Developer's Journal #4 (Patreon)

Hello Everybody.  Work continues on the remainder of LDNA: Part One.  I've spent a lot of time this week--far more than I wanted, actually--on animating.  The animations still need some work, and so for the time being I'm refocusing on still renders so I don't fall behind.

The scene I'm currently working on has a lot of characters.  In the Demo there was a scene that took place on a basketball court with eleven characters.  That was a very demanding scene because my graphics card can't render more than a few low res characters at one time.  That meant I had to rerender every scene between two and four times and add them all together in Photoshop afterwards.  And then I kept redoing the lighting in that scene, meaning I had to go through the entire process multiple times.

My current scene is a social at a bar with Rockford and seven of his friends or colleagues.  There's also a bartender and some other random bar patrons to give the place some life, so it's a big scene.  This one shouldn't be as bad as the basketball court scene because I should be able to do more close-up shots, thereby limiting the number of active characters in each render.  That wasn't feasible during the fight sequence because the player needed to be able to see a lot of characters in action at once.  But, whereas the basketball court scene was outdoors and easily lit with an HDRI, this is an indoor scene which is inherently darker and which I have to be careful not to overlight, and so each render will take a bit longer.  The bar scene is also much longer than the fight sequence, so I expect I'll be working on this scene through at least the end of next week.  I've attached a screenshot from inside Daz so you have an idea of what I'm working on.

I'm working on a soft launch of a Discord server.  Your Patreon account SHOULD already be connected to my server, but I am still figuring out how to get it set up so people can join and participate.  Prior to a few months ago I didn't even have a Discord account so this is all new.  My plan is to start advertising the server at the same time that I release the full Part One.  So until then it's in testing only status.

Thank you for your support!