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Hey, folks! Hope your week's off to a good start. Sorry to get this up late again. @_@ I've been a day behind for like three weeks, and unfortunately it won't be stopping anytime soon. I've got some hectic, time-sensitive stuff in my personal life that's eating away at my days, I've been doing some annoying annual re-certification stuff at my day job, and of course I'm cranking away on renders as fast as I possibly can. I've put an extra wick in my candle, so I can burn it at more than both ends.
But, things are moving pretty well. I'm in the process of getting a test build ready for my $15+ supporters, which'll likely hit at the end of the month. It'll likely be missing the last scene, since I'm not finished with it yet. But, there'll be a good bit of content. And I mayyyy have time to squeak in a few of the less lengthy, optional endings.
Attached to this post you'll find some images for a scene I had a lot of fun with, because I got to go a little big and crazy, in an environment that doesn't usually see a lot of action -- our hero's condo. As you can see, there's a bunch of extra figures in one of the images, and poor Risa's looking more than a little flustered. I'll leave you to speculate about what's going on, but I'll take a minute to get into the nitty gritty of how I put the scene together.
For those that don't know, Daz figures can be reeeeally resource-intensive. That typically limits you to a few figures per scene, if you want the renders to process in a timely fashion. Given that I'm trying to do hundreds (and over time, thousands) of renders, I can't let renders cook for hours. If a render takes more than twenty minutes, I start getting pretty annoyed. So, for a scene like this, where I want a lot of people in it, there's a few options. I could use the
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, which reduces the texture map of objects within the scene. Pretty useful, but it has its limits, if I don't want the characters' skin reduced to a blobby mess.
So, I tend to prefer using billboards, two-dimensional images that you can insert into a scene. Now, you can buy
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that allow you to rotate the image on the X and Y axis, and they're pretty neat. But, those sets are expensive, and you're limited to what that asset creator has made available. So, I like to use
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and make my own. This can be useful for all kinds of stuff, from background characters to skylines. So, I set about making my background cast of party girls.
I basically just set up a light similar to what I want in the scene, and render figures against an empty, transparent background. Boom, done. But.. This takes time. And as I've already discussed, I don't like wasting a lot of time. So, I decided to try something. I tossed a couple of these images to Perplexity, told it to match the style, and generate a bunch of dancing bikini girls on a plain background. Here are some of the figures it gave me.
In the end, a process that would've taken me a decent amount of time (posing bodies, props, facial expressions, and hair, rendering, applying costumes and hair, tattoos, etc.) took me under ten minutes. I removed the backgrounds from the images with
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, put them into the Billboard Builder, and I quickly had a full scene of girls partying.
Now, would I want to use this for something important? No. I'd rather be able to fully control a character's expression, pose, etc. But for background characters, which I knew I'd be blurring with a little depth of field trickery to hide any funky AI features? Well, it's a pretty solid return on the time investment.
That's it for me, today! I'm currently pushing myself to get the alpha build for the next chapter done by the 8th. That feels doable. But, as always I'll keep you updated on my progress. Until next time, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!
