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Progress Report
🕑 Added 2022-02-20 09:21:36 +0000 UTCAlright folks. Good news first. That being that Silas Station 4, the last of the non-game rewards, should be done and up in another day or so. Two at the most unless something goes wrong. I've already finished the renders and I even tried something a little extra with it, though I'm unsure just yet if it worked.
Unfortunately. now for the rest of it. Left Hand Magic is very behind where I wanted it to be. As in, I've only got 3 of the 7 planned animated scenes done. The first delay was caused by needing far more still renders than I'd planned for originally. And then another, even larger, delay was caused by the discovery that animating threesome scenes jumped the individual frame render times from something like 20 minutes per frame...to an hour per frame. Yikes. That was completely unexpected, since the previous threesome animation hadn't had anywhere near as big a jump. Unfortunately, that appears to have been because there was basically nothing else in that scene except the nude figures used. This caused me to have a minor crisis of 'well, fuck, now what?'
So, while running the renders for that threesome scene, I sat down and worked through my options. For those of you that have been around a while, you probably know (I hope so anyway), that I hate delays. I very much have a serious problem with all those Patreon pages out there that overpromise, delay, and underdeliver, often while overcharging as well. I consider them unprofessional trash that should go take a long walk off a short bridge and save us all from their dickery. I've made it a habit to live by that belief, to do everything in my power to deliver on time or with minimal delays, and to try and deliver every single thing I promise and then some.
And I intend to keep doing exactly that.
Which means that the situation from the last three months can't continue.
As such, I sat down and ruthlessly tore apart my process, figuring out exactly what I needed to do (or even could do) to get things back on track. The first thing I did was implement a technique for animations that I'm not happy with and will use as little as possible. It's a dirt common thing to do, very often used in adult anything, but it results in slightly less natural seeming animations. They come out a bit smoother in a lot of ways, but a little too perfect. Even so, it's something I can do to shorten the number of frames I need for more complex animations (that is, in fact, why this particular trick is so commonly used). And so, for the most time-intensive of such animations, I will employ it to prune that time cost down.
That, however, was about all I could do with my actual process. To be brutally honest, in order to deliver as much content as I do (Which, frankly, is an insane level by almost any standard. Most other adult game Patreons need 3-5 people to put out as much content as I do monthly. And even then, I'm a major standout in the number of extra rewards I provide for my tiers, and the relatively inexpensive tiers I use in the first place), I've already streamlined my process heavily. Which left only one thing I really could do at this time.
Hardware Upgrades
After taking a day or so to agonize over it, I bit the bullet and ordered a second GPU for my rendering rig. I'd been resisting because, quite frankly, I hated the fact that I'd be forced to pay through the noise to buy the bloody thing from the scalpers that have been using the limited supply to artificially inflate the price. But, by all accounts, it's going to be at least another year before the chip manufacturing industry gets itself sorted out. So, I decided I could no longer wait. I went ahead and ordered a new GPU from one of those scalpers, for a rather painful price. I could afford for it...but I'm probably going to have to be a bit stingier with asset purchases for a few months to try and recover the loss at least partway. There's also some risk, there always is, when adding new hardware. Doubly so in this case, since I didn't have the time to fully research every detail out. I'm not yet sure if my current PSU and thermal systems can handle the extra load, for example.
That said, I honestly felt it was my only option if I wanted to live up to my own self-set standards. So, I went ahead and did it. The new GPU actually arrived today, though I haven't had the downtime yet to pull the rendering rig apart, say a few prayers that nothing goes horribly wrong, and do the upgrade. I'll likely be doing that today (Sunday). By my best estimates, the new card will speed up my render times by somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. This is because I'll be using the card IN ADDITION to the current one, rather than replacing it. And the new card is a more powerful GPU anyway (A Nivida Gefore 3060 Ti, where the old one is a 2060 Super). The gains aren't linear with Iray rendering, but the 30% increase should be a fairly safe minimum figure.
Now, having said that, this month it's unlikely to make the difference and let me fully catch up. I do hope that, should nothing go wrong, it will at least let me minimize any delay of the release of Left Hand Magic. And, going forward, this should seriously alleviate some of the issues I've been having. I'm hoping that, if everything goes well, it will allow me to get a full-size Haven's Port build done next month, even if there's a delayed start to work on that because Left Hand Magic overruns. Likewise, I hope that it will allow me to actually hit my build size targets for LHM going forward, without the delays and stress.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I felt everyone here deserved a proper, full explanation of what is going on...
