Daz Generally speaking, how many renders for a monthly update do people consider sufficient?

[Gallant Trombe]

I know it varies and depends obviously, but I want to produce meaningful updates that are worth downloading with every release, but I definitely want to avoid long update cycles. I'm also streamlining my process which means trades off here and there, so if I could take a bit more time per render, I would for the sake of quality. Right now, I'm limiting my render time per shot to about 5 mins each, and including 1 min of post-processing each, that's about 30 renders each development day whenever I have free time.

 

[Synx]

I don't think it's something you can express in renders. It will highly depend on how much you use the renders, like a new one for each sentence or do you reuse them, how many different paths you got, (if you got 100 different paths 1000 renders is very low), etc.

For each update I would personally aim for roughly 30 minutes worth of playtime for 1 path if you would read all the text. How much renders that required is just impossible to say.

30 renders a day sounds more then fine.

 

[Black Swamp Ent.]

When I play an update to a VN, I don't go by how many renders, but how much actual story/content there is for the update. Like Synx mentioned, depending on the situation, 900 renders may seem like a lot, but if they're split between several paths, it won't go far in the scheme of things.

 

[Zargon_games]

Either you are a genius for posing scenes and you have a nasa pc to render in 5 minutes or you are not taking enough time to do the job properly. In my case I do something like 4 to 6 renders per day, which take about 1 hour of rendering (4K render, 5000 iterations) and I need about 30 minutes of scene setup, there are also days that I dedicate to write the script or work on the program code, so not every day I do new renders, that's why in each bimonthly update I include about 180/200 renders.

If you can really produce 30 quality renders per day I really congratulate you, but it sounds like something difficult to maintain over time.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Either you are a genius for posing scenes and you have a nasa pc to render in 5 minutes or you are not taking enough time to do the job properly. In my case I do something like 4 to 6 renders per day, which take about 1 hour of rendering (4K render, 5000 iterations) and I need about 30 minutes of scene setup, there are also days that I dedicate to write the script or work on the program code, so not every day I do new renders, that's why in each bimonthly update I include about 180/200 renders.

If you can really produce 30 quality renders per day I really congratulate you, but it sounds like something difficult to maintain over time.

I don't know what is quality renders to be completely honest. Which is why I'm asking for advice lol. They look pretty good to me. Not the highest quality render I've done myself, my 4k character portrait shots take about 30mins to 1 hour to render, 2 hours to pose and light, but those are one-off "promos", not for in-game. If it's just for average convo scenes and the game will be in 1440p, they take 5-6mins average. For more dramatic ones, yes they would take longer. For example, in terms of purely rendering time, this took roughly 4mins foreground, 6 background. I reuse the background if it's just slight movements like mouth moving, a slight shift of pose, etc. This lets me do a lot more variants for conversations, not have either 1-2 static shots or different angles all the time. This averages out to 5-6mins each after I'm done with the scene. This is not counting posing, which takes a variable amount of time.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

I don't think it's something you can express in renders. It will highly depend on how much you use the renders, like a new one for each sentence or do you reuse them, how many different paths you got, (if you got 100 different paths 1000 renders is very low), etc.

For each update I would personally aim for roughly 30 minutes worth of playtime for 1 path if you would read all the text. How much renders that required is just impossible to say.

30 renders a day sounds more then fine.

When I play an update to a VN, I don't go by how many renders, but how much actual story/content there is for the update. Like Synx mentioned, depending on the situation, 900 renders may seem like a lot, but if they're split between several paths, it won't go far in the scheme of things.

Yeah, this is what I think too as a player. But now that I'm developing my own game, time is something I need to quantify, and renders is the most time-consuming and important component of the VN. My VN won't be path heavy, as much as I enjoy seeing big branching paths, having too many just means less content per update. A lot of people play these for just one or two characters' content, I don't want them waiting months just for 30mins of them. Speaking as a player, I really don't like that, it is so easy to just forget and lose attachment to them when you have to wait so long for so little. Optionals, variations and endings are where choices would matter.

 

[MissFortune]

Either you are a genius for posing scenes and you have a nasa pc to render in 5 minutes or you are not taking enough time to do the job properly. In my case I do something like 4 to 6 renders per day, which take about 1 hour of rendering (4K render, 5000 iterations) and I need about 30 minutes of scene setup, there are also days that I dedicate to write the script or work on the program code, so not every day I do new renders, that's why in each bimonthly update I include about 180/200 renders.

If you can really produce 30 quality renders per day I really congratulate you, but it sounds like something difficult to maintain over time.

More often than not, 4K isn't necessary. You're just increasing your render times.

I mean, if you're doing it to reduce noise on a portrait or something it's understandable to some extent, but that fact of the matter is that 90% of users won't notice it. Especially when a lot of them are on budget, color-inaccurate 1440p gaming monitors. There is no major difference between 4K and 1440p, people just think there is.

 

[mickydoo]

I can get 10 a day rendered and coded if they are set up, I can do 20 renders if the scenes are not so much set up but more or less ready to be so (but not coded in though). But then it take two days to put together and code in an animated scene that has 2 or 3 angles (that's not including making it and rendering it, and fucking it up and doing it again), I can spend a few days just writing. Also not to mention when I get the shits with it and don't do anything for a few days, and/or have something else in real life that takes up my time.

I aim for 10 a day over 30 days so its 300 a month, but it takes me 6 weeks in reality.

Its not so much the time in the day, if I set up 10 scenes I start getting sick of it and need a break.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I aim for 10 a day over 30 days so its 300 a month, but it takes me 6 weeks in reality.

Quite a high bar all thing considered imho. Beware of burn-out.
Of course there is lot of factor, but still on average, hm, not sure it's healthy in the long run .

 

[GNVE]

Well development takes time and I think most devs discover that having short update cycles are unsustainable. Anyone who has been working as a dev in this niche for a while has discovered that updates take longer if you want to produce quality and have a life outside of work. To prevent burnout all creators seem to slow down the schedule after a while. Sometimes getting grief from a small minority of their community.
I think it works better to be upfront about having a healthy working schedule and longer times between updates. Yeah it might scare off some people but are those followers really the ones you want? When setting up my Patreon I made sure to value long term patrons as well as the high rollers. In my mind a person who drops a dollar a month for years is more important than a patron who drops a hundred bucks for one month. Reason being is simple. You can build a company on a reliable patron. It is a lot harder if your income fluctuates wildly every month. Your expenses certainly don't.
You need to remember that as long as you don't make enough money off of this to actually make a decent living it is a hobby. Even if your plan is to eventually make it your job. Which means you will need to prioritize school or work over it which limits the time you can actually work on the game. (Especially if you want to have a life outside of work as well).
Having a longer update schedule prevents burn-out in the long run. This is advantages to your followers as well since it will allow you to actually finish your game eventually rather than abandoning the game half-way through.

By the way you describe your workflow it seems as if you aren't using a render queue? I think that is a very important part of a good workflow. you watching your pc render is not very effective as you usually cannot do much else while the pc is busy. With a render queue you can do all the rendering while sleeping, eating, going out or doing whatever. I'm using

You must be registered to see the links

currently and am quite happy with it. It doesn't work with animations though but that is a minor inconvenience.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Well development takes time and I think most devs discover that having short update cycles are unsustainable. Anyone who has been working as a dev in this niche for a while has discovered that updates take longer if you want to produce quality and have a life outside of work. To prevent burnout all creators seem to slow down the schedule after a while. Sometimes getting grief from a small minority of their community.
I think it works better to be upfront about having a healthy working schedule and longer times between updates. Yeah it might scare off some people but are those followers really the ones you want? When setting up my Patreon I made sure to value long term patrons as well as the high rollers. In my mind a person who drops a dollar a month for years is more important than a patron who drops a hundred bucks for one month. Reason being is simple. You can build a company on a reliable patron. It is a lot harder if your income fluctuates wildly every month. Your expenses certainly don't.
You need to remember that as long as you don't make enough money off of this to actually make a decent living it is a hobby. Even if your plan is to eventually make it your job. Which means you will need to prioritize school or work over it which limits the time you can actually work on the game. (Especially if you want to have a life outside of work as well).
Having a longer update schedule prevents burn-out in the long run. This is advantages to your followers as well since it will allow you to actually finish your game eventually rather than abandoning the game half-way through.

By the way you describe your workflow it seems as if you aren't using a render queue? I think that is a very important part of a good workflow. you watching your pc render is not very effective as you usually cannot do much else while the pc is busy. With a render queue you can do all the rendering while sleeping, eating, going out or doing whatever. I'm using

You must be registered to see the links

currently and am quite happy with it. It doesn't work with animations though but that is a minor inconvenience.

Thanks for the advice, makes a lot of sense. I do actually use render queue, but the scenes I'm working on right now is fast to render and have a lot of small variations. They take about 5 mins, so I just work out or do chores while I wait. So far it's been a lot easier to iterate and fix renders if I do them one at a time, rather than saving it for the night. But long ones that take any more than 10mins I render overnight.

 

[GNVE]

Something else I forgot to add. Measuring your output by number of renders a day is not the best idea. there is a lot of things you can do that are productive but do not result in renders per se. Whether it is doing coding, marketing, being on this forum (which to me counts as marketing, a future investment for help when I inevitably get stuck myself and market research.) or a 100 other things you could be doing that are productive.
For instance when I made the valentines series a lot of work ended up in research (i.e. watching tango videos) to get the feel right. this lowered the output of objective renders but was necessary work.

Currently I'm mostly designing characters. When measured by output in renders is quite low. But I need to morph a character. write a backstory for which I often times need to do a lot of research. For instance Anandi is from a rural Indian village and Sam is a male transexual. As a cisgender straight European white guy I have little experience with either topic so it requires a decent amount of research to not just get a stereotype of a character.

Or for Saint Patricks day I ended up with just two final renders after a lot of work. Most of that time went into trying figuring out how to do large groups of people in the game (and then having to pose a large group). Sure the actual render output was greater since the scene is made up of several partial renders but what everybody will see is the final 2 renders.


Lastly making art is a fickle process. You can't always push trough and hope to make something great. sometimes you have to step back, take a break, go outside and look for inspiration. I have come up with great characters (Sam being one of them) while trying to fall asleep. At other times have actively tried to work on the game and didn't get anything done.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Something else I forgot to add. Measuring your output by number of renders a day is not the best idea. there is a lot of things you can do that are productive but do not result in renders per se. Whether it is doing coding, marketing, being on this forum (which to me counts as marketing, a future investment for help when I inevitably get stuck myself and market research.) or a 100 other things you could be doing that are productive.
For instance when I made the valentines series a lot of work ended up in research (i.e. watching tango videos) to get the feel right. this lowered the output of objective renders but was necessary work.
View attachment 1121624
Currently I'm mostly designing characters. When measured by output in renders is quite low. But I need to morph a character. write a backstory for which I often times need to do a lot of research. For instance Anandi is from a rural Indian village and Sam is a male transexual. As a cisgender straight European white guy I have little experience with either topic so it requires a decent amount of research to not just get a stereotype of a character.
View attachment 1121632 View attachment 1121629
Or for Saint Patricks day I ended up with just two final renders after a lot of work. Most of that time went into trying figuring out how to do large groups of people in the game (and then having to pose a large group). Sure the actual render output was greater since the scene is made up of several partial renders but what everybody will see is the final 2 renders.
View attachment 1121631

Lastly making art is a fickle process. You can't always push trough and hope to make something great. sometimes you have to step back, take a break, go outside and look for inspiration. I have come up with great characters (Sam being one of them) while trying to fall asleep. At other times have actively tried to work on the game and didn't get anything done.

Those renders look good! I especially like the chess one, really well done lighting.

I guess we have all different ways of doing creative work. I usually sit down and just keep writing, most of my inspiration comes from my own experiences and dreams. I would wake up in the middle of the night and just type until sunrise. But for the case of the VN, much of the story, setting, characters are already written a few years ago. Right now I'm at the stage of just producing renders to figure out what is within reality and what is not. I rather tailor the story to what is actually doable than the other way around. Hence why I'm trying to pump out renders at the moment.

 

[GNVE]

Those renders look good! I especially like the chess one, really well-done lighting.

I guess we have all different ways of doing creative work. I usually sit down and just keep writing, most of my inspiration comes from my own experiences and dreams. I would wake up in the middle of the night and just type until sunrise. But for the case of the VN, much of the story, setting, characters are already written a few years ago. Right now I'm at the stage of just producing renders to figure out what is within reality and what is not. I rather tailor the story to what is actually doable than the other way around. Hence why I'm trying to pump out renders at the moment.

Thanks! The chess one is one of the few dramatic lighting images I have made. I usually opt for a more flat lighting that would fit in an interior room as most interiors will eventually end up in a game. I did theatre lighting for a while so it helps when I do go all out.

And yeah there are a thousand ways to shape your creative process. Only thing that matters is that you have a workflow that works for you. I just wanted to warn you about using an incomplete metric of productivity. It could lead to a sense of failure, stress and eventually burn-out. Read it in an article a couple of years ago by a journalist feeling burnt out do to looking at words written per day and I found it helpful so I wanted to share.