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Development Update #91
🕑 Added 2023-08-15 17:00:08 +0000 UTCWhat a month it has been. The highest highs, and the lowest lows. The good news is that we are ending the last 30 days on a high note. For my regular patrons who watch the behind-the-scenes videos, a lot of this will be review. The rest of you, please strap in.
Clothing - What A Mess
Clothing nearly did me in. Days of testing and tweaking kept leading to dead ends and major issues. I was a bit worried we would need to convert TBaK to a nudist game. Thankfully improvements in the software I use to convert Daz models and clothing to UE, along with a few bold experiments paying off, led me to finding a way to make clothing functional. I even have some revealing options for some clothing, and that will open up some fun possibilities. I'll continue to refine the quality of the clothing, but I'm able to throw nearly any outfit through the process now and get a pleasant result.
Character Changes
Nothing is ever perfect with conversions, and as I did more close up shots, I noticed issues with several characters. The good news is that those were pretty easy fixes. I'll just be spending a little more time reconverting certain things on the characters to get improved results.
Massive Progress
Let's not talk about only the challenges. All that isn't behind us yet, as 3D rendering always provides strange obstacles, but there are some significant positive developments now. Let's start with the biggest: work on content for Chapter 11 (content that will actually show up when you play it) begins tomorrow. Getting back to some "normalcy" with new content you all can actually see previews of a relief after these last few months. Even better is that my theory that not only would Unreal Engine improve quality in some key areas, but that it would speed up my workflow is proving true.
I can already setup static renders more quickly in UE than I could in Daz (and, if you remember, I was no slouch in speed there). Even better is that renders are coming out much more quickly with matching quality to Daz. As an example, I did five lovely 4K special renders for patrons in July. These took a bit over 35 minutes to render out from UE, and that was with a lot of "buffer" renders to allow the physics simulation to properly start. In Daz, those renders would have taken me at least 5+ hours to render out at 4K. Obviously that is a massive difference. Since then, I've gotten render times down even further, with no loss in quality.
I continue to get more comfortable setting up animations and single frames in Unreal Engine, and that bodes well for the future. I've already got a small list of future improvements I want to experiment with, and those will get tested sometime after Chapter 11's release.
The Next Big Things
Custom lewd animations will be the next big thing to nail down. Creating realistic animations to go along with my realistic everything else is not something I'm taking lightly. Thankfully I've been studying some of the better animations out there for some time, and with everything else that needs to be prepared for Chapter 11 starting to wind down, I'll be able to really focus on this work.
Past that, I'll continue to squash the little problems I'm still encountering. There has been so much to learn during this process, and a lot of it are things I hoped I could put off. The upside is that I am pretty comfortable in UE now and continue to get more comfortable daily.
The Home Stretch
While this conversion has taken some time, it is nice to have validation that it will be worth the wait. My three big goals will be achieved: increased quality, beautiful animations, and improved setup of renders. I know you all are eagerly awaiting the next chapter, and you won't have to wait much longer. At the near seven-month mark since I started this transition, while I would love to have a finished release, the majority of the heavy work is now completed and tested. With rapid render times and quick setups in UE, things are looking very nice for Chapter 11 and beyond. This work was a lot more "trailblazing" than I imagined when I started, but seeing things come together is satisfying.
I'll be back in another month with what should be a significant progress update. There will definitely be previews coming steadily over the next few weeks.
Enjoy an early animation test I did about a week ago.
Comments
Anthony Docimo
>I even have some revealing options for some clothing, I see what you did there. :) kudos on the accomplishments, and i love the models in the photos & the models' modeling the outfits.
