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Hello,
So, I announced on Discord that the Dev Log would be one day late, because I wanted to show something off.
I had to render two animations for it if 160 frames each. (I rendered it about 6-7 times because things went wrong. More about this further below.
So, a good thing and a bad thing.
The good thing is SG is now the sole render focus. I’ve started production of still images again and it feels like coming home. I’m not at 100% capacity yet because there are a lot of things to take care of in the background.
Those background processes will finish this month, and then I’ll return to 100%.
The bad thing is that I jumped the gun with an environment I used in the new update. I didn’t thoroughly check the environment for issues, low quality sections, etc.
I wanted to be fast and failed to grasp that I will be using this environment for pretty much the entire game.
The longer I kept working with it, the more issues I found. Mostly low-quality sections.
And because I must use this environment for multiple Seasons, I changed it. I have to re-render about 480 images. I started about four days ago and rendered about 200 of them. I’ll be done with the re-rendering process of that scene next week.
I know from a certain standpoint it’s probably better to keep these issues/mistakes that leave me to re-render something to myself, but I want to be transparent. (Kidding, I just don’t want to suffer alone.)
I did buy, and use an amazing environment that I evaluated before. It looks great.
In other news, it’s likely that the update gets to 8000 renders instead of 7000.
It’s probably like 8000 still renders + double to triple the animations I’ve done in Season 1… It only has one cinematic, though.
And… further down below you’ll see that these animations will reach a new level in Daz.
Animations, Simulations, and sculpting.
I was doing an animation over a week ago and I got really sick of it… I kept test rendering it and it looked off. It was the behavior of the clothes that rubbed me the wrong way.
Did you ever notice that in 99% of AVNs the characters often undress when it gets to a lewd scenes? Even in public settings or quickies they take off all their clothes?
That’s because it’s a gigantic pain in the ass to work with clothes during animations. Daz3D has Dforce, it tries to simulate cloth physics… total garbage imo for animations. It’s good for blankies in still renders but that’s about it.
I used to do small cloth animations with Zbrush. I sculpted the morphs myself and animated them. A good example is in Chapter 4, when Vanessa takes of her bra/top. (Man, the song “Over – Lvly” was a perfect match for this scene…)
But you will never ever be able to simulate clothes that way. It would probably take you days to sculpt anything like what I’m about to show you in a bit. And even then it’s impossible because you can’t sculpt in high resolution if you aren’t a Daz PA.
If you can recall, I started the process of creating my own clothing items in Marvelous Designer… It’s currently on ice because it’s not priority and I thought to myself… When I switch to Blender, I will be using MD (Marvelous Designer) to simulate cloth.
It’s a got a very powerful engine… There’s gotta be a way to do this in Daz right?
When I first started this process, I had a huge success on the first day… I discovered something that already changed the way I approach some scenes now. But then it went downhill.
You see, I tried to throw a half court shot and went for animations immediately but whenever I ported it over to MD, it just crashed. No log file. Nothing.
There is barely any documentation in the web for Daz3D to MD in terms of animations… I spent a few hours on two days on it and then I quit.
Fast forward a few days and I remember not hearing a bell. I went back into the ring and… Huh, I figured out why it kept crashing on import.
That was just the first roadblock, but I had gained momentum. In Marvelous new issues arrived, I can’t even recall them all and the dev log would be insanely long if I wrote down everything. At some point I was trying to write a script in Daz, that’s how bad it got.
Okay, I have to shorten this. This would otherwise be the longest dev log I've done.
I figured out on day 1 how to do it on still characters… This was already world changing.
Then, I figured out how to do it with animations.
This took multiple days and over 30 animation tests.
Lot’s of words from my side, let me give you something visual.
Bella is wearing high waisted leggings. Now how would you do it if you wanted her pants down, but only half… Like you would do for a quicky?
I wouldn’t be able to sculpt this, the leggings is going over her belly button... it would take forever and would look like shit because of low-res sculpting & shit folding in on itself. Some clothes also completely distort in certain poses.
Bella before getting cheese fries.
View attachment 4819881
Bella after getting cheese fries.
View attachment 4819887
This alone opens up so many new possibilities. Lewd scenes? Characters don’t need to fully undress anymore, but you need to keep an eye on the clipping.
That’s where the animations come in… What if you could see even the smallest kinetic force rippling through the fabric? With each thrust you’d see it.
And in cinematics… When you walk? Dance? Stand there in the wind?
This is what I had to render for yesterday, I ran into the most annoying and unsolved issue yet, some clothes just explode, and the software just freezes. It has something to do with how the clothes are made.
I can probably fix it by porting the clothes to Blender first, fixing the geo issues there, and porting it back… But fuck that. I don’t have the time for this right now.
I’ve gotten this workflow down to a mere few minutes.
I’ve used Zara here to showcase a little dance. I didn’t animate the hair. Ignore that.
On the left, you see the simulation. On the right it’s the Daz default. This dress has no “Blow/wind” morphs and even if it would look nothing like the one on the left.
I made it a gif, so the quality suffered a lot and it’s only 25FPS but it's the perfect format to show it.
Every single bit of fabric reacts to movement and physical objects.
In one simulation, Zara accidentally grabbed the back part of the dress and held it up in the air, showing off her bare ass.
It looked super fun but I couldn’t use it because it was for a test..
The good thing is this workflow carries mostly over to Blender.
However, already having access to this level of cloth sim in Daz, is amazing. I’ve already used it in game for some animations.
It was a pretty damn frustrating little journey to figure this out, but I think this is the biggest discovery I have made in the past 2-3 years.
I only need to figure out why some clothes are exploding. (Intersecting vertices most likely)
No direct previews today. I just want to get back to work ASAP and not go through thousands of renders trying to figure out what to show, but what Bella is wearing in the two butt shots is an outfit she wears in the new update.
With the behind-the-scenes stuff coming to an end, SG S2 CH1 is the sole focus. It will take about a week to redo the scene I talked about at the beginning, but that’s irrelevant in the grand scheme. The new environment that we will all have to see for pretty much the entire game is now a lot better.
I've attached all images + the gif. Beware, the gif is almost 100mb.
- Ocean
