VN Ren'Py A Thousand Rounds [Prologue] [NME Artworks]

[Old Man Al]

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Hey everyone, almost missed this one. So, we'll start with the important stuff. The puppy is doing great. She's been a bit unruly the last couple days but apparently that's my fault. I'm overstimulating her and she's essentially running on a cooked brain. So starting today I had to start incorporating forced down time and naps. She's been a lot better today. I don't want her puppy phase to end, but I am excited for when she gets older and can keep up with my energy levels and activities without turning into a little terror. Lol.
Scene 2 is almost done. I've already started setting up scene 3. It'll be a tough one for sure. I have big plans for the animations in this scene, and I have zero fucking clue how to make them happen. So, you know... jumping into the deep end... with a brick tied to my feet. Just the way I like it. If it starts looking like it's taking too long though, I'll probably push them to the end and focus on the rest of the chapter. Circle back when I feel refreshed / learned more. Either way, things are moving well now. The puppy spends most of her nap times now in her pen / at my feet. She's already growing out of my lap, and often times can't really get comfortable despite trying. So, that's afforded me more time to focus on ATR. Catch .22 if there ever was one.
Cloon has some great concepts cooking, which I think I was supposed to share in this log, but since I wasn't too sure, I'll postpone and add them in the next one.
I think that's it for this log. My Blender workflow is becoming easier to manage the longer I do it. I have decided, despite how beautiful particle hair looks, to forgo any use of it in the future. While I love the idea of the physics baked into the hair for animations; doing still work with it is arduous and nerve cooking. Not to mention heavy as fuck. So, I can understand why game companies use "game-ready" hair (which is just mesh hair) and use bones/cages to provide movement. So, that'll be something I need to figure out soon since I already did a few models with particle hair.
Anyway, have a great week everyone. Followers, I'll catch you on the next one. Patrons; you know where to find me.
Stay frosty,
NME

 

[Old Man Al]

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Hey everyone, man this week flew by. Not in a good way either. Alright, so let's break it down. Scene 2 is laughably dense. So much so, that the back end of it, with 5 models loaded into the scene is causing so many fucking headaches. The VRAM for the total scene is far outside the 24GB of my 4090. Now, thankfully, Blender only renders out the camera. However, it still calculates EVERYTHING. This is causing obnoxiously long render times for the frames. Not to mention the particle hair, which I have to groom, render, re-groom on the next frame, render, repeat for all scenes with Olivia in it. I still have about 11 frames to pose before I can say it's done, which doesn't sound like a lot, and wouldn't be if the scene didn't run like a sloth on heroin. So, I'll hopefully have those done soon, and then the painful rendering of it all. Thankfully, this scene will be the last I have to deal with that. I've gotten pretty familiar with this scene optimization addon for my environments and I've finally figured out the character optimization workflow. While I'm not using particle hair anymore, I am using the geometry node calculated curves. Which is essentially the same thing, but way more optimized and easier to make. To give an example. The render I did recently with Kira. Her model was at one point pulling almost 8-9GB of vram alone. I did my optimization method for her materials/mesh. Then it dropped down to about 6.2GB. Removed her particle hair and went back to mesh hair, and it came down to roughly 5.8. I since switch to geometry hair, further optimized her shaders, and now I'm running Kira with more detail than ever, at a beautiful 4.4GB of vram. She moves around the scene space like a leaf in the wind. I want that for ALL of my models. It'll not only exponentially speed up my workflow, it'll also keep me from screaming at my PC and ripping out all of my hair.
Cloon is doing Cloon things. Being amazing and crushing dope ass shit. We did have something to share, but we recently updated the team logo, and so that had to be put on hold again. I'll coordinate with him soon, and see if we can't get that little bit out later this week on it's own post.
So, I get that it might seem a bit scary. Like "jeez NME, you already work slow as fuck, now you gotta redo your models again!?" It's not like before. I've redone the shaders so many times, that I actually turned most of them into node groups that I can import as a collection and I'm so intimately familiar with my models now, that the whole process takes me less than 5 minutes to adjust the values to each one. The optimization workflow does take a bit more time, especially because I'm still new to a lot of the processes but that part is too important not to do, and way to critical to the future of my work to fuck around and rush it. However, that being said, the longest will be the hair. While I should be able to get MOST of the hair styles done with geo-nodes. Some which I just took a quick stab at this weekend are proving to be obnoxiously difficult to reproduce. So, if I have to, I'll just make new hair styles for them to keep things moving. Either way, the point is, don't worry. The process isn't going to eat up too much time, and in the long term, will shorten everything by a ton.
I think that about covers it. Have a great week everyone. To our followers, we'll catch y'all on the next one. To our Patrons; you know where to find us.
Stay frosty,
NME

 

[Monetka_]

Tarakis' February Custom ft. Chloe

 

[Old Man Al]

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Hey everyone. Hope you all had a great week. Alright, so let's get down to brass tacks. I started working on scene 3. I have finished scene two posing, but because of the obnoxious render times, I haven't done that part yet. The whole scene will lock down my PC for a couple days or so. Which, I'll have to wait for a weekend for since I have an actual job which requires me to be able to run some pretty heavy programs/tasks sometimes. So, I simply just... can't right now. I was going to try and do it this weekend, but there was just too much to do. So once I render it, I'll have a preview for you all. Until then, it'll sit there in the corner being woefully ignored like the problem child it is. Now, scene 3 has been going smooth so far, but I'm going to start attempting the animation work this week. Two of my engineers at work are on vacation this week though, so... we'll see what my time looks like. Thankfully, I was doing this weeks lewd render with Ruby, who is in this scene, and there were some problems with her model that popped up. Thankfully now, rather than in the middle of animation work. Lol. So I'm working on fixing those today, and once I'm done, I'll re-render the lewd and post it here. It's easy, when you spend weeks sculpting, baking, sculpting, baking, sculpting, baking, testing, sculpting, testing, baking, etc....... To miss some pretty obvious flaws in your work. But this is life in 3D. So, gotta roll with the punches. Cloon should be back from vacation soon, so once he gets back I'll have some preview for you guys on one of the many things he's been working on. Character optimization has been... problematic. It's working... it's just slower than I had hoped since there is quite a bit more fine tuning involved. But I'm getting there. Thankfully the models I need for the next scene are already done. So big relief there. I think that's actually it for this week. Short(ish) and to the point. Gotta get back to unfucking Ruby's model so I can get back to work.
I hope you all have a great week. To our followers, we'll catch you on the next one. To our patrons; you know where to find us.

Stay frosty,

NME

 

[Old Man Al]

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Hey everyone. Not a lot to report this week. I spent almost the whole week trying to optimize and unfuck scene 2. I tried to render it, and I got through maybe a handful but then it kept crashing Blender or rendering black screen. So, I needed to figure out how to decimate some mesh without changing the whole look of those scenes and causing some ugly lack of continuity issues. I got most of them. Not totally done yet, as I'm trying to get this done without touching the models themselves. The scenes at the end when there are 4 models in camera are being a bitch to get done. I did work on scene 3 a bit. The static images leading up to the animation are almost done. I had an issue with MC's cock material. It looked fucking weird and discolored. Like he was wearing a cock-ring for too long. So working on that. Otherwise it's about ready to push into the animation. Scared and excited.
Cloon just got back from vacation. We'll coordinate and touch base tomorrow.
That's it this week. Same shit I did this past week will continue this week until I get it done, and then I'll be starting the animation sequences. Hope you all have a great week. To our followers, we'll catch you next week. To our patrons; you know where to find us.
Stay frosty,

NME