Ren'Py How essential are animations?

[IamUnderman]

Hello again. I am working on a game for Ren'py and I am wondering what are people's thoughts on sex animations (or animations in general). To give some context I have spent the last year tinkering with Daz on and off when my job has allowed for it and have gotten to a point where I feel fairly happy with my ability to produce renders. I am not saying they are world class or anything, but I feel they are good enough to share and go into a game. I have zero experience with 3D animation however or how to even do it in Daz.

This is not me requesting guidance on how to animate however, more a question of if it is even something I should consider doing. I personally don't get a lot out of animations in games. At best they are kinda nice, at worst they actively slow the game down and make my eyes roll. Especially considering how much extra dev time they must take. As a consumer I would personally be happy to play a game with 0 animations.

Is this a common view however? I see many games rated lower with the reason being their lack of animations, is this a deal breaker for people?

I am curious as to what people think and if I am missing something. Think of this as audience research I suppose.

I dearly appreciate any responses, thank you in advance.

 

[Winterfire]

Asked the same questions a few years ago: https://f95zone.to/threads/why-are-animations-important.53477/

The general consesus is that static is better than shitty animations.
Of course great animations are better, but if you can't do great animations, don't even bother.
Many big games (Grandma's house afaik) have no animations, I also do no animations.

 

[coffeeaddicted]

Asked the same questions a few years ago: https://f95zone.to/threads/why-are-animations-important.53477/

The general consesus is that static is better than shitty animations.
Of course great animations are better, but if you can't do great animations, don't even bother.
Many big games (Grandma's house afaik) have no animations, I also do no animations.

I think animations are overrated.
You could have an animation effect with renpy as well. A user wouldn't know really if done well.
Besides animations bloat the game.

 

[AlternateDreams]

I think you could get more feedback by creating a thread with a poll in General Discussions.
Not many people read Dev Help.

As for your question, I personally have a lot of trouble with games that don't have animations. I usually don't download them, or if I do it's more out of curiosity, but I'm not going to play them for very long.
I prefer a game with very basic animations to no animation at all.

 

[osanaiko]

It's a time vs "quality" trade off. Making animations is time consuming compared to static images. Therefore choosing to add animations means the total content of the game will be less for the same time investment (or at least have far less proportion of time spent, so quality will be lower).

But many players seems to prefer some animations, at least that is what they say. But I suspect that in a venn diagram, those players overlap a lot with the "i don't like to read too much"/ESL group, who only want to see some dirty pictures and don't care about the story.

So what market/player group are you interested in targeting? What type of game do you want to make?

 

[tooldev]

Usually i hate memes but for once i will answer with one:


curtsey Peter van Hardenberg

 

[n00bi]

Want to do animations "3D"?, be prepared to invest in a good pc with a good Nvidia card,
Or have Multiple pc's so you can do team rendering or have some extra $ to rent a session @ a server farm.
As said above. animations takes time. a very long time depending on the length, quality, etc.
Lets say you have a complex scene that takes about 10 min to render a single frame. (10 min can be generous in some cases)
That is 300 minutes of rendering time just for 1 second of animation @ 30 fps.
Now i assume you don't want just one animation in the game that is 1 sec long.
This is just the rendering time. not including all the time you need to spend on animating the character rig's.
There is a reason you see the games with good renders and animations takes months between updates.

I personally prefer games with animations, but not thous who just swap between 2 or 3 images. it looks like shit.
And as to how essential animations are, i think they are, but that is a subjective opinion.
You def will get more people wanting to try out your game if it have animations.

 

[MissFortune]

Lets say you have a complex scene that takes about 10 min to render a single frame. (10 min can be generous in some cases)

If animations are taking 10 minutes per frame, then someone is doing something wrong. Assuming you're on strong/ideal hardware, your typical 24fps, 1080p, 60 frame (roughly 2 seconds) animation should be taking no longer than 2 to 5 minutes. On my 3080, I was getting roughly 3-4 minutes per frame. With two 4090s, I'm usually looking at under a minute and a half at 1440p.

Low samples (800-ish) and denoising on the last few iterations of each frame will make the process significantly faster. The faster the GPU the better.

 

[tooldev]

If animations are taking 10 minutes per frame, then someone is doing something wrong. Assuming you're on strong/ideal hardware, your typical 24fps, 1080p, 60 frame (roughly 2 seconds) animation should be taking no longer than 2 to 5 minutes. On my 3080, I was getting roughly 3-4 minutes per frame. With two 4090s, I'm usually looking at under a minute and a half at 1440p.

Low samples (800-ish) and denoising on the last few iterations of each frame will make the process significantly faster. The faster the GPU the better.

While your numbers might make sense, you are assuming from the wrong end. Unknowns always have to be taken from the conservative side and it is highly doubted, that a person who 'has been tinkering with DAZ' is running any setup near your statement.

The numbers are good for comparison and for setting a goal, but simply cannot be used to plan for a general approach. That is simply far too optimistic. N00bi's statement makes a lot more sense in terms of enabling someone to make a fundamental decision.

 

[n00bi]

If animations are taking 10 minutes per frame, then someone is doing something wrong.

You think 10min for a frame is long?
Come back and tell me that after you have added simulation to a complex scene.
such as gravity, collision, jiggle for boobs/ass/fat, hair simulation etc.
And add in some global illumination and or ambient occlusion on top of that or other fancy lighting.
And some textures using distortion modifiers, etc...
A scene with animations is more than just characters moving around.
Of cource i am talking about top notch renders here. not some cartoon render.
And a lot of people want 4K renders these days too

Lets not forget that you probably need to redo some scenes with animations during the process to get a final result your happy with.
And that can be a challenge in it self. depending on the scene, its not always as easy as just to in and edit some frames.
If you have cached up simulation etc. you often need to redo the entire rendering.

I am not tying to say that a animation takes 10min+ for every frame. that be silly.
But expect that it can happen or even longer, it all depends on the scene setup, quality so forth as said in posts above.

 

[AllNatural939]

If animations are taking 10 minutes per frame, then someone is doing something wrong. Assuming you're on strong/ideal hardware, your typical 24fps, 1080p, 60 frame (roughly 2 seconds) animation should be taking no longer than 2 to 5 minutes. On my 3080, I was getting roughly 3-4 minutes per frame. With two 4090s, I'm usually looking at under a minute and a half at 1440p.

Low samples (800-ish) and denoising on the last few iterations of each frame will make the process significantly faster. The faster the GPU the better.

You're assuming too much... You should know that people always live under different realities. I render with a 2gb GTX 1050... and I know at least one other developer who renders with a worse graphics card than mine.
How long do you think it took me? And it's not because I'm doing something wrong, it's because I can't do it any other way. Not at the moment...
You seem to believe that this is an alternate ideal world where everyone who ventures to make a game has decent hardware... Do you know that there are countries where specialized computer stores still sell video cards like the GT 1030 (and quite expensive by the way)?

You must be registered to see the links

 

[shmurfer]

Lessons in Love strikes a good middle ground if you're really wanting some animations. All the one off sex scenes are static, and the stuff that is repeatable is animations.

Though that dev said they take too long as it is so nothing's perfect.

 

[Insomnimaniac Games]

~Snip~

I know of at least one dev who, until recently, was doing CPU rendering.

 

[n00bi]

I know of at least one dev who, until recently, was doing CPU rendering.

Gimme 256GB of ram and a AMD EPYC 9754, CPU and i will happily try cpu rendering

 

[AllNatural939]

I know of at least one dev who, until recently, was doing CPU rendering.

Well, that's me too, not always but more often than I would like. 2gb don't do much on their own...

Gimme 256GB of ram and a AMD EPYC 9754, CPU and i will happily try cpu rendering

Will 16gb of ram and a Ryzen 3 work for you?

 

[Insomnimaniac Games]

Well, that's me too, not always but more often than I would like. 2gb don't do much on their own...

Sam, I am once again requesting a hug emoji for my boy.

 

[MissFortune]

snip

The context this was brought up in was Daz. Not Blender. Most of what you're referring to is either native to Blender/Industry Standard software, or is actively done terribly by Daz.

Daz's (bad) excuse for simulation in dForce is generally not recommended for animations. Collision is basically non-existent in Daz, nor is gravity outside of dForce, jiggles can be done with morphs in Daz (and manual slider animation), and good luck simulating hair with dForce in an animation without a few explosions in between. Typical Daz lights add nothing meaningful to Daz render times. How many top notch animations can you name in AVNs? That's why guys like Puggy get so much work, or do work in 3DX (e.g. KisX) animations, where there's a shit ton more money.

You're assuming too much... You should know that people always live under different realities. I render with a 2gb GTX 1050... and I know at least one other developer who renders with a worse graphics card than mine.
How long do you think it took me? And it's not because I'm doing something wrong, it's because I can't do it any other way. Not at the moment...

I'm sure you know that 10 series cards are an exception and not a rule, no? Especially for anything 3D. Most devs with weaker hardware usually lean toward KK/HS1 or HS2 for AVNs instead of choosing to be masochistically tortured by Daz.

Steam isn't perfect, but it's pretty telling. The average person with a semi-modern desktop is running a 30/40 series card. Don't really think I'm assuming too much there.

 

[AllNatural939]

Most devs with weaker hardware usually lean toward KK/HS1 or HS2 for AVNs instead of choosing to be masochistically tortured by Daz.

I'd rather be a masochist than an idiot. Why would I use something I don't like at all? If I did, that would be pure real masochism. If I see that something is going to take too long I can always render and sleep. If I see that I don't like the models (HS) I can't sleep and act like nothing happened... Nope, I'm definitely not doing things wrong.

 

[n00bi]

The context this was brought up in was Daz. Not Blender. Most of what you're referring to is either native to Blender/Industry Standard software, or is actively done terribly by Daz.

Yes your correct, i was not thinking about Daz in specific.
You may be correct or wrong about render times in Daz, i cant tell as i dont really use Daz for rendering scenes.
I use Daz to create characters, shapes form base models and clothing then i export them.
And do the rest in Cinema 4d. like add Hair, vertex maps for jiggle area, weight-maps, setup the rig and controls for animations. so on and do the renders in C4d.
In essence i just use Daz as a asset for creating character.

C4D is not freeware tho. but Blender is and yea a lot of the stuff i talked about is relevant to Blender too and not Daz.

 

[osanaiko]

Gimme 256GB of ram and a AMD EPYC 9754, CPU and i will happily try cpu rendering

I know this was posted partly as a joke, but I think the following info is interesting as it shows just how far in front specialised GPU hardware is when compared to generalised CPU hardware for the massively parallel computational task of rendering:

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This is a forum post was been maintained by a regular on Daz3d forums for a long time, although the first post stopped being updated at the end of 2022. The thread itself still gets new posts with info about newer released GPU.

I do recognize that there are a lot of caveats:
- DAZ/Iray performance has changed with versions over the years (i.e. 4.21 is around 20% faster than 4.19 was for the same scenes)
- the specific benchmark scene that is used is not necessarily representative of what people will be needing the tool to do for them.

But anyway, the data clearly shows just how massively far in front even a basic GPU is when compared to a many-threaded CPU (at least for Iray).

The threadripper 3970X gets approx the same iterations/sec rate as a GTX 1660. A reasonable priced 3xxx series GPU, the 3060ti, is 4 times faster for 1/5 of the cost. That is 20 times more cost effective.

A top of the range GPU, that still costs less than the many-core CPU (+ special motherboard?), is 8-10 times faster.

Here is a snipped up section from the comparison chart in the first post of that thread:



* I added the last two lines from posts later in the thread, for comparison

Later edit:
Based on the cost of a 4090 being $1599 MSRP, the single 4090 gives 64.8 "iterations per dollar per hour".
i.e. ~15 times better value than that (admittedly old now) threadripper.