libertypics

Active Member
Jan 23, 2019
699
1,490
(Discovering the Personal Trainer dev did a new game, slamming the download option like mad)

Please be as good as the first, please be as good as the first, please be as good as the first...
 

balvenie1401

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2017
1,387
2,175
I enjoyed it, quite the big step up quality wise from PT. Not my personal sense of humor but it wasn't unbearable either, silly and light hearted so hard to see how it could possibly offend anyone. I'm quietly hoping we'll have the chance to play the MC as a real asshole without having him stumble all over the place, but we'll see.. please don't let it be an awful "personal growth/bettering himself" type of deal *fingers crossed*

As a genral rule I'll auto pass on any new title that list humor as a genre since I don't think humor and porn is a good match, more so 99% of people trying to be funny are fu**king boring and unbearable. This title got a pass due to it being Domiek and I'm glad it did. Visually it's quite pleasing, writing/story very middle of the road for me, nothing exciting but I'm not mad at it either, a few fresh spins on an otherwise stale genre which I appreciate.

Was a bit surprised by the amount of content for 0.1, was expecting this to come out swinging after a year hiatus.. was honestly expecting 4 or 5 times the amount of content, being conservative.. then I just assuned he planned ahead and made the first 4 or 5 patches already to give himself some headroom and ensure steady releases.. but that doesn't seem to be the case.. well, I know what they say about making assumptions so shame on me I guess :/
 
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Sonico

Forum Fanatic
Jul 21, 2018
4,034
2,897
Good to see Domiek back in action. Time to give this little one a spin.
 

johnelros

Well-Known Member
Apr 10, 2018
1,079
14,879
1648261532972.png

Hey guys, just going to give a quick summary of the developments still the last dev talk. I apologize for being a bit quite lately. I generally become reclusive when dealing with stress and oh boy has the past month been especially a bad time to quit smoking.
The image above shows particle hair being groomed and turned into presets through an addon. This is really nice because I can now groom and adjust hair in between renders without resorting to simulations. More importantly, the base hairstyle isn't destroyed in the process as it was in the past, giving me much more flexibility.
I've also made scene preparation a bit faster by standardizing the things I would constantly recreate from scratch.
Camera Rig: I've rigged multiple cameras to each character with predefined settings of the most common shots I take. This rig follows the characters around with poses and creates a standardized starting point per shot, on top of making outline organization much easier. This should also help making renders feel more cohesive.
Lighting Rig: Much like the camera rig, I've rigged a standardized lighting setup to each character. This saves a lot of time and helps reduce scene clutter as well as create a more consistent shot for characters faces. The main downside is that having character lights move around with poses will create slight lighting environment differences with each pose. The extra work to create consistency isn't worth it imo because it's not that noticeable and Blender is slated to implement Light Linking later this year. This will allow the lights only to affect target objects, in this case, the individual characters themselves.
Pose Library: This isn't anything new as a Daz user but since switching to Blender, I've been posing everything manually from scratch. However, I've noticed that I'm constantly recreating variations of the same handful of poses as a starting point such as standing/sitting. I've gone through and created a pose library of these common poses as a starting point. I guess there really is no point in reinventing the wheel.
That's all for now, going back into my shell.
Dom
 

Kingjulian1st

New Member
Jul 11, 2020
3
6
Does anybody the model or assets used for Selene? I feel like I've seen her before but I have no clue where that could have been... :D
 

Rizo

Well-Known Member
Jul 29, 2017
1,204
5,964
Has there been any update in terms of content? Last I played the aunt sucked MC dick. Anything been added since then? I enjoyed the game so far.
 

johnelros

Well-Known Member
Apr 10, 2018
1,079
14,879


Dev Talk - Fokin Ell
What a miserable month it's been but at least I've regained access to my computer. Gather around the fire and hear a grown man cry.
Some time ago I was pretty excited to mention that Blender finally had Light Linking available through a third party, K-Cycles. Light linking allows the user to designate certain lights to only directly light specific objects. This makes character lighting much easier as I can control how I light characters without effecting the environment. This is a feature I've been waiting for a very long time.
All was going well although I quickly discovered that the K-Cycles Light Linking was pretty deceptive. It was really just a post-fx implementation through the compositor. It wasn't exactly Light Linking, was much slower than a genuine implementation but it still worked well enough. Once I started doing animations, everything took a huge steaming dump on my face. The hair of my characters started having different light values for every frame, causing their heads to look like disco balls. After spending a few days trying to fix this issue, I decided to ditch K-Cycles and just work on the update with vanilla Blender. Nope, same issue. After another couple days of trying to resolve it, I did the equivalent of rage quitting and downloaded Octane for Blender.
Blender has been undergoing major changes over the past two years. This year, they began rewriting their render engine, Cycles, from scratch. This would allow the engine to become more modern and eventually have more advanced features added such as Light Linking. Unfortunately, this also increases the chance of introducing bugs and other issues. I've used Octane before in Daz studio and decided to give it a go in Blender. My thought process being that Cycles has 2 developers working on it while Octane has 60+ employees. Using Octane should hopefully provide some stability to the render side of things because I'm seriously exhausted from constantly fixing things that break as the software changes. New update comes out that fixes the previous broken thing but creates some new problem that I discover mid-production.
Octane is a great render engine and very similar to Cycles. It's also is a much more feature rich engine and has true Light Linking among other features. The transition was easy but it did result in me spending two weeks manually rebuilding every single shader for every asset in the game, a truly mind-numbing experience. I still need to tweak the skin shaders but it's close. As I resumed creating renders, I ran into another issue. Octane had an "Out of Memory" bug for any scenes including more than one character, which is most of them. Since it's a paid service, I reached out to tech support and expected the 2-3 days for them to resolve the issue.
My wife decided that these 2-3 days present the perfect time for me to install laminate floors for the entire first floor. I knew nothing about flooring and reserved the research part to my wife as I was continued to work on the skin shader.
BIG MISTAKE
Long story short, it's been nearly two weeks and the renovation is still not done. My body is destroyed from being on my knees for 10-12 hours a day. Somehow the wife managed to pick out the most broken laminate flooring possible. This stuff doesn't click lock together at all. At first I thought it was my lack of experience and I pushed through. After a couple of days of misery, I went to the home improvement store to try the other brands and all of them click lock with absolute ease. I don't know who's at fault, the person who designed these floors or whoever's in charge for quality control, but someone needs to hang for this crime against humanity. Something like 80% of the boards locking system is defective so it's not unusual to spend 2 hours wacking the shit out of just one board until it finally locks in place.
SILVER LINING
Wife feels guilty for this misery so I was able to convince her to swap my office with a bedroom. The old office had no windows so it was pretty depressing being there all day. I've just setup my workstation again and Octane seems to have resolved my memory error so I can at least get back to doing some work now. All that's left to do for the renovation are the stairs, which is going to be a nightmare but at least I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I'll be revisiting my setup and seeing where I can limit upgrades and third party addons to increase stability. Constantly fixing shit is seriously dreadful.
Thanks for reading my memoirs.
 

lukachandrika

Member
Aug 2, 2020
202
171


Dev Talk - Fokin Ell
What a miserable month it's been but at least I've regained access to my computer. Gather around the fire and hear a grown man cry.
Some time ago I was pretty excited to mention that Blender finally had Light Linking available through a third party, K-Cycles. Light linking allows the user to designate certain lights to only directly light specific objects. This makes character lighting much easier as I can control how I light characters without effecting the environment. This is a feature I've been waiting for a very long time.
All was going well although I quickly discovered that the K-Cycles Light Linking was pretty deceptive. It was really just a post-fx implementation through the compositor. It wasn't exactly Light Linking, was much slower than a genuine implementation but it still worked well enough. Once I started doing animations, everything took a huge steaming dump on my face. The hair of my characters started having different light values for every frame, causing their heads to look like disco balls. After spending a few days trying to fix this issue, I decided to ditch K-Cycles and just work on the update with vanilla Blender. Nope, same issue. After another couple days of trying to resolve it, I did the equivalent of rage quitting and downloaded Octane for Blender.
Blender has been undergoing major changes over the past two years. This year, they began rewriting their render engine, Cycles, from scratch. This would allow the engine to become more modern and eventually have more advanced features added such as Light Linking. Unfortunately, this also increases the chance of introducing bugs and other issues. I've used Octane before in Daz studio and decided to give it a go in Blender. My thought process being that Cycles has 2 developers working on it while Octane has 60+ employees. Using Octane should hopefully provide some stability to the render side of things because I'm seriously exhausted from constantly fixing things that break as the software changes. New update comes out that fixes the previous broken thing but creates some new problem that I discover mid-production.
Octane is a great render engine and very similar to Cycles. It's also is a much more feature rich engine and has true Light Linking among other features. The transition was easy but it did result in me spending two weeks manually rebuilding every single shader for every asset in the game, a truly mind-numbing experience. I still need to tweak the skin shaders but it's close. As I resumed creating renders, I ran into another issue. Octane had an "Out of Memory" bug for any scenes including more than one character, which is most of them. Since it's a paid service, I reached out to tech support and expected the 2-3 days for them to resolve the issue.
My wife decided that these 2-3 days present the perfect time for me to install laminate floors for the entire first floor. I knew nothing about flooring and reserved the research part to my wife as I was continued to work on the skin shader.
BIG MISTAKE
Long story short, it's been nearly two weeks and the renovation is still not done. My body is destroyed from being on my knees for 10-12 hours a day. Somehow the wife managed to pick out the most broken laminate flooring possible. This stuff doesn't click lock together at all. At first I thought it was my lack of experience and I pushed through. After a couple of days of misery, I went to the home improvement store to try the other brands and all of them click lock with absolute ease. I don't know who's at fault, the person who designed these floors or whoever's in charge for quality control, but someone needs to hang for this crime against humanity. Something like 80% of the boards locking system is defective so it's not unusual to spend 2 hours wacking the shit out of just one board until it finally locks in place.
SILVER LINING
Wife feels guilty for this misery so I was able to convince her to swap my office with a bedroom. The old office had no windows so it was pretty depressing being there all day. I've just setup my workstation again and Octane seems to have resolved my memory error so I can at least get back to doing some work now. All that's left to do for the renovation are the stairs, which is going to be a nightmare but at least I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I'll be revisiting my setup and seeing where I can limit upgrades and third party addons to increase stability. Constantly fixing shit is seriously dreadful.
Thanks for reading my memoirs.
I dont understand anything :)
 
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johnelros

Well-Known Member
Apr 10, 2018
1,079
14,879


LimpLivelyHapuku-size_restricted.gif


Dev Talk - Brought to you by the letter "y".

So last post I mentioned my frustration with constantly having to fix things. Needing to update to the latest version of Blender for some function to get a fix which in return breaks something else, etc. I probably spent at least 20% of the time just fixing shit. So I've instead taken a different direction in the name of stability... I've become.... H@KK3RMAN!!!
I've begun scripting my own addon instead of having a dozen different ones that constantly break with each update. Nothing too complicated of course, but this already eliminated over half the addons I've been using and only the essential complex ones remain.
As mentioned last time, I've switched using Octane for my render engine since it offers more stability as Blender's native engine Cycles is undergoing a complete rewrite so things are prone to change. However, switching to Octane introduced new problems. A lot of the camera and light features were scattered across multiple windows and didn't work with my camera and light addon I've grown reliant on.



1654014867288.png

It became a huge pain in the ass to jump in and out of multiple menu's and windows just to change a value. That's when I put on my cape and became H@kk3RMAN! I've made it so when I press "y" on my keyboard, a window pops up around my cursor with the settings I need depending on if I have a camera or light selected.



1654014880807.png

This has been working beautifully and I was feeling high from power. Why should I stop just at lights and camera when I have other pain in the ass problems to deal with? When posing a character, I go and disable all performance demanding settings and objects like hair, clothes, etc. Once done posing, you go back through and re-enable them to see how it looks in a render preview. Each cycle of enabling or disabling takes 10-15 seconds depending on how many characters are in a scene. Well not any more bitches, H@kk3RMAN strikes again! No more digging through the messy outliner, I press "y" and my life becomes beautiful.
Character rigs are overlapping and it's becoming difficult to click on the correct skinny black line just to pose them? Naw dawg, that shit's for peasants. H@kk3RMAN just selects the actual big juicy character, hit's "y" and smashes that "Select Armature" button.



1654014895351.png

I know what you're thinking, Dom... that's surely it right? I can only get so hard reading about H@kk3RMAN's exploits. Sorry bub, the story doesn't end here. I press "y" again and POW right in the kisser!


1654014906832.png

We got a menu for posing as well! All the goodie good functions that I constantly waste time manually doing are condensed into single button clicks. Manually solo the hand controllers and then re-enable my baseline controllers again after I'm done? Fuck you, do I look like a slave to you? My boy H@kk3RMAN got me covered.

_____________________________
The plan going forward is to have as few moving parts as possible. Create what I need myself as it's easier to fix/manage should something happen and only go for third party addon's when absolutely necessary. This addon I've created for myself is flexible and I expect will grow overtime as my needs change.
After spending weeks converting all materials manually to Octane and then fixing all these bugs and developing the addon, it feels good to finally start working on renders again.

Ciao,
H@kk3RDOM
 

Loady

New Member
Dec 28, 2018
13
68
Scripting away small annoyances is one of life's great pleasures. Over the weekend I just finished a script to toggle mute on my boom mic or cycle audio output devices with a key press. Couple hours of work to save a couple seconds, but it feels so good when it works just right.

Obligatory:
 
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