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Would you believe I'm still not over this virus? It isn't near as terrible, but I am definitely approaching that 8-10 week mark. The good news is that it is causing me fewer issues day-by-day. I did check in again with the doctor, and they confirmed it just is going to take awhile to get over.
Now on to what you all came to read about: Chapter 11's development. The very good news is that render progress is now steady. Not that there isn't the occasional issue that grinds things to a halt for an hour or two while I figure out how to solve it, but I'm back to a life of cranking out renders (and then inevitably redoing some of those when I find things I missed the first time). That and rewriting rougher parts of the script.
I'm using a new clothing setup that allows me to grab clothing during simulation to position it. This allows for some "happy accidents," and lets me get creative with some of the clothing items I'm using. You'll get to see this in some of the previews. And speaking of clothing, it turned out to be much easier than I thought to get custom clothing into these scenes. So you'll get to see some more period appropriate outfits for some of our characters, though many have a few modifications to make them a bit better fit for an adult visual novel. In fact, a lot of the custom clothing is more problem free than the clothing items I was using before.
At this stage, progress is steady, but things are still fluid. While writing my scripts, I always estimate how many renders a scene will get. Render setup, while quicker, is still the largest chunk of my time. I already had an enormous release with Chapter 11, and a lot of scenes are growing the render count, as I go through and do them. This is one time where a progress bar or some other example of progress isn't very useful. Scenes vary in size, complexity of characters, posing difficulty, etc. There are some scenes that are on the chopping block, but I'll make the decision whether to nix those before I start renders on them after I have more of these essential scenes out of the way.
One big area that I've been working on to speed up my development times is doing only what I have to do for the render. In times past, I would look at a render from nearly every angle, and then make adjustments. Now? I get my camera setup before anything else and then look through that only. If there are problems visible from the camera, I'll only fix those. This has also helped with things like environment creation, as I just need to get those to a baseline of quality, and I can adjust any details during individual renders or scenes.
That's all from me for this month. I'll be heading on a holiday "vacation" (family visit) in about a week, and then return back here before the end of the year. During the break, I'll be doing some editing of the script and writing, but render work will cease during that time. I will have some special holiday themed renders coming before I leave. Have a great holiday season, and I'll be back with another development update in January.
