longlivetheprincess
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Progress Report
🕑 Added 2022-05-01 13:16:40 +0000 UTCGreetings, everyone!
I can finally and confidently say that I'm now out of the design phase for both the Sister Agnes updates. It's tricky putting together these puzzles and making them all fit together, but I got there. As part of the design for these updates, I have carefully mapped out the exact spots where I need to add menus, options, and dialogue.
The result is that some of my expectations had to be adjusted, which is almost always the case. For example, in the last update, I mentioned how Sister Agnes would most likely end up with two secrets for you to solve. Well, that turned out to not be the case. While she does have two secrets, the more I worked on them, and the more I tried tweaking and adjusting how they were going to interact, the more I realized that they were so tightly interconnected that I couldn't solve one without ruining the other.
Figuring out the solution to this problem was the biggest hurdle I've dealt with over the past two weeks. Still, I eventually landed on a solution: Merging those two secrets into one bigger secret. Once I approached the problem from that angle, all the pieces of the design puzzle came together at last, and I was able to wrap things out relatively efficiently.
To give you a brief outline of how I imagine the upcoming two updates, I expect that 0.41 will contain most of the complex new content. This includes dialogue, clue-gathering, new locations, and Sister Agnes's dark secret. Version 0.42 will implement Remove Inhibitions for her, add a few sex scenes (there will be something in 0.41, too, don't worry), and give her an epilogue. It appears that 0.41 will be a more extensive update than 0.42, but this might still change.
Outside of design work, I have also re-rendered all the existing church images with better lighting and added a few new expressions for Sister Agnes that I will need for the new dialogues. The previous renders were from roughly 25 updates ago. At that time, I was still making some fundamental mistakes when setting up scenes, particularly with lighting. The church images used to take a long time to render and needed an AI routine to eliminate the worst dithering, but that has now changed. While the church environment is still demanding to render (lots of reflective surfaces, basically, and those really add up in render times), it's now just a fraction of what it used to be, and it no longer needs AI upscaling. The new images also look less oversaturated, with Agnes appearing to fit better into the scene's lighting conditions.
Here is what it used to look like before:
And this is what it looks like now:
Anyway, with these things out of the way, I've decided to spend a little time working on the new game again. I almost slipped and typed its full name here, but that will have to wait for the middle of this week when I finally officially unveil the title. You can expect more information about the game then, alongside two character introductions with portrait images. After that, you will get a new character portrait every week until I run out of characters. I can't wait to finally start talking more openly about this game instead of hiding almost all of it behind the upper tiers of Patreon and SubscribeStar.
Until next time!
Comments
Pett Brenson
Big, Big improvement in that shot. A photographer/film maker lighting is critical to making scene effective in many ways. This is so much better with a more natural feel to the image. Kudos on the excellent work and the new direction you are going in.
It's a little bit of everything. Trial and error was very useful, but I find that it was way more important to pick up knowledge from actual professionals. To that end, I read a book called "Lighting for Digital Video and Television" by John Jackman. This book is about actual movie and photography lighting, but most of the principles apply equally well to 3D rendering. I also got quite a bit of mileage out of an official Daz course (an expensive one) called "Killer Lighting" which helped me really nail down some of the technical applications of these techniques in Daz specifically. Lighting is a big topic with a lot (a LOT) of nuance and detail work. Even things you might think are inconsequential (such as where the shadow from the tip of Agnes's nose lands in the image above) can be of massive importance to the overall feel of an image. Professionals help point out these things in a way that pure experimentation would be unlikely to ever do.
That certainly is an improvement! Are there any specific tutorials or online resources you recommend for getting better at lighting scenes, or was it mostly trial and error for you?
