first ever renders

[Jai Ho]

I am also writing a VN - well, in theory - I haven't worked on it in over a month! I laughed when I saw your pic above - "Hey, I recognize that apartment!" Haha. Here is one of my renders. I am trying to make sure I have plenty of room at the bottom for dialog. One tip on that apartment, you see how my camera is facing the same wall you did? I made everything else behind me and around me invisible and it quickened the render time. Just an idea.

By the way - I did not use any indoor lighting, I just cranked up the lighting coming from the windows in render/environment.
Heeeey! I'm glad I posted this pic - the left lady's sandle is messed up into her clothes! Gotta fix that! Great first start - looking forward to seeing your progress!

 

[JackBeNimble]

I particularly like your posing, expression use, and composition here, Jai Ho.

 

[Chatterbox]

Jai Ho, I did the same thing. I also had to reduce my texture sizes as they were off the chart. I finally got it down to 45 minutes with 1000 iterations at Ultra HD, then resized to kill any left over pixelation.

Nice posing! That's something I really haven't dug into yet. I've only been doing this about 1 week.

 

[Jai Ho]

Jai Ho, I did the same thing. I also had to reduce my texture sizes as they were off the chart. I finally got it down to 45 minutes with 1000 iterations at Ultra HD, then resized to kill any left over pixelation.

Nice posing! That's something I really haven't dug into yet. I've only been doing this about 1 week.

For a week you are doing amazing! Keep up the great work!

 

[ltech]

@iTECH , that's some great, practical VN advice! Love the back/fore ground idea. I'm imagining only rendering the background once, then using game code to overlay characters in different poses?

Also, would you recommend moving the character farther back in this scene, to make space for the text? How do you do close-ups in a VN?

Just curious myself.

For my first VN I am using foreground and background method as well as whole scene renders depending on the situation. As for close up's I would just always try to remember to leave enough room for the text at the bottom of the screen, with renpy you can hide the text and the user has to press a key to go to next screen.

Itech,

That seems like a good idea, but how do you do that and get the lighting to match? I could see that on outdoor scenes, but if I render the scene and then the character by herself, would she not be exposed to outdoor type lighting?

Lighting can be a issue when using the foreground/background method but a lot of VN's actually use this method, it is up to you. Personally I am going to use both the foreground/background method and whole scene method.

A good example of when the foreground/background method can come in handy is driving scenes. Also like you mentioned, it is great for outdoor scenes.