Ren'Py In a Scent [Domiek] Discussion Thread

[Terminator_26F]

I would only say this: if this new game is so successful, so funny, so full of pretty girls, with an MC as charismatic as that of Personal Trainer, then I'm 100% for it and I can't wait to dive into it. ...

 

[johnelros]

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I've been quite lately so want to make up for it with a render from episode 1.

Also, I introduced this character as Sonya. I have no idea who Sonya is or what state of sleep deprivation I was in to constantly refer to her as such. This is Gloria, all the scripts say Gloria. God damnit Dom!

 

[evanripper]

Holy crap those renders though! Gorgeous! Cant wait

 

[Nospamwss]

View attachment 1432706

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I've been quite lately so want to make up for it with a render from episode 1.

Also, I introduced this character as Sonya. I have no idea who Sonya is or what state of sleep deprivation I was in to constantly refer to her as such. This is Gloria, all the scripts say Gloria. God damnit Dom!

Wow!

 

[johnelros]

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Just a quick update on the progress of In a Scent. The script for episode 1 has been completed for some time now and coding is mostly implemented but not tested.
Rendering is in full swing. Animations are being revisited. I've spent a lot of time rendering camera movement animations and it's been brought to my attention that a decent chunk of this can be handled with a Renpy addon. I'll experiment with this when the time comes. If it ends up working well, this will remove the need to render several thousand frames of animation. This could be a significant time saver because in addition to animating camera pans, I'm already investing a significant amount of render time to animating non-sexual scenes such as dialogue, where having 10 renders of someone talking would not be very entertaining.
My biggest concern is the incorporation of sound. This is being saved for last. I'll have to dust off my old music production software and plugins to try and incorporate sound fx in a uniform way.

 

[Terminator_26F]

Main Female cast only old women? Thanks, but a big no for me ...

Better a few smart, super sexy, curvy and attractive Milfs than a bunch of young assholes with brains in their cunts walking around without panties waiting to get fucked on every street corner ... And I pity those who claim that a 35-40 year old woman is "old" because they deprive themselves of both human and sexual experience ...

 

[johnelros]

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You will get to fuck one of these two, I won't reveal which one it is.

Nothing new really happened since the last post. Rendering along as usual. There were a couple of issues that popped up that were immediately solved. I feel a bit like an alien studying humans, as I'm mostly manually posing facial expressions and having to Google reference images of various state of emotion like a psychopath.

 

[DarhkBlu]

Better a few smart, super sexy, curvy and attractive Milfs than a bunch of young assholes with brains in their cunts walking around without panties waiting to get fucked on every street corner ... And I pity those who claim that a 35-40 year old woman is "old" because they deprive themselves of both human and sexual experience ...

The weird thing to me is that I'm pretty sure the first character showcased Raya isn't a milf so their comment makes even less sense...

 

[keefer43]

Just keep poking along - we are all good little boys and girls patiently waiting. Love the anticipation - hopefully...well you know.

 

[johnelros]

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No big changes or issues since the previous Dev Talk, just continuing rendering the content for Episode 1. As mentioned last time, I'm doing the poses and facial expressions from scratch, so this has been the focus of my learning. I expect the quality in expressions to improve substantially by end of the game. Poses are difficult but at least it's pretty straightforward. Facial expressions on the other hand, have a lot of subtlety that will definitely take practice to nail down.
I'm not doing this to be a hipster as Daz has a lot of premade poses and expressions. I just don't want to import all those expressions into Blender and clog up the menus and negatively impact performance. As I get better at doing it manually, I'll become faster too. The big upside is that everyone has unique expressions crafted for them, rather than reusing the same generic ones we've seen already.
Blender 3.0 is slated to have a functioning asset library, so it might be possible for me to save poses/expressions and build my own custom library per character.

In case you haven't noticed, Gary is quickly becoming my favorite cuddly teddy bear, sorry OZ.

 

[Kaidu-kun]

Good luck,
I really enjoyed PT.
Btw my wee wee cant wait to meet Raya

 

[johnelros]

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Knocking out more renders and prepping animations. I spent the first few months of this year on preparing assets and exploring technical opportunities to increase visual quality. Some of those possibilities quickly proved to be an inefficient use of time, while other things would be a great option once Blender furthers along its development (Particle hair rework 2022).
Overall, most of the time invested in learning these technical opportunities are paying off. There are certain things I will hold off on doing until after episode 1 is released as I don't want to delay progress any further on the initial release. Blender is releasing version 3.0 this week which brings a really great feature that will help speed along development.

Of course I'm talking about the Asset Library. This allows me to organize and access my assets in a convenient way similar to Daz. The best feature though is the ability to save poses in this library as well. As mentioned before, I do all character posing manually from scratch. This allows greater flexibility but at the cost of speed. Although I've gotten pretty quick at posing the body in general, arguably faster than it would take me to find and tweak a suitable pose in Daz, certain body parts still take a lot of time. The most notable ones being hands and facial expressions. With the asset library, I'm able to create my own hand poses to quickly reuse and tweak, which saves an incredible amount of time.

Facial expressions are much more difficult. After episode 1, I will build a library of custom generic facial expressions with some character specific unique ones. Hands and facial expressions probably account for half the time I spent on setting up a scene.
There were some new issues that popped up, mainly due to software updates. The first issue is that some of the characters I prepped first no longer have the same rig as the newer ones. This is due to the Daz -> Blender addon making some changes for the better. This results in having to do the preparation work all over again. It should be relatively easy to transfer over most of the old to the new, but there are certain things that don't always carry over well like morphs I've sculpted in Blender as well as the particle hair for eyelashes. I'll do this after episode 1.

Another issue is that Blender is using a new open source denoiser which has increased speed and quality for renders but animations are screwed with terrible flickering. I've purchased a Davinci Resolve license which has a temporal denoiser included which should fix this issue. Still needs to be tested. I unfortunately discovered this issue after I rendered the animated opening sequence. So I ended up using the original open source denoiser + the Davinci Resolve one in addition. This wasn't ideal but I can't afford to dedicate another 15 hours towards re-rendering it.

Finally, I stumbled upon some cool shit. I use Marvelous Designer for customizing and simulating clothes. One issue is that when you bring the simulation back into Blender, you lose vertex and shader information. The clothes act as one single shader, meaning you can't separate the trim from the rest, have multiple designs, etc. Well while trying a new data format to transfer animated cloth simulation, I discovered that this new format allows the retention of all data. This is huge because it saves time I would have to otherwise spent to redo all the clothes vertex/shader data.
Finally, over the past month or so, I've started being less of perfectionist to some degree. In the past I've re-rendered the same scene several times whenever I notice something not quite how I wanted it. That's a tremendous amount of time wasted for things that most people would likely not notice. It's a bit of an internal conflict to push through a render that I see a glaring issue with but at this point production speed is more important.

I'm still not announcing an ETA for episode 1 as I don't want to create a deadline until I'm absolutely certain I can deliver. Just to give an idea of where the project's at, I'm giving myself a personal deadline to finish all renders/animations by end of year. There would still be other work left to do like sound design, ui, coding, etc and it's these steps that I'm currently unable to estimate.

Overall I'm happy with the progress and can't wait to have you guys play the game. Although the writing in Personal Trainer was more-or-less an afterthought, In a Scent's script makes me very happy in my pants.

 

[Monetauro]

My boy, if you've done that wonder before, I'm crazy about what's next now.
And from what we can see so far... It looks like I don't have a chance to be disappointed.

Spoiler

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[Terminator_26F]

It's when you prepare the work meticulously that things run smoothly and give complete satisfaction. Dude, we've seen you in action before and we know what you're capable of. Take all the time you need to craft something memorable, experiment with new techniques, create a great environment for your game. Our patience will be rewarded with an anthology game and you with the Nobel Prize for DEVs and everyone will be satisfied !!

 

[ozzyboi35]

View attachment 1527048

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Knocking out more renders and prepping animations. I spent the first few months of this year on preparing assets and exploring technical opportunities to increase visual quality. Some of those possibilities quickly proved to be an inefficient use of time, while other things would be a great option once Blender furthers along its development (Particle hair rework 2022).
Overall, most of the time invested in learning these technical opportunities are paying off. There are certain things I will hold off on doing until after episode 1 is released as I don't want to delay progress any further on the initial release. Blender is releasing version 3.0 this week which brings a really great feature that will help speed along development.

Of course I'm talking about the Asset Library. This allows me to organize and access my assets in a convenient way similar to Daz. The best feature though is the ability to save poses in this library as well. As mentioned before, I do all character posing manually from scratch. This allows greater flexibility but at the cost of speed. Although I've gotten pretty quick at posing the body in general, arguably faster than it would take me to find and tweak a suitable pose in Daz, certain body parts still take a lot of time. The most notable ones being hands and facial expressions. With the asset library, I'm able to create my own hand poses to quickly reuse and tweak, which saves an incredible amount of time.

Facial expressions are much more difficult. After episode 1, I will build a library of custom generic facial expressions with some character specific unique ones. Hands and facial expressions probably account for half the time I spent on setting up a scene.
There were some new issues that popped up, mainly due to software updates. The first issue is that some of the characters I prepped first no longer have the same rig as the newer ones. This is due to the Daz -> Blender addon making some changes for the better. This results in having to do the preparation work all over again. It should be relatively easy to transfer over most of the old to the new, but there are certain things that don't always carry over well like morphs I've sculpted in Blender as well as the particle hair for eyelashes. I'll do this after episode 1.

Another issue is that Blender is using a new open source denoiser which has increased speed and quality for renders but animations are screwed with terrible flickering. I've purchased a Davinci Resolve license which has a temporal denoiser included which should fix this issue. Still needs to be tested. I unfortunately discovered this issue after I rendered the animated opening sequence. So I ended up using the original open source denoiser + the Davinci Resolve one in addition. This wasn't ideal but I can't afford to dedicate another 15 hours towards re-rendering it.

Finally, I stumbled upon some cool shit. I use Marvelous Designer for customizing and simulating clothes. One issue is that when you bring the simulation back into Blender, you lose vertex and shader information. The clothes act as one single shader, meaning you can't separate the trim from the rest, have multiple designs, etc. Well while trying a new data format to transfer animated cloth simulation, I discovered that this new format allows the retention of all data. This is huge because it saves time I would have to otherwise spent to redo all the clothes vertex/shader data.
Finally, over the past month or so, I've started being less of perfectionist to some degree. In the past I've re-rendered the same scene several times whenever I notice something not quite how I wanted it. That's a tremendous amount of time wasted for things that most people would likely not notice. It's a bit of an internal conflict to push through a render that I see a glaring issue with but at this point production speed is more important.

I'm still not announcing an ETA for episode 1 as I don't want to create a deadline until I'm absolutely certain I can deliver. Just to give an idea of where the project's at, I'm giving myself a personal deadline to finish all renders/animations by end of year. There would still be other work left to do like sound design, ui, coding, etc and it's these steps that I'm currently unable to estimate.

Overall I'm happy with the progress and can't wait to have you guys play the game. Although the writing in Personal Trainer was more-or-less an afterthought, In a Scent's script makes me very happy in my pants.

Really excited for this one, I loved personal training, you are talented.

 

[johnelros]

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Not much has changed since the previous dev talk, just a continuation of renders and animations. Rendered a bunch of animations last week without Blender's denoiser to instead apply the Davinci temporal denoiser as mentioned previously. Unfortunately the results were still not super great. Probably should have just tested it with one animation first rather than jumping the gun.

There are still two other options left that I'll test later. Hopefully one of them will have promising results but more than likely episode 1 will have some noticeable denoising differences between animations. Shouldn't be a big deal but the inconsistency still bothers me a bit.
Ozzybear also got me a Blender/Substance Painter bridge addon which greatly speeds up the workflow in texturing assets. Thank you grumpy boo boo <3

 

[johnelros]

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7 events + animations left to stage and render. The self imposed deadline to finish episode 1 artwork by end of year is getting close but still looking achievable.
Earlier posts regarding animation denoising led me to an optional denoiser included in my 3rd party optimized Blender build. We have to save renders in an EXR format to utilize it. I've been vaguely aware of the advantages of EXR in the past but never really put it to test until now. The results are pretty crazy.
I cranked up the lighting here to see how EXR compares to PNG when adjusting exposure in post.


On the left is PNG, right is EXR. Both have exposure reduced by 5.

EXR retains so much more information while the PNG basically goes to black.

Now we try -2 exposure.

PNG starts looking washed out.

Same test but now with Raya standing in a completely blown out living room.

Exposure reduced by 5.


Once again, the image almost entirely disappears in PNG while EXR correctly retains light and color information.
The best part is that Blender has an option to utilize DreamWorks lossy EXR compression making the file size significantly smaller while retaining much more information.


I'll be saving all renders in EXR format going forward. I'll have to adjust the post-process preset I created in Davinci Resolve to account for these changes. I'm pretty excited by this as color grading is about to get a whole lot more interesting.

 

[Ive-11]

sound like vanilla story, but i prefer more kinky story

 

[Avaron1974]

WHY AM I NOT SEEING JENNA?

I am so very sad at this.

Jenna should be main LI for all games and I shall not rest until it is so.





Okay so maybe i'll rest and not actually do anything at all but it's the thought that counts.

 

[Bluehemo]

i like that it has a unique style. very refreshing from the same look of a lot of new games.