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Hi guys,
it's been a while since the last post, so I want to share a bit of news. I have to tell you, I've learned some new lessons on the way, but as it happens the most valuable lessons comes from failure.
New stadium
There has been a stadium in the game for a while, but we've never seen it. Because Jane is a cheerleader I wanted to add it at some point, Now I had the means to buy one, so I 've bought this one :
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There where no team logos or names, decent size (I've actually looked at sizes of college stadiums and some have capacity of 30 000 or even more) and lots of details.
First big problem was importing the stadium in to Daz3d. It only imported the meshes and non of the textures, so I had to retexture everything with mixture of the original textures and some from the packs I've bought.
Too late I have realised it's a rugby stadium not an american football. So I had to find a new field with the right layout. I have found one for free, but the grass looked like a poorly painted ground. So I've edited the textures so only the layout is visible, and I've created new grass texture and place it on the rugby field that only the grass stays there. I had to use the the ragby field, because it had the mesh that fit correctly into the space between stands.
At one point I've added a real 3D grass on top of it. It looked good, but I would not be able to add anything else to the scene without crashing my PC.
One big disappointment are the seats. They are just one flat plane with texture, not a real seats, so any ideas for a scenes on the stands has to be scrapped until I find a way to replace it with a real seats.
This alone took me more than 3 days, just to put it together. Hardest part was the blending together the ragby field with the football layout with the creation of the textures for it. The most time consuming part was messing with the 3D grass. Finding the right models, placeing it on the ground (the more meshes I had placed the slower the computer was and it took me hours just to place it). If I had realised sooner that it won't work I might have saved almost a day of work.
Cheerleader team
No cheerleader works alone, not even Jane, so I have added several new characters to the game. I've designed 4 new characters including coach and one more for a story reasons.
I couldn't add 20 or so characters to the scene, my computer would explode, so for technical reasons there are only 5 characters at the scene. For the record I tried 7, but no. 6 is the most my PC can handle at the moment.
Creating new characters is quite easy, so it was done in less than a day.
Testing and rendering
This was the most annoying part. The grass looked good in the preview but when rendered, it was a mess. I've done it like a 20 times and I still wasn't happy. The final version is far from what I wanted, but it is the best from what I was able to make.
Next problem I had were the shadows. No matter how much light I added to the scene I was unable to produce a decent shadow, so the characters do look a bit like they're floating above the ground. As I'm writing this article I I've got one more idea, but I don't want to waist more time on this, at least no this month.
Conclusion
This endeavour took me almost entire week to create one event and I've lost a bit desperate at times, because it just didn't work.
The reason I'm writing this at all is so you know what I'm doing. It's not pretty, it's not smooth and I stumble a lot. Hopefully these lessons will prove useful in the future.
Until the rest of this month I'm returning to what I know, so nothing will will slow the production now. I still believe this update will be worth it.
See you guys next time
