Using the ever-handy Billboard Builder, I created three 'billboards' for the statues, figured out the angle they'd  be viewed from, dropped them in aaaaand got a pretty solid result!

But, I wasn't out of the woods just yet. I previously talked about a new character I was introducing. Well, with new characters come new problems. In this instance, it was an annoying hair asset.

Here's what my viewfinder looked like in Daz. Note the nifty little billboard in the back.

And here's what I got.

Yup, it looks like she has alopecia. Which just isn't what I was going for. So, I used another, similar hair asset, and had to fix the dozen or so images she appears in. Finally arriving at the desired result, as seen here.

You may notice that her face is a little clearer in the final image. That's something I usually do with these depth-of-field shots. Getting the focus perfect in-camera can be a little difficult, so I like to do one version that has the effect, and then a partial render of the focal point's head/chest area without the effect, before combining them. It ultimately gives me that ~*artsy*~ look, while keeping the subject's face/eyes nicely in focus, without forcing me to smash my head against my desk in frustration.

Hopefully that's a fun little peek into my process, and why, when I occasionally come into you fine folks hat-in-hand and say, "Heyyy, sorry.. Didn't make as much progress as I wanted this week," you understand. :'D

I'll leave you with that for now! But as always, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!