Tutor Post: Final Weeks, Post Patch and Animation Woes.
Heellooooooooo! ♥ We're down to the final stretch in Daz!
A wee Wednesday morning drop in >) I'm on the last section of Moddy's scene then it's just tidying up a hundred or so CGs from across the patch in post and I'll move into RPGM (I'm actually pretty excited to start writing this patch lol!)
I'm in a strange sorta place right now because I'm in no way burnt out from Daz but instead I just wanna make more and more CGs for all of the things I'm genuinely excited to get stuck into AND at the same time I can't wait to start eventing in the new maps with all of the toys I've been making over the past couple of months xD it's a good dilemma to have lol
With the progress in the Mod Shop this patch I think it'd be doing it disservice to not add some minis for all 3 of the guys in the post patch update as well so I've added those to the list, just some events that aren't restricted by sleeping in game and that can be easily accessed for some passing eye candy
Speaking of minis, the game is severely lacking in that department. It's one of the most common complaints I see; there isn't enough "RPGM" elements to justify the engine and please know that I completely agree, I agreed 3 years ago and I think the problem is even more apparent now. Just to be transparent about why it's been this way; when I move to make these little heart events it feels like I'm neglecting game "progress" and it just sits in my head like that and I think that honestly kills my drive a bit. That's sort of how I've ended up in the situation where the BIG events of the Exhibitionism route are all completed but the RPGM minis that follow haven't been, I'm so focused on the BIG stuff because I perceive that as the "important" content and I'm always putting so much pressure on myself to go, go, GO that I continue to neglect the aspects of RPGM that people both expect and enjoy. That's sort of why I'm allocating the post patch to this issue, creating development space in my brain that I'm almost exclusively working on minis / heart events. Obviously a lot of this will be Exhibitionist content but there's also Sharon minis, the queue event, an event that I made that was never implemented, sunbathing events, more harassment events that will scale from Episode 1 throughout, Troy minis, Mod Shop minis, random minis.. There are maps in the game that could really use some of this too, like Albiss is entirely empty and boring, what if there were a few events scattered throughout? It doesn't add much to the game on it's own but filling out many of the common zones; Renshire College, The City Districts, Renshire Forest, Theo's Beach.. The feeling of the game probably switches somewhat and for the better. I've made this declaration or something like it before but I've never really given myself the space to do it but this time we're making a dedicated patch, this time I'm gonna make Renshire glow with interactable activities.
Ultimately I think this is one of the major issues with Lisa as a game currently, I'm extremely pleased with the game's core and many of it's larger events but the cake has no icing. I think once the areas are saturated in interactable activities that it'll really improve the player experience so look forward to that at the start of next year I suppose ^_^!
How is the brightness in this image btw? Is it too dark or is it okay? x
Alright there's no easy way to say this but I am cancelling the animation for this patch. I've spent an absurd amount of hours on two animations in attempt to get something that looks great but it just isn't happening. I have come to the conclusion that Daz simply isn't built for animation, the sheer amount of minor inconveniences and also major issues with the tool just makes it impossible, like the program can't even hold a locked limb in position during animations :x it's very frustrating to say the least lol. I used a preset animation and tried to fix the characters positions (because they're obviously different sizes and shapes from the preset build), it was a nightmare going through over 400 frames individually only to create a jarring broken mess, I would expect that keyframing point A to point B in a suitable animation kit would tween the two points together but in Daz the results are completely at the mercy of the Gods because you wouldn't believe the results of some of it, it's like you're being trolled by the program a lot of the time xD
Other issues being that dForce just destroys Lisa's hair in anything over 30 frames of simulation, Lisa's top weirdly cracks and blows in the absent wind after some time in simulation too. Previewing the animation is also just a no-go, I had to render it in 100 frame batches overnight and sew it together to view it, then where there was errors in say the neck snapping and such I had to go through, fix the frames individually and restart from scratch. My PC rendered animations for over 2 weeks straight and in the end, it didn't even matter
This doesn't mean I've given up, not yet. I've been reading a little about blender and how it's a much more usable and functional tool for animation and with an easy bridge between blender and Daz, I will try in the 3.2 patch to download blender, build an animation there, port it to Daz and render the scene there to keep the lighting concurrent. This doesn't mean that there will be an animation in 3.2, it's just a promise that I'll try my best. Learning Daz took me over a year until I was quite comfortable with it and I expect blender is quite a lot more complex than Daz so please don't get your hopes up just yet xD I'm just hoping that some of my learnings from Daz will translate, at least tangentially to working in other 3D programs.
This scene moves around a little.. xD
I know this is a bummer to hear but I really gave it my all man, as much as I adore Daz.. it's just awful for this and I can't waste anymore time as I'm kind of running out of it lol ^_^ as promised I said I'd upload what I didn't include so here are a few of the the very janky raw results of a shameful amount of wasted hours:
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These are uncompressed so they're quite large files.
File "4" with no denoiser on it was where I stopped, the denoiser was removed because it was creating weird issues as it's kind of applied randomly per frame and to fix that I'd have to remove the noise separately as one video file in post but I never got that far x
It's not the end of the world, there's still plenty to look forward to both in December and in January / February. It's gonna be a packed couple of months for Lisa content
ALRIGHT I GOTTA GO! Thanks so much everyone, have an amazing day ^_^ x
Sending my love <3
//pG
