Questions about making my first visual novel w/ Renpy & Daz - Is there a detailed guide?

[Revel!]

I'm wanting to possibly make my own visual novel and am looking for a detailed, lengthy, comprehensive guide on all the various elements that go into it. I've done a lot of searching around and have found some small guides on specific things, and some very vague and not that helpful "guides" on the general subject of making a visual novel.

I'd like to find a guide that includes the whole process, preferably, including both Renpy and Daz Studio stuff. Or at the very least, a full guide on Daz Studio. I've already got plenty of experience with Python coding, so I'm confident I can pick up Renpy pretty quickly and make a decently advanced game/novel with it. But I am completely lost when it comes to Daz Studio. I've never done any 3d modeling (and this isn't even modeling? it's just rendering?). I haven't found any really useful guides around here on getting started with Daz, and I've got a bunch of questions.

My questions are:

1. Does anyone know of a detailed, comprehensive guide to the entire VN-making process? Or just a good Renpy one? Or a good beginner Daz Studio one?

2. Do people use the free version of Daz or do they buy the license? If they buy a license, which one is recommended?

3. I know I've seen a lot of similar assets/models in a lot of these games. But what exactly are they and where can I find them? There are some in particular, like the hairstyle from the cover image of False Hero, that I know I want to include in my own novel and I've seen them all over. Is there a list of like the most commonly used assets, or community favorites? Or perhaps like a big zipped package with all of them?

4. I've seen a lot of talk about having to wait for things to render. Just how long does it take on average to render one of these images? Is it only slow on bad computers or on all computers?

5. I've read, but didn't understand very well, that there's different rendering programs to use with Daz. One such is Iray by Nvidia? And this one requires an Nvidia card, and a high-end one at that. What exactly are the recommended computer specs for efficiently making a visual novel? I've seen both graphics cards and processors mentioned, but I'd like to know what all the recommended specs are. I have a pretty decent PC, but I'd like to know if even my pretty good computer should be upgraded.

 

[anne O'nymous]

1. Does anyone know of a detailed, comprehensive guide to the entire VN-making process? Or just a good Renpy one? Or a good beginner Daz Studio one?

For Ren'py, the official documentation that come with the SDK is a good start.

2. Do people use the free version of Daz or do they buy the license?

There's a none free version ? No, seriously, there's one ?

3. I know I've seen a lot of similar assets/models in a lot of these games. But what exactly are they and where can I find them?

You can buy them in the

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, some other shop like

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or

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, by example. Or you can look more attentively the sections around there ; but in this case, it's polity and respectful to buy them once you've the money for this.

4. I've seen a lot of talk about having to wait for things to render. Just how long does it take on average to render one of these images? Is it only slow on bad computers or on all computers?

It totally depend of the complexity of the scene, the computer, the GPU, the amount of RAM and the configuration you'll use to render the scene. Basically speaking, it can goes from 5 minutes to many hours.

5. [...] What exactly are the recommended computer specs for efficiently making a visual novel?

It totally depend of what you effectively want to achieve.
There's games with totally average grainy renders that have some success, and for those level of quality, any computer can do the trick. But if you want to have high quality renders, you'll need some high tech material. And obviously, you can try in between and use an average recent computer.
For more, there's few thread here that talk about the required configuration, just read them.