VN Ren'Py Sofia's Dark Fantasies [Ep.2 Ch.1 v2.01] [Greuceanu Heavy Industries]

3.30 star(s) 29 Votes

How many of you played the game and appreciate the render quality?

  • Played and wasn't impressed by the renders

    Votes: 96 10.1%
  • Played and seen potential in the AI Polish

    Votes: 292 30.8%
  • Played and Loved the AI polish

    Votes: 244 25.7%
  • Didn't play it because it's AI crap

    Votes: 205 21.6%
  • Didn't play at all?

    Votes: 111 11.7%

  • Total voters
    948
  • Poll closed .

Greuceanu

Active Member
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
708
2,040
i am sure a lot of you are waiting for the free game version (probably jan 10th) but for those who want to support our game and want a deal we are offering 30% for the first month, the new release is available for the $10 tier and here’s the discount code F95ZONE-2024_XMAS this is a patreon only deal

the free release will not be the same as the patreon release, it will jpgs instead of png quite a bit of quality loss there plus less animations, we are debating if that’s gonna be 10/16 or 8/16, we are happy to provide the game for exposure and feedback but none of that pays the bills for the team.
 

Greuceanu

Active Member
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
708
2,040
Free release just dropped, remember to leave feedback at the end of playing, the Paid release has 16 animations vs 8 and has PNG's vs JPG (much better quality) we ran a few promos (over the holidays) to help people support us the paid release isn't expensive and we would appreciate your support, please don't ask for the paid version in this thread and as always if you have feedback (outside of the form in the game menu icon is a heart icon or at the end of the game) leave them here or contact us via dm
 
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Glaz64

Member
Jun 11, 2017
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The biggest problem for me with the renders, is the vacant 1000 yard stare that seems so common with AI renders. Absolutely zero expression on any of the faces. If they have no expression its very difficult for the reader/viewer to engage with them.
 
Sep 7, 2019
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so yes we are polishing parts of the image and after the entire image, we have 2 step process, a double pass and it's time consuming vs a prompt and go...this gives us much higher resolution, control over details and much much better images, the lights are blender / daz...it's a different approach and it's something we keep iterating on, we moved from Daz to Blender...and moved our model to Genesis 9...

thanks for ur message:)

View attachment 4051407
Haven't played the game, just browsed thread, looking at art. Wanted to express my opinion on picture aspect alone. On technical level, I like the idea of enhancing renders by AI pass a lot (I have some knowledge about 3d rendering techniques from both game and DAZ, not so much about post-processing/AI). And results seems very promising. But as seen on the front page of this thread and very nicely shown on the pic quoted above, I find that the end result is missing the mark by overdoing the good stuff. Someone else said as feedback that the girl looks like too much makeup, but I disagree, rather too little or bad one. It is too much detail, too harsh lines, veins and muscle lines and skin detail/age marks, something makeup is usually made to tone/hide. There are pictures here are there with softer light that look quite appealing, but most look too harsh, even if scene suggest softer lighting like on picture above. It's almost cell shaded effect (not quite), where all the details are drawn with black outline to make it imitate pencil work art. So lets just call it oversharpened.

Daz render looks awful in your comparison. Daz can do much better. Expression and lighting are comically bad in every comparison pic I have seen so far (maybe it is enough for your workflow, but still, man wonders what can be done with decent renders). But the kicker is #1 look best for me. The Harshness I was talking about is not yet present in this one, it seems to be added by hand in photoshop in #2. Is making her (and most characters in game as seen on other screens) look so much older and weathered your intention? Clearly, tastes come to play here as well. But in comparison, #1 in already adding all the lovely detailed look to the body and face, with appropriate softens to make it appealing/alluring.

AI/ML seems to me both exciting in what can it do and disappointing how poorly it seems to be serving storytelling because of lack of consistency, and your (and one or two similar projects) approach and technique seems most promising so far.

I have been learning about DAZ for a while. Not an expert, but I have some grasp of possibilities and difficulties. Your technique does seem to offer some existing enhancements. Learning photoshop from scratch (and paying subscription) not in my time/money budget for now, and frankly doesn't seem that exciting. I have more superhero/SF renders in mind and special/particle effects, like energy beams, power shields and explosions is something I haven't seen done well in DAZ (they added VDB support, but libraries are limited) so I'm wondering if to your knowledge is it something that can be done by AI (enhanced I mean, adding simple emissive beam in DAZ is not a problem, it just doesn't look any good, especially compared to all this lovely characters, costumes and locations)? Anyway, mostly giving my 2 cents of feedback, but if you could give me some pointer to where to start learning about AI technique similar to yours, I would be grateful I mean not from text prompt, as most like to be, but from mostly done picture with text prompts to modify it. Should I start with Stable Diffusion (from my googling it is best offline one and free)?
 

Greuceanu

Active Member
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
708
2,040
Haven't played the game, just browsed thread, looking at art. Wanted to express my opinion on picture aspect alone. On technical level, I like the idea of enhancing renders by AI pass a lot (I have some knowledge about 3d rendering techniques from both game and DAZ, not so much about post-processing/AI). And results seems very promising. But as seen on the front page of this thread and very nicely shown on the pic quoted above, I find that the end result is missing the mark by overdoing the good stuff. Someone else said as feedback that the girl looks like too much makeup, but I disagree, rather too little or bad one. It is too much detail, too harsh lines, veins and muscle lines and skin detail/age marks, something makeup is usually made to tone/hide. There are pictures here are there with softer light that look quite appealing, but most look too harsh, even if scene suggest softer lighting like on picture above. It's almost cell shaded effect (not quite), where all the details are drawn with black outline to make it imitate pencil work art. So lets just call it oversharpened.

Daz render looks awful in your comparison. Daz can do much better. Expression and lighting are comically bad in every comparison pic I have seen so far (maybe it is enough for your workflow, but still, man wonders what can be done with decent renders). But the kicker is #1 look best for me. The Harshness I was talking about is not yet present in this one, it seems to be added by hand in photoshop in #2. Is making her (and most characters in game as seen on other screens) look so much older and weathered your intention? Clearly, tastes come to play here as well. But in comparison, #1 in already adding all the lovely detailed look to the body and face, with appropriate softens to make it appealing/alluring.

AI/ML seems to me both exciting in what can it do and disappointing how poorly it seems to be serving storytelling because of lack of consistency, and your (and one or two similar projects) approach and technique seems most promising so far.

I have been learning about DAZ for a while. Not an expert, but I have some grasp of possibilities and difficulties. Your technique does seem to offer some existing enhancements. Learning photoshop from scratch (and paying subscription) not in my time/money budget for now, and frankly doesn't seem that exciting. I have more superhero/SF renders in mind and special/particle effects, like energy beams, power shields and explosions is something I haven't seen done well in DAZ (they added VDB support, but libraries are limited) so I'm wondering if to your knowledge is it something that can be done by AI (enhanced I mean, adding simple emissive beam in DAZ is not a problem, it just doesn't look any good, especially compared to all this lovely characters, costumes and locations)? Anyway, mostly giving my 2 cents of feedback, but if you could give me some pointer to where to start learning about AI technique similar to yours, I would be grateful I mean not from text prompt, as most like to be, but from mostly done picture with text prompts to modify it. Should I start with Stable Diffusion (from my googling it is best offline one and free)?
play the game and episode 2 and then come back for more feedback:) Daz doesn’t hold a candle to blender, stable diffusion is your best bet but it takes time to get good at it
 

Greuceanu

Active Member
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
708
2,040
The biggest problem for me with the renders, is the vacant 1000 yard stare that seems so common with AI renders. Absolutely zero expression on any of the faces. If they have no expression its very difficult for the reader/viewer to engage with them.
play episode 2 and then come back with feedback
 
3.30 star(s) 29 Votes