VN Ren'Py Abandoned Dr. Amana, Sexual Therapist [v2.0.0P] [Ianvs]

[RomanHume]

I realized in the recent week I've skipped over some previous posts in the thread that I failed to respond to. So I'm going to take a moment here and do a mega post to correct that. My apologies for those who got skipped in the deluge. Cheers mates.

Well, just for giggles I created a test scene by following your basic workflow above, using characters from Genesis through G8. For Iray using default settings (i.e., 95% covergence, 1.00 quality, etc.) the scene with all character materials enabled required 2:45 to reach final state, but when all character materials were switched to a single grey material it dropped to 00:22 ! That's a huge difference.

With Octane, regardless of the render mode I used, the timing was nearly the same for characters with full-on SSS materials as for mapping them all to the same, matte grey shader. The basic scene on fastest render mode took about 9-11 seconds for the grey materials and just under 25 seconds with custom character materials, while the more advanced render mode took almost the exact same amount of time in both cases. So, mapping to grey wouldn't save me loads of time for my workflows, typically. That can only go so far, because once lots of reflective/refractive object materials are enabled in a scene, that could start to add up (but even so, Octane is just beast at showing you enough quickly - like a car with huge low-end torque).

Oh, and my viewport is usually in hidden line, wireframe or smooth shaded mode, so that also cuts down use of materials while manipulating the scene in Daz.

I will certainly be the first to say that Daz is clunky and has a lot of room for improvement. Generally speaking though I'm happy with the quality of Iray, though in the future I'd love to upscale to something like Arnold. But that's a long term vision for the future.

I've spent so much time adapting to Daz and Iray, though I am curious how complicated it is to roll over to Octane. I have no immediate plans to do anything of sort, but I'm always interested in learning as many tools as I can.

i think you should reconsider lola-you've made her too interesting. plus, as you said '' For me it was about doing it in a tasteful way that didn't play on pure sexual fantasy/fetish but instead conveyed a believable character that players would want to get to know. '' a little to much effort for someone who's only a second character.

On of my goals is to make multiple games set in the same fictional reality. So even after Lola's role in this story has been fulfilled, there are always opportunities to expand her role in future games.

But for the time being, I already have so much going on in this story that expanding her role beyond what is planned would create a ton of additional work. But her role in this story isn't done yet and we will be seeing more of her.

Lola/Lita dont necessarily need to be romancable, but it would be interesting if they show up later as a part or someone elses story.

Could see them involved with Jane's story for example, she is a "bad girl" so talking to a stripper might be a view into her future if she doesn't change perhaps. Like a mentor "Dont follow my path" sort of deal.

She still has a lot of work to do in the Roger/Nanami story. But cameos and crossovers are always a possibility.

I would love to see Lola/Lita as romance option but i think that would kill our poor dev from overwork, after all 7 romance paths are already a lot.

For real. There's already so much story I have left to get on doc and coded. As much as I love the character (and have every intent to use more in this game and in future projects), I simply can't justify coding in an 8th romanceable character. The project is already larger than I would like.

I like the kind that is behind the guy's back.

The best game that comes to mind that has this kind of cheating is Good Girl Gone Bad. If you play your cards right, you can make Ashley stay in a relationship while cheating around without her boyfriend's knowledge. She likes him, but she also loves the thrill that she gets when cheating on him. I admit that isn't the best comparison because GGGB has a female MC.

I can't think of any good game with a male MC that has this kind of cheating. I can only remember of Japanese netorare visual novels that falls in this category. If you know how to read Japanese I can recommend you some of them.

But I guess you can get my point. Of course I'm not trying to say that this is the "best kind of cheating" and the way you're planning to do it is worse. It's just a matter of personal preference.

Fair enough. It's always interesting to me to hear what angles people prefer. Roger and Emily's story is just getting started, so there are still a lot of directions that plot line can evolve in. Thanks for sharing mate!

(sorry for my bad english) I agree with you, i'm not a current donor and i don't like to give an opinion when i don't support, but i think she could have a very interesting story, i liked the introduction of her more than the wife, amanda and monica introduction. Why don't ask in a private patreon post and see if the people have a REAL interest in that dev? Maybe it is more than less that have an interest in Lola as a love interest, it might be worth.
Just one more opinion

Again, as much as I love the character, there is just already too much material I have to work through. But don't lose heart, we've not seen the last of the dear girl.

See, I was thinking that was you in the picture!

That's exactly how I look when I'm programming. I just chill with my whiskey, a whore's hand on my balls, dictating to my speech-to-text all the code and story.

Yeah...for realz! That's totally me!

....I'm awesome!

But, some of us are perfect gentlemen! Not the usual knuckle-dragging riff-raff you might find!

I'd believe that. But I've seen you in the H5 forums too. You're not only putting moves on my girls, but spreading your gene-seed through out the stars!

I can only image what other games you've sullied with your wanton behavior!

That, right there, is a beautiful render! Congrats!

Thank you indeed! I dare say I'm getting the hang of this.

So, will this half-version leak here? It would be nice...

That's entirely up to the pirates. Unfortunately, I"m afraid if it does leak it would do more harm than good. That is, after people spend an hour downloading it only to get about twenty minutes of content.

I think that's why most of the pirates are waiting for the completion. Just so that it'll be worth their time.

However, and this is where I pander, $10+ patrons that have access to the bug testing of new scenes have the option of only downloading the new content. So if you're really determined to speed play through the new stuff without spending all night waiting for the game to download, there is an option. *Pandering complete*



Alright, I think that covers everything I missed. If you posted here or tried to get my attention and I missed it, by all means, send me a message or flag me down and I'll respond ASAP.

Cheers all!

 

[Ghostface Reborn]

I realized in the recent week I've skipped over some previous posts in the thread that I failed to respond to. So I'm going to take a moment here and do a mega post to correct that. My apologies for those who got skipped in the deluge. Cheers mates.




I will certainly be the first to say that Daz is clunky and has a lot of room for improvement. Generally speaking though I'm happy with the quality of Iray, though in the future I'd love to upscale to something like Arnold. But that's a long term vision for the future.

I've spent so much time adapting to Daz and Iray, though I am curious how complicated it is to roll over to Octane. I have no immediate plans to do anything of sort, but I'm always interested in learning as many tools as I can.



On of my goals is to make multiple games set in the same fictional reality. So even after Lola's role in this story has been fulfilled, there are always opportunities to expand her role in future games.

But for the time being, I already have so much going on in this story that expanding her role beyond what is planned would create a ton of additional work. But her role in this story isn't done yet and we will be seeing more of her.



She still has a lot of work to do in the Roger/Nanami story. But cameos and crossovers are always a possibility.



For real. There's already so much story I have left to get on doc and coded. As much as I love the character (and have every intent to use more in this game and in future projects), I simply can't justify coding in an 8th romanceable character. The project is already larger than I would like.



Fair enough. It's always interesting to me to hear what angles people prefer. Roger and Emily's story is just getting started, so there are still a lot of directions that plot line can evolve in. Thanks for sharing mate!



Again, as much as I love the character, there is just already too much material I have to work through. But don't lose heart, we've not seen the last of the dear girl.



That's exactly how I look when I'm programming. I just chill with my whiskey, a whore's hand on my balls, dictating to my speech-to-text all the code and story.

Yeah...for realz! That's totally me!

....I'm awesome!



I'd believe that. But I've seen you in the H5 forums too. You're not only putting moves on my girls, but spreading your gene-seed through out the stars!

I can only image what other games you've sullied with your wanton behavior!



Thank you indeed! I dare say I'm getting the hang of this.



That's entirely up to the pirates. Unfortunately, I"m afraid if it does leak it would do more harm than good. That is, after people spend an hour downloading it only to get about twenty minutes of content.

I think that's why most of the pirates are waiting for the completion. Just so that it'll be worth their time.

However, and this is where I pander, $10+ patrons that have access to the bug testing of new scenes have the option of only downloading the new content. So if you're really determined to speed play through the new stuff without spending all night waiting for the game to download, there is an option. *Pandering complete*



Alright, I think that covers everything I missed. If you posted here or tried to get my attention and I missed it, by all means, send me a message or flag me down and I'll respond ASAP.

Cheers all!

at least let us help her to find a better life-that would be a good conclusion-a secretary for the mc could lead to further story.

 

[TheDevian]

at least let us help her to find a better life-that would be a good conclusion-a secretary for the mc could lead to further story.

I would at least like to see her pop back up after she is done getting her work done, to say thanks or whatever. That said, I do like the idea of giving her a job too, that could be a nice bit in the epilogue or whatever perhaps.

 

[RC-1138 Boss]

I get the feeling RomanHune already has her story drafted at this point from reading his previous comments.

 

[TheDevian]

I get the feeling RomanHune already has her story drafted at this point from reading his previous comments.

Yeah, I figure most of it's planned to some degree, but he has been known to ...adjust a thing or two once in a while, so who knows? It could be that was the plan the whole time, the world may never know!

 

[fried]

I will certainly be the first to say that Daz is clunky and has a lot of room for improvement. Generally speaking though I'm happy with the quality of Iray, though in the future I'd love to upscale to something like Arnold. But that's a long term vision for the future.

I've spent so much time adapting to Daz and Iray, though I am curious how complicated it is to roll over to Octane. I have no immediate plans to do anything of sort, but I'm always interested in learning as many tools as I can.

For a free offering, Daz' Iray is excellent and the version embedded with 4.12 beta is going to be optimized for use with RTX cards for even more stellar performance (especially real-time):

You must be registered to see the links

Iray relies upon MDL materials (i.e., derived by NVidia for their own products) so other renderers typically need some form of mapping to at least give you an approximate start on setting up equivalent shaders (using a different specification or shader) in their systems. The nice thing about Daz' Iray is that comes for free. For me, their material node system can be less flexible or at least accessible in daily use and is somewhat clunky (totally subjective opinion here - coming from a person who has worked with node systems for Poser, Blender and Autodesk-shipped renderers, plus V-Ray.) In the end, you can still get render layers (using a different NVidia convention, but same concept) and other needs from Iray in Daz, which is pretty cool.

Octane is probably the next closest render integration solution for Daz (and Poser) scenes, at least from the perspective of launching from within the UI, having its own pane in Daz and even its material+rendering details saved as part of your .duf file (i.e., OTOY extends the standard .duf format with additional data). It also does standard approximations of 3DL and Iray-oriented Daz shaders to Octane materials on-the-fly and on-demand, at the Daz "surface" level. It usually gets you about 40-75% of the way there after the first pass, in my experience.

So, you need to tweak for optimal Octane material and lighting use in most cases but much of that is sped up by relying on a combination of Octane's user-submitted material library, your own material library or those you can purchase. After that, it's a simple matter of drag and drop onto a surface to get that leather couch look you previously liked for a different model, then easily go in and change the color, specular settings, etc. to make it a new variation on the theme (then maybe save that to your personal material library, too.) Its node system becomes second nature after trying it for only a little bit and experimentation yields real-time results so there's no waiting to try out all sorts of ideas on-the-fly.

If you wanted to try Arnold, Redshift or other renderers, their integration would be in the form of exporting your objects or scenes from Daz in FBX, OBJ or similar format and then re-mapping in the app supporting those renderers and then working on them uniquely outside of Daz at that point. I don't think any of them handle Iray's MDL shaders natively, unfortunately. The export process is generally easy, but the Daz to Maya product makes it a couple of clicks and makes the choices easier:

You must be registered to see the links

. That said, the entire reason I went for Octane was to find an integrated, real-time PBR approach which worked for Poser and later for Daz, actually.

Honestly, if you were going to try the export and eventually render route, you might also consider Blender because Cycles is pretty decent and its nodes are super-flexible, IMHO. Plus, it can add hair, physics, etc. that the big Autodesk and Maxon products offer in a free, pretty capable all-in-one package. It has the ability to import morphs and bones from Daz with an add-on (to an extent) as well, so you can even pose after importing an exported Daz scene. I've also used a Maya-to-Blender transformation utility and that worked great, too - Blender is just fun as a barrel of monkeys, IMHO. I realize you've been looking into Maya and it does beat out most packages in the animation department, corporate workflow areas, etc. (which is possibly where the Arnold influence came to you, I am guessing).

I still use Iray! It's very good at simply using things out of the box, though it still needs at least some tweaking in the shaders and render settings to get what I need. If that takes too long for a quickie scene that I thought would be best with Iray's qualities, then I will go to Octane because I can tweak there so much faster.

Here's an example where the scene was comprised of objects with materials for Iray, 3DL and Poser Firefly renderers but didn't work well for all of them, so I went to Octane as the common ground and got most of what I needed after about 10-15 minutes of tweaking (and longer for fine-tuning, primarily trying for early morning lighting in a weird space):

https://f95zone.to/threads/the-visit-v0-10-fix2-stiglet.10361/page-163#post-2103541

I could have done the same thing with Iray shaders, btw - at least for my style, it would have taken me longer. But, perhaps for you that would be a much shorter period of time to get the setup you needed.

As mentioned, it's possible Daz 4.12 with RTX cards will further enable Iray for real-time draft performance when that's delivered.

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

I'd believe that. But I've seen you in the H5 forums too. You're not only putting moves on my girls, but spreading your gene-seed through out the stars!

I can only image what other games you've sullied with your wanton behavior!

That's is an outrageous accusation!



Which I totes resemble

 

[weaselman]

A hint, but only for those who are immune to spoilers...

Spoiler

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

goddamnit, I'll not stand for this

I'll be the best one-generation-older-neighbour she'll ever have, you can even hard-lock all the sex scenes behind this, just give us a way that we'll be able to avoid that face!

 

[RomanHume]

Spoiler

You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.

goddamnit, I'll not stand for this

I'll be the best one-generation-older-neighbour she'll ever have, you can even hard-lock all the sex scenes behind this, just give us a way that we'll be able to avoid that face!

Bro, can you do me a favor and edit your post so that the spoiler stays hidden behind the spoiler tag?

Edit: Thanks bro. I figured it was an accident by the way the two tags had been chopped off at the top.
Now, to answer your question, no. Sadly it's not avoidable (the scene plays out how it does for a reason). But fret not, You'll always have a chance to make things up to her.

 

[weaselman]

Bro, can you do me a favor and edit your post so that the spoiler stays hidden behind the spoiler tag?

sure, if you do the same (I'm not even sure how that happened, I'm sorry for that)

 

[TomberryDude]

I've been sitting on this game trying to figure out something to say for a while.

I love this game, it's great. Cassie and Jade are so beautiful.

The trans girl is pretty good. Not something I usually go for, especially IRL but I like her.

 

[RomanHume]

sure, if you do the same (I'm not even sure how that happened, I'm sorry for that)

Thanks bro. I figured it was an accident by the way the two tags had been chopped off at the top.
Now, to answer your question, no. Sadly it's not avoidable (the scene plays out how it does for a reason). But fret not, You'll always have a chance to make things up to her.

 

[RomanHume]

I've been sitting on this game trying to figure out something to say for a while.

I love this game, it's great. Cassie and Jade are so beautifu.

The trans girl is pretty good. Not something I usually go for, especially IRL but I like her.

Thank you!

I'm like you, Trans isn't really my thing. But as a writer, I look for things that push my abilities out there. It is my belief that a good writer can write anything. And I've learned that even though I'm not into Trans stuff, apparently I can write it pretty damned convincingly.

Seriously though, she's a great character and I fell in love writing her. She may not become a romanceable character, but she's definitely not done in the story and has much more to contribute.

And Jane...ah sexy little Jane. I'm definitely looking forward to the next Cassie update though cause it's time to turn up the heat.

Salute mate!

 

[Ghostface Reborn]

I've been sitting on this game trying to figure out something to say for a while.

I love this game, it's great. Cassie and Jade are so beautiful.

The trans girl is pretty good. Not something I usually go for, especially IRL but I like her.

i feel the very same way.

 

[Baftroid]

I am getting exceptions running the 1.0.7a. Anyone now how I can clean the saves and other scripts?

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

I am getting exceptions running the 1.0.7a. Anyone now how I can clean the saves and other scripts?

To delete your saves; whilst on the save screen, hover your mouse over each save, then press the delete key on the keyboard.

 

[RomanHume]

You must be registered to see the links

2019-09-08 Cassie in HD

Soooooooo......yeah. I did a thing.....and it's exciting, and I wanted to share it with you.

Those who have been patrons for awhile know, I'm always trying to push this project as far as it can go. I am a relentless learner and I'm always looking to explore that next level of perfection.

It has long been my dream to one day take my games to the next level using Maya and the Arnold Renderer. But a Maya license is crazy expensive and that was more of a long term goal. Something to aspire to in another year or so if I can really get enough support to work on the project full time.

But in the meantime, my explorations for improvement haven't ceased, and I've been exploring alternatives software packages (read: less expensive). One thing I've learned is that in the world of 3D modelling, the fundamentals don't change. The biggest difference between software packages is interface, specialized tools, and render engines. But the parts are pretty much the same. Modelling, UV Unwrapping. Texturing, Shading, Rigging, Animating, Rendering.

It was with the knowledge of these fundamentals in mind that I decided to toy around with Blender because, hey, it's free. And despite the low cost of implementation, a lot of developers shy away due to the overwhelming complexity of it's interface and the sheer depth of it's tool set. But I am neither shy nor intimidated and so I said what the hell, and dove right in.

I've been cranking on the game solid for the last three weeks and I decided this weekend I needed to take a little breather so I could dive in again fresh on Monday. But as is the curse of someone passionate about a project, I couldn't stop thinking about the game. So Saturday morning I thought I'd kill a couple hours in the morning downloading and toying around with Blender just to see what all the fuss was about.

That started a journey that has lasted until this very afternoon. And so, after watching about ten hours of tutorials and just playing to my heart's content, I decided to import one of our characters into Blender and see what kind of results I could achieve.

Once I had Cassie's model in the software, it took another three or four hours of modifying and adjusting surface nodes to get her skin to render properly but it was a tremendously good learning experience.

And so, I present to you my first forays into photorealistic skin shading in Blender. Now there is still much more to learn and much more to perfect (including the skin) before she is usable for anything. So don't get too excited about seeing Cassie HD in the game anytime soon. But for a self taught amateur with about two days of experience, I don't think the results are bad at all*!

Now tomorrow is Monday, at which time I will be shelving Blender to work on the game once more during the coming week. But I have every intention to break it out again next Saturday morning and continue my learning.

That's Awesome, So What's it All Mean?

Let's take a quick minute and talk about the future. Moving the game out of Daz and into a full 3D software package would be a big deal. It completely frees the process up from the Daz store, allows greater customization, and would open up the ability to do real animation in a fraction of the time or cost of doing it in Daz.

It's improved quality all the way around. And while setting and rigging the initial models might take a little more time than it does in Daz, just like Daz, you only have to do it once. At that point, you have everything saved and you're importing your pre-built assets into your scenes. But to do that, I have to be working on the game full time.

So while this is an exciting advancement, it will still be some time before we can use this new tech in the game. I still have to learn proper rigging and animation, as well how to make, model, and rig hair**. But I know how to model in ZBrush, I now know how to build groups of shader nodes and we have sufficient hardware (Each of the above renders took less than a minute to produce).

Clearly it's all very attainable. We just have to wait patiently to get there. So hang in there, help me continue to build support (maybe we'll put a dollar value on this goal). And know that when the time comes and we are prepared to make this leap, WE ARE NOT STOPPING DEVELOPMENT FOR A REBOOT. When the time comes I plan to handle it just like the upgrades we're doing now. Each future release will have a bunch of new material and a little bit of remastered old material. And little by little the old material will eventually catch up to the quality of the new stuff.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. I'm going to put this away and enjoy the rest of my weekend...all six hours of it.
Cheers Friends!



*As good as it came out I'm still not 100% satisfied. I want to increase the resolution of the textures to enhance surface details and continue to experiment with the surface nodes to achieve an even more life-like quality.

**Which I am super excited to learn because I'm sick of Daz's static, stiff, lifeless fucking hair.

 

[whippetmaster]

That knowledge could turn into side stories, short comics, standalone special renders and the next therapist for our gentleman!

 

[fried]

View attachment 395422

You must be registered to see the links

2019-09-08 Cassie in HD

Soooooooo......yeah. I did a thing.....and it's exciting, and I wanted to share it with you.

Those who have been patrons for awhile know, I'm always trying to push this project as far as it can go. I am a relentless learner and I'm always looking to explore that next level of perfection.

It has long been my dream to one day take my games to the next level using Maya and the Arnold Renderer. But a Maya license is crazy expensive and that was more of a long term goal. Something to aspire to in another year or so if I can really get enough support to work on the project full time.

But in the meantime, my explorations for improvement haven't ceased, and I've been exploring alternatives software packages (read: less expensive). One thing I've learned is that in the world of 3D modelling, the fundamentals don't change. The biggest difference between software packages is interface, specialized tools, and render engines. But the parts are pretty much the same. Modelling, UV Unwrapping. Texturing, Shading, Rigging, Animating, Rendering.

It was with the knowledge of these fundamentals in mind that I decided to toy around with Blender because, hey, it's free. And despite the low cost of implementation, a lot of developers shy away due to the overwhelming complexity of it's interface and the sheer depth of it's tool set. But I am neither shy nor intimidated and so I said what the hell, and dove right in.

I've been cranking on the game solid for the last three weeks and I decided this weekend I needed to take a little breather so I could dive in again fresh on Monday. But as is the curse of someone passionate about a project, I couldn't stop thinking about the game. So Saturday morning I thought I'd kill a couple hours in the morning downloading and toying around with Blender just to see what all the fuss was about.

That started a journey that has lasted until this very afternoon. And so, after watching about ten hours of tutorials and just playing to my heart's content, I decided to import one of our characters into Blender and see what kind of results I could achieve.

Once I had Cassie's model in the software, it took another three or four hours of modifying and adjusting surface nodes to get her skin to render properly but it was a tremendously good learning experience.

And so, I present to you my first forays into photorealistic skin shading in Blender. Now there is still much more to learn and much more to perfect (including the skin) before she is usable for anything. So don't get too excited about seeing Cassie HD in the game anytime soon. But for a self taught amateur with about two days of experience, I don't think the results are bad at all*!

Now tomorrow is Monday, at which time I will be shelving Blender to work on the game once more during the coming week. But I have every intention to break it out again next Saturday morning and continue my learning.

That's Awesome, So What's it All Mean?

Let's take a quick minute and talk about the future. Moving the game out of Daz and into a full 3D software package would be a big deal. It completely frees the process up from the Daz store, allows greater customization, and would open up the ability to do real animation in a fraction of the time or cost of doing it in Daz.

It's improved quality all the way around. And while setting and rigging the initial models might take a little more time than it does in Daz, just like Daz, you only have to do it once. At that point, you have everything saved and you're importing your pre-built assets into your scenes. But to do that, I have to be working on the game full time.

So while this is an exciting advancement, it will still be some time before we can use this new tech in the game. I still have to learn proper rigging and animation, as well how to make, model, and rig hair**. But I know how to model in ZBrush, I now know how to build groups of shader nodes and we have sufficient hardware (Each of the above renders took less than a minute to produce).

Clearly it's all very attainable. We just have to wait patiently to get there. So hang in there, help me continue to build support (maybe we'll put a dollar value on this goal). And know that when the time comes and we are prepared to make this leap, WE ARE NOT STOPPING DEVELOPMENT FOR A REBOOT. When the time comes I plan to handle it just like the upgrades we're doing now. Each future release will have a bunch of new material and a little bit of remastered old material. And little by little the old material will eventually catch up to the quality of the new stuff.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. I'm going to put this away and enjoy the rest of my weekend...all six hours of it.
Cheers Friends!



*As good as it came out I'm still not 100% satisfied. I want to increase the resolution of the textures to enhance surface details and continue to experiment with the surface nodes to achieve an even more life-like quality.

**Which I am super excited to learn because I'm sick of Daz's static, stiff, lifeless fucking hair.

Well, that post seems kind of interesting, considering my post earlier today about your technical options and learning ... looks nice!

 

[TheDevian]

View attachment 395422

You must be registered to see the links

2019-09-08 Cassie in HD

Soooooooo......yeah. I did a thing.....and it's exciting, and I wanted to share it with you.

Those who have been patrons for awhile know, I'm always trying to push this project as far as it can go. I am a relentless learner and I'm always looking to explore that next level of perfection.

It has long been my dream to one day take my games to the next level using Maya and the Arnold Renderer. But a Maya license is crazy expensive and that was more of a long term goal. Something to aspire to in another year or so if I can really get enough support to work on the project full time.

But in the meantime, my explorations for improvement haven't ceased, and I've been exploring alternatives software packages (read: less expensive). One thing I've learned is that in the world of 3D modelling, the fundamentals don't change. The biggest difference between software packages is interface, specialized tools, and render engines. But the parts are pretty much the same. Modelling, UV Unwrapping. Texturing, Shading, Rigging, Animating, Rendering.

It was with the knowledge of these fundamentals in mind that I decided to toy around with Blender because, hey, it's free. And despite the low cost of implementation, a lot of developers shy away due to the overwhelming complexity of it's interface and the sheer depth of it's tool set. But I am neither shy nor intimidated and so I said what the hell, and dove right in.

I've been cranking on the game solid for the last three weeks and I decided this weekend I needed to take a little breather so I could dive in again fresh on Monday. But as is the curse of someone passionate about a project, I couldn't stop thinking about the game. So Saturday morning I thought I'd kill a couple hours in the morning downloading and toying around with Blender just to see what all the fuss was about.

That started a journey that has lasted until this very afternoon. And so, after watching about ten hours of tutorials and just playing to my heart's content, I decided to import one of our characters into Blender and see what kind of results I could achieve.

Once I had Cassie's model in the software, it took another three or four hours of modifying and adjusting surface nodes to get her skin to render properly but it was a tremendously good learning experience.

And so, I present to you my first forays into photorealistic skin shading in Blender. Now there is still much more to learn and much more to perfect (including the skin) before she is usable for anything. So don't get too excited about seeing Cassie HD in the game anytime soon. But for a self taught amateur with about two days of experience, I don't think the results are bad at all*!

Now tomorrow is Monday, at which time I will be shelving Blender to work on the game once more during the coming week. But I have every intention to break it out again next Saturday morning and continue my learning.

That's Awesome, So What's it All Mean?

Let's take a quick minute and talk about the future. Moving the game out of Daz and into a full 3D software package would be a big deal. It completely frees the process up from the Daz store, allows greater customization, and would open up the ability to do real animation in a fraction of the time or cost of doing it in Daz.

It's improved quality all the way around. And while setting and rigging the initial models might take a little more time than it does in Daz, just like Daz, you only have to do it once. At that point, you have everything saved and you're importing your pre-built assets into your scenes. But to do that, I have to be working on the game full time.

So while this is an exciting advancement, it will still be some time before we can use this new tech in the game. I still have to learn proper rigging and animation, as well how to make, model, and rig hair**. But I know how to model in ZBrush, I now know how to build groups of shader nodes and we have sufficient hardware (Each of the above renders took less than a minute to produce).

Clearly it's all very attainable. We just have to wait patiently to get there. So hang in there, help me continue to build support (maybe we'll put a dollar value on this goal). And know that when the time comes and we are prepared to make this leap, WE ARE NOT STOPPING DEVELOPMENT FOR A REBOOT. When the time comes I plan to handle it just like the upgrades we're doing now. Each future release will have a bunch of new material and a little bit of remastered old material. And little by little the old material will eventually catch up to the quality of the new stuff.

Anyway, that's all I got for now. I'm going to put this away and enjoy the rest of my weekend...all six hours of it.
Cheers Friends!



*As good as it came out I'm still not 100% satisfied. I want to increase the resolution of the textures to enhance surface details and continue to experiment with the surface nodes to achieve an even more life-like quality.

**Which I am super excited to learn because I'm sick of Daz's static, stiff, lifeless fucking hair.

Very nice. I have been messing with Blender a bit lately as well, though I have not even considered trying people yet. It was pretty imposing at first, but the new 2.8 version has made it a lot easier to work with, and I am finding it rather enjoyable. It's not only free, but it's almost on par with what they use at Pixar from what I have read.

It looks like you are already doing some amazing work, I can't wait to see how much better your project can get now. Best of luck!