VN Ren'Py In a Scent [Ep. 4 Part 1 v1.035] [Domiek]

4.70 star(s) 122 Votes
Discussion Reviews (122)
Ragnar

Ragnar

Super User
Respected User
Aug 5, 2016
4,780
13,018
Slow-burn: Nope, this won't be a slow-burn story. Although I do prefer tension/buildup and think this has a better payoff than jumping straight into it, this doesn't mean that we need 6 episodes just to shoop, baby!
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Praise be to Porn Gods. Renounce the false Blueballs God :illuminati:
 
Ape Drape

Ape Drape

Member
Oct 3, 2018
117
184
AshramAscendant said:
The food in this game actually looks appealing. I would eat it (and maybe some of the other dishes! ;))
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You decide.
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OMG LOL!! Some... no, MOST of the games here... beautifully rendered models will go to an exquisitely modeled fancy ass 8 Michelin star restaurant and the food is either diarrhea on a plate or franks and beans. And they're all like "This looks AMAZING!"
 
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johnelros

johnelros

Well-Known Member
Apr 10, 2018
1,079
14,879
1644547981291.png
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I've wanted to consistently simulate clothes in between poses for a long time but there have been a lot of headaches involved. It's often a very lengthy process to prepare the assets before even starting the simulation. This would discourage not only the use of simulations, but also the use of multiple outfits as each one required a tremendous amount of work, mostly retopology.

I've continued experimenting with my Blender -> Marvelous Designer -> Blender workflow and think I now have something ready for use in production.

1644548019757.png
Normally the clothes deform with the movement of the character. This works okay for the most part with conforming clothes like pants/shirts. As soon as you involve dresses, skirts, or any other loose non-conforming clothes, the deformations become silly. They can be somewhat fixed with sculpting but this is still time spent on okay'ish results.
1644548032246.png
This new workflow should let me achieve reasonable simulations relatively quickly. I've tested it for a few hours and it seems to work fine but as always, the true test is during production. The only remaining piece to resolve is how to perfectly loop animations with these cloth sims, but that's a problem for future me to deal with.

Here's hoping that I don't end up with egg on my face.
 
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J

Joop501

Active Member
Mar 19, 2021
773
446
johnelros said:
View attachment 1638581
You must be registered to see the links

I'm planning to give myself the first 7-10 days after every release to work out the technical side of things. There's always some issue being exposed as you're working on a scene and this being the first release, there were plenty. This was compounded by Blender upgrading to 3.0, which brought with it an entire rewrite of their render engine and introducing bugs to existing addons. It's a great upgrade but there are things that needed to be readjusted on my end.

EPISODE 1 REFLECTION
It was a combination of relief and feeling vulnerable to finally release episode 1 after a year of work. Fortunately, the comments and reviews so far seem to be overwhelmingly positive, thank you.
I want to address some of the most common concerns I've read here, rather than responding individually.
MC is a twat: Yes, it's absolutely true. MC is an annoying self-centered idiot. My goal was to create a character that the average player will find annoying but only tolerate out of entertainment. Some liked MC, some hated him, but it seems like many just barely tolerated him as intended. It's impossible to hit this balance for all players but I think we got as close as we could.
He won't be unbearable forever. Despite this being a ridiculous comedy, one of the main writing goals for this project was meaningful character development.
Story doesn't make sense: I've seen it mentioned a few times that it doesn't make sense why the family would accept a stranger into their home. It's definitely a reflection of my inability to tell a story if I've failed to effectively deliver important information. I wanted to avoid the usual information/exposition dump at the start of the game and try to be less on-the-nose.
The goal is to have nothing come out of left-field. As the story develops, you should be able to replay the game and think "Oh! How did I not catch that the first time"? Episode 1 already has many future plot points sprinkled around that I hope will have massive payoff as the story matures.
Please continue leaving feedback, good or bad. The story is already written and I won't add or remove elements based on the feedback. I will however, reflect on how I deliver the story and adjust as best as I can moving forward.
Slow-burn: Nope, this won't be a slow-burn story. Although I do prefer tension/buildup and think this has a better payoff than jumping straight into it, this doesn't mean that we need 6 episodes just to shoop, baby!
Episode 1 already illustrates this with the contrast between Gloria's BJ and Selene's. The first being unmemorable and being nothing more than a means to an end (probably similar to how MC views her), yet Selene's was much more exciting with a better payoff.
My goal for the buildup is not from the sex itself but the situation surrounding it. Episode 1 had a lot of the content go towards setting up the groundwork of the story, which didn't leave much room for the naughty things without it looking absolutely forced. Episode 2 will have more ding-dong sing-alongs.


TECHNICAL STUFF
The most obvious one was the skin shader. I created the characters and made a custom skin shader early last year. It was my first time doing so and things looked great in the simple preview renders. Rendering episode one however, revealed that there were some serious issues. I had created the shader from scratch, building multiple nested nodes totaling around 20. Unfortunately this lead to some bugs I missed the first time around. It was by sheer stupid luck that it somehow all mostly worked, but there were still noticeable issues like Raya's eyes looking high AF and noisy renders due to issues with the SSS. This seems to all be fixed now but we'll know for sure while rendering episode 2.
There were other issues like with Raya's lips looking smeared and glitchy eyelashes. The eyelashes that come with Daz have some sort of transparency/SSS issue in Blender.
View attachment 1638582
I had worked around this by making the lashes from scratch using particle hair. This looked great last year but after having to transfer the character a dozen times in between software and addon updates, they ended up breaking. Rather than repeating this process, I've decided to go another route and so far it seems to look great.
View attachment 1638583
The most exciting part for me is probably the newly working FACS controller. Last year, Daz introduced a controller that, in simplified terms, let's you easily manually pose facial expressions. I didn't think this was possible for me to use but turns out the mastermind behind the Daz to Blender addon had already implemented this. It's a huge deal for me since I do all my poses and expressions from scratch rather than using a library. For episode 1, I manually posed every individual bone on the face which was difficult and took forever.
You must be registered to see the links
from Daz if you're curious to see what I'm talking about.
View attachment 1638585
(The black dots on the right window was what I had to manually pose for ep. 1)

Lastly, I believe I found a better way to rig clothes than what I used for episode 1. The older method involved using a modifier that essentially copied body movements but was impossible to adjust afterwards without a very convoluted process. The new method seems to give similar results but also allows me to sculpt any changes on the fly.
Additionally, Blender has updated their obj export format to process much faster than before. This may make using Marvelous Designer for even minor cloth simulations much more attractive. I'm still experimenting with a workflow but the results over the last couple of days seems promising.

--------------------
Phew, that was a long update. I don't expect such long dev talks for a long time so you can relax.

Cheers!
Click to expand...
I appreciate your explanation
 
K

keefer43

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2019
1,449
2,269
johnelros said:
View attachment 1638581
You must be registered to see the links

I'm planning to give myself the first 7-10 days after every release to work out the technical side of things. There's always some issue being exposed as you're working on a scene and this being the first release, there were plenty. This was compounded by Blender upgrading to 3.0, which brought with it an entire rewrite of their render engine and introducing bugs to existing addons. It's a great upgrade but there are things that needed to be readjusted on my end.

EPISODE 1 REFLECTION
It was a combination of relief and feeling vulnerable to finally release episode 1 after a year of work. Fortunately, the comments and reviews so far seem to be overwhelmingly positive, thank you.
I want to address some of the most common concerns I've read here, rather than responding individually.
MC is a twat: Yes, it's absolutely true. MC is an annoying self-centered idiot. My goal was to create a character that the average player will find annoying but only tolerate out of entertainment. Some liked MC, some hated him, but it seems like many just barely tolerated him as intended. It's impossible to hit this balance for all players but I think we got as close as we could.
He won't be unbearable forever. Despite this being a ridiculous comedy, one of the main writing goals for this project was meaningful character development.
Story doesn't make sense: I've seen it mentioned a few times that it doesn't make sense why the family would accept a stranger into their home. It's definitely a reflection of my inability to tell a story if I've failed to effectively deliver important information. I wanted to avoid the usual information/exposition dump at the start of the game and try to be less on-the-nose.
The goal is to have nothing come out of left-field. As the story develops, you should be able to replay the game and think "Oh! How did I not catch that the first time"? Episode 1 already has many future plot points sprinkled around that I hope will have massive payoff as the story matures.
Please continue leaving feedback, good or bad. The story is already written and I won't add or remove elements based on the feedback. I will however, reflect on how I deliver the story and adjust as best as I can moving forward.
Slow-burn: Nope, this won't be a slow-burn story. Although I do prefer tension/buildup and think this has a better payoff than jumping straight into it, this doesn't mean that we need 6 episodes just to shoop, baby!
Episode 1 already illustrates this with the contrast between Gloria's BJ and Selene's. The first being unmemorable and being nothing more than a means to an end (probably similar to how MC views her), yet Selene's was much more exciting with a better payoff.
My goal for the buildup is not from the sex itself but the situation surrounding it. Episode 1 had a lot of the content go towards setting up the groundwork of the story, which didn't leave much room for the naughty things without it looking absolutely forced. Episode 2 will have more ding-dong sing-alongs.


TECHNICAL STUFF
The most obvious one was the skin shader. I created the characters and made a custom skin shader early last year. It was my first time doing so and things looked great in the simple preview renders. Rendering episode one however, revealed that there were some serious issues. I had created the shader from scratch, building multiple nested nodes totaling around 20. Unfortunately this lead to some bugs I missed the first time around. It was by sheer stupid luck that it somehow all mostly worked, but there were still noticeable issues like Raya's eyes looking high AF and noisy renders due to issues with the SSS. This seems to all be fixed now but we'll know for sure while rendering episode 2.
There were other issues like with Raya's lips looking smeared and glitchy eyelashes. The eyelashes that come with Daz have some sort of transparency/SSS issue in Blender.
View attachment 1638582
I had worked around this by making the lashes from scratch using particle hair. This looked great last year but after having to transfer the character a dozen times in between software and addon updates, they ended up breaking. Rather than repeating this process, I've decided to go another route and so far it seems to look great.
View attachment 1638583
The most exciting part for me is probably the newly working FACS controller. Last year, Daz introduced a controller that, in simplified terms, let's you easily manually pose facial expressions. I didn't think this was possible for me to use but turns out the mastermind behind the Daz to Blender addon had already implemented this. It's a huge deal for me since I do all my poses and expressions from scratch rather than using a library. For episode 1, I manually posed every individual bone on the face which was difficult and took forever.
You must be registered to see the links
from Daz if you're curious to see what I'm talking about.
View attachment 1638585
(The black dots on the right window was what I had to manually pose for ep. 1)

Lastly, I believe I found a better way to rig clothes than what I used for episode 1. The older method involved using a modifier that essentially copied body movements but was impossible to adjust afterwards without a very convoluted process. The new method seems to give similar results but also allows me to sculpt any changes on the fly.
Additionally, Blender has updated their obj export format to process much faster than before. This may make using Marvelous Designer for even minor cloth simulations much more attractive. I'm still experimenting with a workflow but the results over the last couple of days seems promising.

--------------------
Phew, that was a long update. I don't expect such long dev talks for a long time so you can relax.

Cheers!
Click to expand...
The Story and Character Development gives you somewhere to go, some kind of progression is needed (a key factor in my mind). Some stories focus on the big Bangs or the size of the Boobs - but you really are seeing the same thing all the time - no Progress : Boring Boring Boring. Thanks for making something that moves along and gets us somewhere. This requires thought and planning - good on you. in order to get to the good stuff there must be a point when you don't have any good stuff. It is meaningful and brings one more into the story. Congratulations on this. Please keep it up - no problems with boobs BTW, in case anyone was wondering. Stay healthy everyone.
 
G

gking2392

Active Member
Mar 18, 2020
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keefer43

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2019
1,449
2,269
You must give in to the whole concept that our MC has some serious personal growth to achieve - we can all see that. If you accept that, there is something worthwhile (I believe this) in his ridiculous (also humorous) circumstances (MILF PORN Logic if nothing else) - then we have a winner here. Do you want it always to be the same boring trope? The fact that this is an original story with only fuzzy certainty of our long term goal of fucking "mom" - certainly others too get boinked along the way; but we can't predict what is going to happen because this is a unique (entertaining, surprising, fun) narrative. I imagine the there are folks that don't want this - there are plenty of alternate avenues out there. For me this is a very kooky and fun porn game with a MILF outcome planned - unknown how we will get there - but still with an anticipatory ending that gets some of us going.
 
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4.70 star(s) 122 Votes