Chapter 1 - Dev Log #5

Hello,

So, first of all, sorry for not doing a Dev Log 2 weeks ago but as I mentioned in the SG Log, I fucked up doing the calendar.

I did do an SG log a few days later but I wasn't done with what I wanted to show in WiAB but I did decide otherwise now.

I wanted to showcase some animations, in which I tried some new things, but the release is close and you'll see my experiments for yourself.

Alright, quite a few things have happened. 

1. New Workstation PC 

I've bought a new Workstation PC a week ago for around 7500€.  Here's the Rig:

- 128GB Ram
- Threadripper 3970X
- TRX40 Designare Mainboard
- 3090 Asus TUF
- SSD's and HD's (2TB & 8TB)

This was the first time I had to actually build a PC myself. I had no prior experience beyond switching Graphic cards. 

But I managed to do it and everything went well. 

So, I still lost around 3 days of developing due to all the setups I had to do, and boy... was this a headache. 

I had connected all my PCs through my home network. This way, I have access to all assets from both games. 

I tried everything to establish the connection but I still couldn't get it to work. 

At the moment, PC 1 can't access PC2 and PC3 but they can access PC1. PC2 and PC3 also can't access each other. 

I spent easily 12-14h on this issue, trying everything from changes to the IP, changing tons of ms.service thingies but I just couldn't access the other PCs and so I gave up and had to look for an alternative. 

I now have a second Cloud that is connected to all three PC's and it allowed me to build an entirely new "Work-Network".

The good thing is, I can now work on for example WiAB, on all three PCs. 

Before, I couldn't work on WiAB on the SG PC. It would through a huge amount of missing files. 

2. NvLink 

The current PC setup looks like this: 

- SG is now on the Workstation and works with 2x3090 & 128GB Ram

- WiAB moved to the old SG PC and now has a 3090 + 2080Ti on 96GB Ram

- The third and oldest PC is only being used to render animations and currently only features a 2080Ti and 64GB Ram. 

After I resolved the Network issue, I encountered the next headache. 

One reason why I got a third 3090, was to make use of the NvLink. 

Hooking it up to get ~40GB of VRam. 

But as you can already imagine, NOTHING made it work. 

I spent 1-2 days on this issue, constantly re-attaching the Bridge, switching cards, reading manuals, changing and deleting drivers, flashing the bios, updating drivers, etc.

The only thing I didn't do was to reinstall Windows. (It would've rendered all my previous work of setting up the work environment useless.) and I just gave up on it. 

I ordered two different bridges to rule out a defect and yeah, I assume the issue is that I'm using mixed cards. (EVGA FTW3 Ultra + Asus TUF OC) 

I was in contact with people that know a lot more about this than I do (Thanks Stoya and Hank Rockwell.) but even they didn't know what was wrong. 

I kept one of the Bridges and I'll see that I can get a matching 3090 in the future. The other one would then go into the animation PC. (Which renders so fucking slow on a 2080Ti.) 120 Frame animation in 13h. 

After I gave up on this, I encountered a new problem. I was locked out of the hard drives. (I switched my drives from the SG PC to the Workstation and gave the now WIAB PC a new 8TB drive.)

Took me a while to find the solution but gladly, I did.

3. WiAB

As you guys know, I'm currently only rendering animations for WiAB. Here and there I find some stills I forgot to do but mainly it's just animations. 

And one thing that is really grinding my gears is that Daz abandoned the ability to save materials for animation frames. 

Short explanation: For every frame, the software needs to load in all the materials. Which isn't a big problem in small environments. (Still annoying.) 

But now imagine the new House of the MC. 

A TEST RENDER with 90 frames and just 75 iterations on 2x3090s took over an hour. 

The actual render process of 75 iterations takes 5-10 seconds. Loading in the materials about a 45sec-1:15min. 

Back in the day, you could save the materials by keeping the Iray preview on but these morons removed it for whatever reason and it's putting a huge dent into my render times that I just can't influence.

The example above is just for a test render. Trial and Error. 

(Blender offers an option to keep all materials loaded.) 

Alright, enough ranting. 

Thanks to the new Workstation, WIAB is now also running on a decent PC and if one of the games ever need the other PC, this works now, too. 

As mentioned above, I wanted to preview a 30sec clip of different animations but decided against it. (Sorry!) 

I was experimenting with hair pulling and different sex positions. It's quite challenging but I started to develop a feeling for it. (Also wrote lots of stuff into my "Animation notebook." 

I'm excited to see what level the animations will have in like 3-4 updates. 

Here's the new Main Menu. 

For those of you who played "Summer's Gone.", I used the exact same layout. 

I personally like this clean and simplistic look and it also makes them appear more connected. 

The Gallery will be added to the WiAB full-version incl. one additional lewd scene with Miru. 

Speaking about Miru.

All images in High-Res are attached.

This is the last Log before the release. I'm done with the Lewd animations and the only thing left is the Intro cinematic and post-work. 

The cinematic is quite challenging and also over 2min long but I'm making good progress. 

Sorry again for the fuck-up with the Dev-Log timings.

- Ocean