You must be registered to see the links
Happy new week!
First off, translations has been something requested by many since CH1. I really hesitated on this for a while because one: I've never implemented one. And two: I figured it was something that would be pretty involving. So when I was approached, I finally broke and decided to let someone do a translation. Chapter 1 will be translated as a trial; if the translation quality is great, I'll move forward with the rest of the chapters. The person wanting to translate is Russian, so the first translation will be Russian. Chinese is another language I get asked about and that'll probably be the next translation. Then I'll refer to either Steam or analytics to see which language/country Artemis gets downloaded. I'm excited to be able to offer this finally, so we'll see how it goes.
Here's a little behind-the-scenes from yesterday's preview render. Every now and then, I'll be hanging out in Discord with other developers, and we'll just shoot the shit while working on a scene. Often expressing frustrations when DAZ decides to be DAZ. When we look at a final render, more often than not most won't know what it took to get the render to its final state.
Those grey blocks you see, I had to edit the hair mesh to partially remove the skull cap. Reason being was for some reason the light coming from the phone did some wonky stuff to her skullcap. I tried a few things, and none fixed the issue. It's frustrating to see people on forums say, "That's just DAZ. Issue has been that way for years.". Removing the skullcap made her hair look like it was thinning, so that was a no-go.
So, I just modified the mesh to remove the forehead part so it doesn't have that odd color displacement. But kept the top part since it's not looking like she's balding at age 23. Rebuilt the mesh and saved it. Then there's the blue sheets clipping into her. This one was trickier since I wanted to clean up the clipping and also give the impression she was lying on the bed and pillow. So, I had to export the mesh into blender, re-apply the cloth physics, modify the subdivision and then start applying her impression where she's laying on the bed and pillow, then export back into DAZ. Honestly, I should have done this whole scene in Blender. It would have been more fun to work in, lol.
Not all developer's workflows are the same. This is just mine I wanted to share, so we can see the process of hurdling over issues. Here's another one. Boob sock is a common thing we all try to fix and have different methods to fix it. From dforce tricks to other methods. My go-to is usually marvelous designer. It's simple and the cloth physics are pretty good. But there are some shirts that make it difficult because there's loose meshes. So when you try to settle the cloth to rest over the breasts nicely. Gravity does its thing and the whole thing literally just falls apart lol.
Long story short, I threw that bitch in Blender and fixed it there.
This is a propaganda devlog. Blender over DAZ, fight me. Just kidding, but in all seriousness, I'm pretty confident in shifting over to Blender by Book 3. A lot of the special renders done lately were in Blender and no one seems to really notice the difference.
Anyways, despite my gripes outlined above. This week was still productive. I love exploring solutions to problems. Good way to exercise the ol' think noodle.
Thanks again, everyone, and be safe out there!
- digi.B