- Thread starter NME Artworks
- Start date
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, hope you had a great week. I'll just jump right in. I got work done this week, just not as much as I would have liked, and not on the things I wish I had. The scene workflow has been a bit of a bitch for me. Besides workflow, there have been quite a lot of new things I needed to learn and also some limitations I have to work around. But, as a wise man once said, when it comes to 3D work; more complexity means more power. It is becoming a bit easier the more I do it, but I still find myself fucking up here and there. Less and less though; so... progress. I got about 15 renders done (I know, this makes me weep) but I got a lot of writing done, new rigs on a few models, new hair grooms finished, and started modeling the next environment (this particularly is so fucking time consuming), and I also learned A LOT of things that are going to make the coming content so much better and immersive. Super happy with the way the week went, even though I wish I had more time. Always, wishing I had more time. Lol.
Today I'll be working on finishing up that bi-weekly 4k with Chloe. I need to work out some flaws in the illustration design. I'll try and get that pinup with Ruby done this week, but the "fluff" stuff has taken a bit of a backseat since I have such little time; trying to keep it focused on story relevant work. Either way, things are moving, in one way or another. Cloon is doing Cloon-things. Optimizing and improving our backend and UI/UX. You know... wizard shit.
I think that's all this week. I hope you all have a great week. For all my free members, if you feel like dropping a line, there is a chat up now here on Patreon. If not, I'll catch you all next week. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, Happy Sunday. So, of the 8(ish) scenes planned for this update, I am almost done with scene 1. Should be buttoned up before the end of the month. I got some more shader work, hair work, and environment work done this week as well. Also got some much needed writing revisions finished. Overall, been a good week. The workflow for scene creation is getting much easier, and in return, much faster for me.
So, according to my rough time sheet, I'm approaching 1000 hours of targeted learning in the shader category. The goal when I started Blender a few months back was to spend 1000 hours in each area that I really wanted to learn, and plug in learning from other areas when I can. So, for example, my current focus has been shaders, but in free time/off time/down time whatever; I was also messing around with hair creation, (very little) modeling, rigging, physics and animation, etc. This tactic will not only give me a good ground in each area I want to know, but lend itself to the overall quality of my work. So, once I hit 1000 hours focused with shaders, I'll probably shift focus to one of two other areas I think are most important. I'll circle back on that in the future. But, I think it's a good tactic. As of right now, especially from when I started, I can make some really great custom shaders/node groups with relative ease. It feels good, understanding something that deeply, especially when understanding shaders in Blender is such an important facet of making things look good, and also ensuring the materials are optimized. For characters AND environments.
There isn't a ton else to report for this week. Halloween is coming up and that's a huge day for me. October in general is a special month for me, as I'm probably one of the biggest horror movie sluts on the planet. It's my favorite month, and my favorite holiday celebration.
I think that's it. To all my followers, I'll catch you next Sunday. To all my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, hope you all had a great week, and to those who celebrate; a very spooky and fun Halloween. Speaking of, Halloween night was a bit of a shit show for me after I went to sleep. I won't dig into it, but I'm on bed rest for a bit. Also can't have coffee or any stimulants and I'm telling you guys... I hate my fucking life without my morning-afternoon-late afternoon coffees. Lol. Anyways, on to ATR news.
I finished scene 1. We're wrapped up and in the bag. Super happy about that. Glad that milestone was hit before the above mentioned shitshow. Thankfully, my laptop is powerful enough I can work on environment modeling and of course writing and shit. So development won't take a hit while I'm laid out. One character though, is more VRAM than my laptop has, so that work is going to have to wait. Which again, is fine, since I can't start the next scene until I finish the environment anyways. That's about it. No new news on Cloon's front (back? back-end?). The stuff he's doing is labor intensive and extremely complex, so probably won't be an update on that for a bit. Once I can get up to my PC again, I'll start working on those pinups again.
Yeah, I think that's it. Now I'm going throw on some Joe Bob Briggs Nightmareathon and pop my gaggle of pills then sleep and shit. I hope you all have a great week and I'll catch you all on the next one.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone. Gonna hop right into it, because honestly, I'm just so fucking tired. So the meds they had me on kept me knocked out a lot of the week. The next environment is almost done. I still need to fill the room a bit, but when you're drugged up, making design choices is hard. Most materials are done, I have a couple items I need to redo the topology over because the materials are acting stupid. That should be decently fast. I landed on the type of lighting I'd like so that's also done. Just need to set it up now. The models are ready to be added once the environment is finished and the scene is fully written now. Perks of being on bed rest I guess. Lol. I will have to go back through it all though as I wrote most of the additional content while I was fucked up. I'll only have a couple days this week to work on ATR. I have to travel for work this week, and I'll be out of town from Tuesday night to Friday evening. I'll be back home some time Saturday morning. Woo (sarcastically). So, yeah I think that's it.
No new news on Cloons front. Just like me we have careers that amp up hard at the end of the year. Combine that with kids, holidays, and all the shit that comes along with that; our free time gets axed pretty hard. Now, we're workaholics and we love what we do, so we'll find time wherever it might be slithering around to work on ATR. As always, we'll keep you all in the loop. Just felt like that needed reiterating, especially because the next handful of dev updates will probably be very depressing to write. Kind of like this one. Lol.
Alright, that's all for this week. I'm going to try and do my best to spend the rest of the day finalizing the environment and HOPEFULLY get the models at least in their starting poses for the scene before the next rounds of drugs and the 14 hour long nap that follows. I hope you all have a great week. To my followers; I'll catch you on the next one. To my Patrons; you know where to find me (most of the time).
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone. Figured I'd just get this out of the way since there won't be a lot of difference between now and later. I got back in late last night from my business trip. As expected, between client meetings and site visits. I didn't get fuck all done while I was out of town. Feeling really behind, but such is the nature of the beast. Today I'll be focusing the majority of my time working on a custom for a Patron. Then either between sessions for that, or once I'm done, I'll either crash or try and get everything at least positioned for the start of the second scene. Man it feels good to be back at my computer. I fucking hate laptops. So tiny...
Cloon made some headway on the backend. Optimizing and improving the work he's done and the work to come. So, at least one of us got shit done this week.
I'll be working on a pinup for Olivia at some point this week as well, and my schedule has been super fucked up with everything that happened, I'm pretty sure it's time (or past due) for another poll for the bonus 4k. So I'll post that either today or tomorrow. I'm a little out of sorts, but I'll catch my bearing here pretty quick. The custom today should help me get back into the groove of things since it pretty much takes all of my skills to make it happen (environment, materials, shaders, clothing, sculpting, rigging, posing, lighting, etc.)
Alright, that's it for this week. I hope you all have a great week to follow. I'll have that poll up soon for Patrons, as well as some WIP photos. For my followers, I'll catch you next week. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- May 6, 2023
- 303
- 594
- Oct 2, 2024
- 100
- 143
- Aug 26, 2020
- 226
- 678
- Jan 18, 2022
- 1,015
- 7,030
You must be registered to see the links
No picture this week. I'm on my laptop. Got called out to Denver this past Wednesday for work. Finally getting to head home here soon. Gonna post this, and then pack up and bounce. So shit news on top of the fact I lost half to week, I rendered out Scene 1 and found out that a lot of my positions weren't keyed for one of the characters. So there were a lot of empty camera shots, because the model was on the other side of the room. So yeah... fuck me. Fuck me and my stupid face. Anyways, before I had to leave for work I got a lot of them done. Once I get home, I'll sleep and then start hammering away at the rest of them. Thankfully most of the poses were keyed correctly, so it's just about repositioning the model and setting back up the lighting and camera settings. Tedious, but relatively easy work. I'll for sure be starting on scene 2 this coming week. Finally. I finished the pinup for Olivia, but it's on my PC at home. I posted it in Discord like 10 minutes before walked out the door for Denver. So, as soon as I'm home, I'll post it here. It was a bit rushed, and not quite as provocative as the other two with Ruby and Alexis, but she does look pretty damn beautiful. So, half a yay. All in all, a slow week for ATR, but we're getting closer to the holidays and as soon as they're over and the new year starts, we'll have a lot more free time to focus on ATR again. In the meantime, we'll continue to get done what we can, when we can. I think that's it for this week. Gonna button this up so I can get my ass home. I miss my dog. Have a great week everyone!
Stay frosty,
NME
You must be registered to see the links
Day late and a dollar short on this one. The weekend snuck right on by. Honestly, if it wasn't for one of my engineers calling me in for a meeting I was about to miss this morning, I would have thought it was Sunday. Lol. Alright, so I only had a few days this past week to work on the game. I'd say I got quite a lot done but in a bunch of different areas. I got a few more model updates done, I started on some new environments I'll need coming up, I started scene two, then scrapped all of it because Melody's hair was so fucking gross. I couldn't take it. So I'm working on that and I'll come back to it this week. I'm almost done, just need to make a final decision on the hair style, and I'll be good to go to restart scene 2 with her. I also had forgotten that there were a couple other characters in the beginning of that scene, which weren't ready for screen time. So I got them all buttoned up as well. So yeah, a lot of small things got finished/started this past week with the limited time I had free to work on it. Thankfully, besides work, I have a couple weeks where I think outside of normal working hours I should be able to focus on it. Most of my shopping is done, so not a lot to do on that front. My son is coming down the 21st and staying until New Years, so I'll be trying to cram in as much ATR work as I can before that so I can focus my time with my boy. So the plan for this week will be to finish Melody, and then start hammering away at scene 2 and also render and postwork all the remaining scene 1 renders I had to go back and fix. Now, for some reason my GPU has been running a bit slow the last few days, so I'll need to keep an eye on it. Might just need to be cleaned, or I might have had some background shit running and not realized it. Hard to believe it would crap out on me after only a couple years. Thankfully, if needed, I can just grab another one, but I'd really hate to have to do that so close to the next gen releases. So, hopefully it was nothing, and shit will be business as usual. That's it for this one. Have a great week everyone. To my followers, I'll catch you next week. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Jan 18, 2022
- 1,015
- 7,030
You must be registered to see the links
Man, 10 of these already huh? Another late one. Been a hell of a week. Blender was being a bitch this week. I spent almost 2 days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I don't know if I was just wording it wrong or what, but I couldn't find anything on Google and even Puggy wasn't sure what was happening at first. Then I finally did something and noticed an oddity in the controls. Then Puggy figured out what it was from there. All is good now, so thank fuck that's over. It was infuriating. One of the downsides of using a program as advanced as Blender, is there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Especially when you don't know all of the features that are even available for it. Like the one I accidentally discovered this past week. It was proportional editing by the way. When an object has a field of influence based on the radius you select. Apparently it has a hotkey and I must have hit it at some point. Probably trying to type in Discord while Blender was still the active window. Otherwise, between work and have to fix some shaders on Mel and some proportions on MC (thankfully it isn't noticeable but I have some scenes where the MC was like almost 7' (213cm) tall. It was funny looking. I already fixed the ones where you could tell, though, I just needed to figure out why his proportions kept getting wonky on me. I'm also redoing Mel's office. I rushed it, and it showed. The materials looked like ass, and the arrangement was ugly. Not to mention I didn't take any time to actually set it up like a real office. So there was just a lot of empty space and horrible natural lighting. I love what its looking like so far now. I'll post some WIP's for Patrons later today. It's pretty fucking nice, if I may toot my own horn a bit. No new news on Cloon's front, at least, none to really share. He's still working on the same thing. It's an extremely complex addition to ATR and in true Cloon flare; it has to be sexy too. So, when we have any sort of working concept for it, I'll dive a bit deeper into what he's been cooking up on his side.
Honestly can't wait for the holidays to be over. My little man is coming this weekend, so it'll be crunch time for me with ATR and some final home decorations this week. I look forward to showing you all what I've been working on all this time. I did have the Cammy render ready to go, but alas, more proportion issues. Her head shrunk I guess. I don't fucking know. At some point this week, I'll need to bring all my models out and check their measurements. Apparently, at some point, the proportions got fucked up for a lot of them when converting to Blender. Since I haven't been using them in production work and some weren't even done with their shaders, I haven't checked. But I'm finding more of them than not, have some weird body issues I need to unfuck at some point. Better sooner than later.
Alright I think that's it for this one. I hope you all have a great week. For my followers I'll catch you next week. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Not a lot done for ATR this week. On Wednesday, the 11th of December, I took my beautiful girl for her last ride. Pearl was her name. I rescued her when she was 8 years old, and she passed at the age of 14. Since the day I brought her home with me, there wasn't a single day I ever spent more than an hour or so apart. We went everywhere together, or we didn't go at all. For combat vets like myself, we end up in a few different places. The two most likely, are the bottom of a bottle, or the end of a barrel. I found myself in both at one point. I had lost everything at one point. Then this beautiful girl came into my life, and she brought me back from that hellscape I was swimming in. She came from the shittiest of pasts. Yet, despite that, she was the happiest and sweetest girl. Doctors gave her a year or less to live. Shows what they knew. Even still, my time with her was far too short. She was my soul, and her absence has left a hole in my heart with no quantifiable depth.
For the last 6-7 months we've been battling against a brain tumor. Given her age and past medical issues, operation / anesthesia would have likely killed her faster than the tumor. So, I opted to do anything I could to keep her quality of life in tact. All the way to the end, she loved going for our walks. So I did whatever I had to, to make sure she got that time. She loved our Jeep rides, and adventures too. My home and the Jeep feel empty and cold without her there by my side. I can't really put into words just how important she was to my life. I miss that fur missile more than I've missed anything in my life...
Now to squash the concern for those of you that aren't dog people, or have no concept to how important one can be to someone. ATR development will continue. I'm not shutting it down or anything. I can tell you that I've had no fucking drive to get out of bed, let alone to work on it this week; but the work will continue after I've adjusted to this emptiness I feel everyday. But y'all have a great week. I'll catch you on the next one.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, hope you had a good week. I got back into Blender a little bit this week. I'll have a story preview for Patrons some time in the next day or two. I just got back home now and have been driving the last two days. So, tired as fuck, and will probably sleep until tomorrow. Anyways, besides the story preview, I'll have that Cammy pinup out soon as well. It's done, but I hate it, but I also am tired of fucking with it. So, it's probably jsut a me thing anyways. I'll send that out soon as well. My brain is barely firing on a single piston at the moment, so I'll stop there. I'll catch you all next week. Have a great Christmas for those who celebrate it. Happy Holidays to you all, and your families/friends.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, another late one, but there was a reason for it. Firstly, and most importantly, I hope you all had a great Holiday, and for those who didn't celebrate; had a great week. So, with Christmas and everything, it was a bustling week. Despite all of that, I actually did manage to get quite a lot done. I wrote my ass off, and thanks to my son being a gamer, I even found time to do some scene work. However...
Yesterday I started uninstalling some addons from Blender that I either wasn't using, or found a better solution to (some I removed simply because I found that manually handling the task was not only faster, but yielded better results). However, some fuckery was afoot, and a whole host of my models became broken. As below will show you, this started happening to a lot, but not all, thankfully. Given that, I was eventually able to work my way backwards and figure out what went wrong. It took me most of the day and night, but it's all buttoned up. That was the reason for the delay this week. I wanted to figure out what it was so there could be good news, rather than shit news on the log. Still, it was infuriating to say the least.
Now, I did start to work on scene 2 but again, there is some weird shit happening to Melody's hair. I'll try and troubleshoot tomorrow, but today is my son's last day here, so I'll be more focused on spending time with him before he heads back to Cali for New Years. I also have some software integration testing for my job that I have to focus on today and another one tomorrow night. The great news is, starting Wednesday this week, my workload should normalize and I should be able to start spending much more time with ATR again. The end of the year is near and with it, the procrastination of all my clientele gets renewed vigor. Lol.
Cloon has been getting reamed at work as well, so I don't have too much to report on the backend either this time. He's got a task from me that will take up some time but like me, he works on ATR when he has the opportunity to. His schedule will also return to normal soon though. I can't wait to use the phrase, "business as usual" to describe my work life again. Lol.
Last but not least, I'll be pausing January collection. I'll be taking a month to focus on restructuring the Patreon membership and benefits. Right now the way everything is set up, along with the schedule I have, even on a regular basis, eats too much into the little dev time I usually manage to find. Now, I don't know how I plan to restructure yet, I just know that I need to. It's not fair to you guys when I promise a benefit I'm either too busy to do, or can't find the time to do them on the schedule I have set. Maybe in the future, I'll do it again, but for now, I think the focus needs to be on delivering things I know I can deliver on, with a stronger focus on development work, rather than the fluff pieces I have scattered across the membership ranks. Now this also gives me the opportunity to get the stuff set up the way I want, and gives you all the time you need to decide after the restructure if you want to switch/renew/cancel before collection is restarted in February.
Alright, that was a lengthy one, but I think I got it all out. I hope you all have a great week, and an amazing New Year. You and yours.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, hope you had a great week. This week was good. Like I had predicted, right after the end of the year, my workload let out a huge fart and now the bloating is gone. I got quite a lot done this week. I did realize after Cloon pointed out that I was working on a scene that was 3 scenes ahead of where I was supposed to be in the story outline we have. So... yeah... derp moment. I created not one, but two whole environments, a character that I needed for the scene I was actually supposed to be on, as well as a shit ton of writing. I had to rewrite a lot of stuff because timing and context but as I've said before, really, the writing is never much of a strain for me. Honestly... I just wish I had more time in a day. Anyways, good progress all around this week.
I think I am done with restructuring the memberships. It was brought to my attention that me pausing the Patreon again might make people, especially newcomers, nervous about the game not being worked on or on the precipice of being abandoned or what not. I can assure you, that won't be the case here, no matter how slow we might move sometimes. Cloon and I love what we do. Not only that, we are always striving to be better than what we were, and the best at we plan to do. So, we can all just squash the idea. ATR is a love child that was cooked for a while before ever being started. It will see it's end, irregardless of whether the road is smooth or bumpy; short or long. I just thought restructuring memberships while they were still active was a silly thing to do. Since Patreon charges everyone on the first anyways, I plan to keep it frozen until the 31st as planned.
Lastly, Cloon laid out his plans for his work, and I'm excited as fuck to see them come to life. I know if anyone can do it, he can, and he'll make it peak. Since that's the only way that man knows how to work. Again, I can only tease, but I'll share as soon as we can.
Blender continues to kick my ass with its complexity, but the learning curve is thankfully not quite as steep as I thought it would be. The program just has so many things it's difficult when something doesn't work, since it could be one or even two of a dozen or so things causing the issue. Alas, my good men remind me often to recall the fact that I've spent a considerably short amount of time in Blender and that my skills are advancing pretty quickly considering. It's just hard to see it when you're in the thick of it. Especially with as much time as I sink into it. I fucking appreciate you gents.
I think that's it for this week. Felt a bit chatty I guess, as this was another lengthy one. I hope you all have a great week. To my followers, I'll catch you again next Sunday. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Oct 29, 2021
- 4,220
- 35,644
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone. Hope you all had a good week. Just to start it off, I won't be posting the Ch1 image poster on these anymore. It just takes up SO much space on the Patreon feed. Anyways, now I'm going to get right into the meat of everything so I can get back to work. Scene 1 is done, post-worked, and added into our test engine. It looks great, despite the bumbled fucking mess I made of it, and I'm a lot happier with it than I thought I would be. I started on scene 2, and I'm really aiming to be completely done with it and onto scene 3 before the fourth week of January. Here's to hoping. Either way, I'll have a preview up some time this week.
As time moves on and I get more and more comfortable with Blender, the timeframe for these scenes will get shorter and shorter. I still run into regular roadblocks, make scene breaking mistakes, and engine mishaps. It is what it is for now. But they're appearing less as we move forward with the game. Writing has been great. Having a lot of fun writing up this one. I know there was some gripe about the time jumps in the prologue. The main story isn't like that. So for those concerned about it, you can put it to rest.
I think I'm going to go for a bit more of a game vibe with the music this time around. We had a lot of lyrical songs from different genres, and as I play through the prologue every now and then (to see all the things I didn't like, and ensure they don't happen again) one of the things that stands out to me is how jumbled up the music can get, and to me it throws the vibe off a lot of times. I'll hash all that out later though. Right now, it's not too important. We have all the music we could possibly need thanks to Cloon and Incog constantly hunting down and sifting through good royalty-free music (meaning we only have to buy it once and it's ours to use as we see fit). Not to mention a good buddy of mine who is a much more prominent dev shares with me resources for stuff all the time. So there is plenty of music to pull from to fit the scenes makeup. More on this later down the production line.
I think that's it for this week. I'm going to get back to it. I hope you all have a great week. For our Patrons, I'll have some WIP and that preview this week. As well as the spicy little render I'm cooking up for the Sergeants and above. For my followers; I'll catch you next Sunday.
Stay frosty,
NME
- Jan 18, 2022
- 1,015
- 7,030
You must be registered to see the links
Hey everyone, hope you had a good week. I know I said I'd have some things for you this week, and I plan to deliver at some point today, but it's been a tough week for ATR. I was supposed to have until Friday to pick up my puppy, but the kennel called and said there was something that came up and if I didn't get her that Tuesday, then I wouldn't be able to pick her up until the following Thursday (this upcoming Thursday). This is such an impressionable time for puppies, so I didn't want to make her sit around alone for an extra week. Alas, puppies are very needy. Like furry babies, only they piss like 30x more than a human. Lol. So anyways, yeah, haven't had a ton of time to myself this week to work on ATR. I did start posing scene 2 but of course, there were issues I kept running into with materials. I've all but gotten them sorted, but that took a bit and I haven't found the time to get back to it. I try and work on ATR while the puppy is napping, but her naps are so fucking short. Like 20 minutes. In the world of 3D, that is a blink. She's napping now after morning play so I'm going to try and get that render for the Patrons out later on during her next two naps or so. As for the WIP's, I should have something to show as well for that. The preview will have to wait, since the character that leads the first 1/4 of the scene was the one having issues with her materials. So, I'll try and pose at least a few of those today, and if I can get it without issue, I'll render a frame for a preview. However, no promises on that particular one. It'll be entirely based on the puppy.
Cloon made some great headway. He showed me a concept that looks great for the UI and I sneaked a peek at his big work coming to fruition. So, at least one of us got something substantial done this week.
And... the puppy is getting up already. So that's my queue to end it for this week. Hope you all have a great week. To my followers, I'll catch you next Sunday. To my Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME