stencilbits
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3D rendering and animation experiments
🕑 Added 2019-07-23 16:39:30 +0000 UTCAs I have previously mentioned, I have been experimenting with interactive 3D scene rendering. The video shows what is currently possible to do using the system I have been developing. Basically, instead of just rendering a static image, it's now also possible to export the whole scene from Blender and render it interactively inside Ren'Py. In the video, you can also see very basic hair simulation and boob-physics. It also supports facial expressions (smile, frown, etc.), posing and animations. The visuals are not that great yet as the renderer I wrote is a pretty quick-and-dirty version with no fancy features. It can be improved or maybe even replaced with a proper, fully-featured renderer (maybe with virtual reality support).
There are plenty of nice things that 3D can provide, but also some disadvantages. I'll list some of them here.
Advantages:
-Interactivity is just cool. Moving things tend to be much more interesting than simple, static images.
-Different camera angles, poses and expressions are easy to do. No need to render separate images for all combinations.
-Pretty easy to do, it only takes a few clicks to export a typical scene and maybe ten minutes of extra work (for now).
-Animations can also be exported, so instead of using pre-rendered video files it's possible to add some interactivity, different point of views, free look etc. This could actually save some disk space as hi-quality videos can get pretty big.
-Interactive headpats and hair ruffling. And other grabby stuff.
Disadvantages:
-Interactive visual quality tends to be lower than in static images as the interactive rendering should be fast (preferably 30-60 fps). Static images can take hours to render and post-process so the quality tends to be a lot better. Still, the demo interactive renderer can be improved significantly.
-3D scenes require much more from CPU and GPU. Ren'Py is not really designed for this kind of stuff and the performance of the RenPy's scripting language (Python) is starting to limit things a bit. Static fallback images can be used by those who have slow/old computers.
-3D content takes much more disk space (estimated maybe 5-15 times more than static images). A typical 1280x720 static .jpg image takes around 0.2 megabytes and some of the scene backgrounds use additional metadata which pushes the image size to around 1.5 MB. In contrast, the 3D scene in the video takes about 11 MBs (compressed) but it also uses large 4K textures which can be made a lot smaller (although quality will suffer a bit). Also, some model geometry and textures can be re-used in multiple scenes which will also help.
-3D content used for interactive rendering sometimes requires a different license which tend to be much more expensive. An outfit might cost 5-20$, but the interactive licenses tend to be around 25-50$ and they add up quickly as each character needs multiple sets of clothing.
So, what do you think? Are you interested in seeing more interactive stuff? I might do a poll about this later to see what people think.
Comments
I'd say just focus on animating the naughty scenes. No need for idles and such on static scenes, that's way too much of a time and resource drain.
Shane Klein
its good but the hair moves so much shes indoors there not that much wind ( i hope)
Quinfax
Seems pretty interesting. I kind of want to see a full tested animated scene to see how it looks in game before a give the yay or nay. I do like the fact your trying different things to make this stand out. Excelsior
Dark Rooster
For me it will come down to the quality of the animations. I would love to see a test scene from an earlier route, like one of Nina's scenes, to see how it would work in its completed state. I liked the controls you had in the demo. I saw that you could change the facial poses. However, will the facial expressions be animated as well or will they be static during the animation.
I think the main strengths of Offcuts are cute static images, humor and great writing. I personally find animation in this game unnecessary. If you want to improve the game in another way in addition to adding new routes, I would suggest adding more of these cute static images to existing routes.
Thanks, I guess a poll might reveal more information about what people want. The animation is pretty "floaty" as it is basically a test animation that moves most joints in a certain arc, it's not really a properly keyframed animation.
Korentin
I love good animations but can't say that they necessarily add that much in visual novels. I think your showcase looks great aside from the floaty-ness of the "idle", I'd say you should keep exploring it if you find it interesting on a creative level.
FGD12
I can't say I am fond of animation. I understand there are people that like it, but I don't care one way or the other. And since adding animation would make the process slower (slower updates!) and require more money, resources and downgrade in image quality, I would say... nah.
