T4bbo
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Progress update on all fronts!
🕑 Added 2020-06-01 00:20:34 +0000 UTCFirst of all... this will be a long update, so take a coffee or a biscuit to read through all of this...
Babysitter:
Yeah... I know, that many of you would like Babysitter to continue indefenitely, but all good things must have an end. I can say you it was a hell of a ride to be developing this game for past 3 years... so much excitment for certain scenes & disappointment for other... so much love for one character from one spectrum of players and so much dislike for same character from other spectrum of players... hard beginnings, hyped middle of the game, satisfaction or frustration in the end...
However, I listen to feedbacks and I agree some endings might feel rushed due to short timespan for them to be made, especially if that's the only ending you've been waiting for or you didn't get the desired ending at all. Therefore I've decided that any longterm Patron who's been supporting the game at least for last 24 months as Mega supporter (12 months foxxy club member or 6 months yacht club member) can submit request to prolong certain ending i.e. to be fleshed out with more renders/animations or submit new ending if it works with the storyline.
Please, submit these requests during June 2020, because I will be working on them only in free time and by the end of the October 2020 I plan to release fully finished game on Steam and other platforms with some new GUI, higher resolution and re-rendered non quality images from beginning of the game.
Babysitters:
This is our main focus from now on, although we've been little slower on development for the past month due to learning UE4, Maya and other softwares required to make better animations or even full fledged realtime 3D game... now we're fully focused on Babysitters and the waiting you have to go through will be rewarded with bigger version coming this month.
Although we have more than 200 renders ready, we need more time to render animations. Also from the story perspective (to satisfy all player's spectrum) it makes more sense to issue game with scripts planned for june...
However, as you can already see, Babysitters will not only have better and more realistic textures on characters, but animations where each female character has different real woman providing the sounds during sexy scenes!
Unreal Engine Animations:
First, I've started to learn about Unreal Engine to render animations faster (realtime), I knew I could not get same quality with default Daz shaders on its detailed characters as I can get from Iray renderer (Daz Studio - software that I use for creating images and animations uses Iray renderer). But the speed and capabilities of UE4 just could not let me sleep without trying it out.
As I post here video after video of my progress and work in UE4, I would like to use them to point out main advantages of UE4 over Daz3D related to visual novels like Babysitter:
- real time rendering (30-60 frames per second) instead of 1 frame per 10 minutes in Iray renderer... yes you read right, short 5 second loop video with 30 frames per second takes more than one day to render using Iray in DazStudio while it's real time rendered in Ureal Engine
This short video is fully made by me with UE4 assets and licensed music (just different cuts are done by postprocessing with video editor). Just several hours of scene set up and rendered realtime (first day of using UE4 ). This would take at least a week in Daz3D to prepare and render.
- body, clothing and hair physics - calculated realtime during rendering instead of minutes to count physics of clothes and hair for each single frame using Dforce inside Daz studio and no possibility to apply physics on soft body parts (tits and ass). So we don't use so often in animations... mostly in static renders. Therefore as soon as I got my hands on UE4... I've started to figure out how to do it... you can see results in following real time rendered videos from Unreal.
Dynamic Hair&Clothes
Dynamic Tits
Physics in UE4 are perfect, but characters eye shader is bad and hands are broken due to skeleton export issues... did I mention that Daz sux at this?
- particle system and lighting - creating and rendering animations with fire, rain, dust, fog or complicated lighting is mission impossible with Iray in Daz Studio while easy task for optimised Unreal Engine... especially with upcoming version UE5... realistic cumshots animations will be really possible...
Ok, so I can create great scenes with these particle effects, but can I use Daz3D scenes and export them directly to UE4 without breaking everything? Well as I've mentioned Daz sux at this, not going to mention all flaws, but we figured out it somehow... here are results of exporting not only characters but also whole enviroments using specialised script.
DazAssetsToUE4_without particle effects
DazAssetsToUE4_with particle effects (do you recognise the place?)
- compatibility with other softwares - Daz is pretty much incompatible with everything, has many glitches at exports etc... UE4 is standard in game industry. Although UE4 has some plugins for animations which we would be utilising, UE4 is not animation software... it's game engine and real time rendering software. For animations... industry uses mostly Maya and Maya can be also used to correct Daz export failures with bones... and add genitalia... following animations are just quick tests, I was waiting to show you animations which I want to do with full MOCAP setup I ve ordered, but it didnt arrive yet. It means facial animations + body animations + hand fingers animation.
Animation_WithRiggedJessica_Cinematic (some camera and sound work)
Animation_WithRiggedJessica_Preview (just preview of scene)
I didn't mention list of all issues we encountered and solved to not bother you too much, but biggest one is creating realistic shader (remember weird eyes?) and make character look similar as rendered in DazStudio... you can see result of our work in the title picture... on the left is currently top notch real time 3D rendered character in the industry alias "Digital human"... on the right is real time rendered Jessica using similar shaders.
What is takeaway from all of this?
Creating animations in Unreal Engine is great for enviroments, not so great for actual characters cause you might spot difference between skin details rendered in Daz and UE4 (even if using best shaders)... and if you accept level of character quality in Unreal Engine, you probably would want to play whole game using Unreal Engine to utilise all it's powers to the full extent.
Every week I get like 3-4 messages like: Give me wallpaper with Jessica, make game just with Jessica, put more scenes with Jessica in the existing games etc.
Imagine we would make real time rendered, fully animated and voiced game with her in quality shown above... would you like that? Drop your opinions in comments below, but I will make a separate poll on this for sure.
Comments
T4bbo
Unfortunately not... like it's possible now to create very good looking characters but not possible to run enviroment with suberb chars real time on average computers... I have to sacrifice little bit of character close up detail for overall better gameplay experience.
Pax
The animations and graphics, especially in the cinematic view, are outstanding! Will the unreal engine give better character quality as well?
Joko Haarislee
i like both ways :D
