I'm impressed.
I have story ideas that I want to make into a VN and I've bought a fast computer with fast graphics card and downloaded DAZ Studio and even purchased a few assets and all that turned out to be the easy part.
Actually using DAZ is beyond my patience level. I looked at AI but the uncanny valley is more than I want to put up with.
95 hours doesn't seem like a long time but I'm not the one that had to sit at the desk and do it. Good job!
DAZ Studio is a rather unpleasant program to use. The user interface is pretty bad and everything in it runs like crap and is slow as hell. But after a lot of suffering, you eventually get used to it and develop a certain fluidity to your work.
Of course, keeping the scope simple is the most important thing. I'm taking this seriously in this project, with few characters, few environments, few assets (my characters don't even need clothes in most scenes because of the theme), etc. This is helping me enormously not to feel suicidal when I use DAZ for several hours in a day.
Generally, what I do for each render is quite simple:
1. add the location where the scene will take place + an HDRI to serve as a dome that will create the scene's basic lighting (download hdris on HDRI Haven)
2. add the characters involved
3. add a camera and set it to 120mm (at first I was using several different lenses and this made the characters' faces change a lot because of the perspective, now I've decided to do almost everything at 120mm unless the scene requires me to change this)
4. load a pose from the library close to what I envision, then finish the pose manually using 'pose controls'
5. make the facial expressions from scratch using 'face controls' (this is important to try and avoid as much as possible the terrible DAZ Studio expressions that make the characters look like Chucky the Killer Doll)
6. I preview the render
7. go to the render settings and change the ISO so that the scene is close to what I expect, even without any lighting (especially the camera headlamp, always turn it off otherwise all your renders will look very amateurish)
8. I add 'ghost light' planes, usually using the basic rule of three points (one close to the camera, one more to the side, one behind), and I keep changing the luminance of each plane and its dimenions until I have an acceptable image.
That's pretty much it.
Instead of putting so much time into a few animations, I suggest adding more static renders and story, to keep putting out content more frequently. You can always go back after you finish the base game and add in some flourishes, if you have not moved onto another game.
Now, if you get enough support where you can have someone else doing the Blender stuff, while you do the static renders and coding, maybe then you could add animations as you go. That or do the old jerky "img1, img2, img1, img2, img1, img2" animations just to give a little sense of motion. It is not the greatest by any stretch but as I understand it is far easier to render two static images that you flip flop than spending two weeks making one 3 second Blender animation and rendering it into Daz.
Yes, your suggestion is what I consider to be the most recommendable for this project. I'm looking for something simple whose new update of 10 chapters can be done in 1 month. In fact, the last update only took a month and a half to complete because of my inexperience with DAZ Studio which caused some avoidable problems.
I hope people will understand that it's a simple, unpretentious VN and therefore tolerate the lack of animations (in fact, one guy has already reviewed the game with 1 star and criticized the animations, but that's inevitable, I guess). But who knows, as you said, maybe an opportunity will arise for me to create animations without having to devote so much time to them...
Overall, I'm pleased with the result, and I'd say that for a 1-month update, chapters 11 to 20 have a totally acceptable level of eroticism, even if it's all very basic, with the alternating 2 images thing. However, for the penetration scenes, having two alternating images is pretty awful, so I'm going to have to try to generate the sexual tension with still images and a good description of the scene and the characters' lines.