Episode 4, Update #3

Salutations,

I've finally completed the character work and all technical upgrades over the weekend. Although it took me much longer than anticipated, I'm pleased with the result. Give it another month of working with the scenes, and I'll probably hate everything again as per usual. 😂

-Episode 4 development-Scene setup and initial renders are being worked on, and I'm also trying to structure the various story beats planned for this episode. I know where I want to take and end it, but I've yet to figure out the right flow and how everything is going to fit together.

-Tech blurbs-
Episode 3 was rendered with UE5.1 and I made the upgrade to 5.2 shortly after its release. As soon as that was finished and fixed up everything that was wrong, 5.3 came along pretty much immediately. Luckily, that was the first update that didn't seem to break anything major. Going from 5.1 to 5.2 broke all the eyes. After years of hacking the translucent parts of the eyes, we can finally make physically correct eyes without having to use metallic values to get reflections. This meant that all eyes turned to metal, as the hack now revealed itself. Honestly, it looks pretty awesome... for some kind of satanic ritual.

I've posted a lot of test shots in the preview section in my Discord server, mainly to calibrate and test the shader and texture modifications as thoroughly as possible. It was a tough and long road trying to fix the problems that come with base DAZ characters. From inverted normal maps, to roughness value conversions, I truly wish that the DAZ team had a proper quality control department that checked for these mistakes, as it shouldn't be allowed to sell broken things imo. I also baked two new greyscale maps in Substance Painter and packed them together with the roughness, as I had two grey channels still available for each body part group. So I baked a Thickness and Ambient Occlusion for each character to give it a little extra and have more masks to control things in my new shader.

Those 3 texture maps combined can do a lot of things, while you only pay the memory cost of a single texture.

Some of you aren't on discord, so here are some of those tests renders.

Ultimately, all it comes down to now is my ability to light scenes, and I know I have a long road to get there.

-Changes-
When I first started this project, I largely had no idea what I was doing, except making environment art. I still don't know anything in the grand scheme of things, but with the help from some amazing people, I'm getting a better understanding along with the experience earned in the last year. I'm not a great businessman or marketer... in fact, I might probably be the worst. In my day job, I focus on environment art. I don't deal with everything else like on this project, and it's a lot for one person to deal with. Considering this is something I do for fun on the side, I'll still have to consider this a business to a certain extend, or it will ruin me eventually. I need to make a few changes that will gradually start coming online:

- The tiers will change and become more lucrative with additional benefits

- The dev-archive on Discord and technical posts where I'll share my development secrets, will become a common thing, exclusively to those that subscribed. To me, it means very little, but as someone else mentioned before, this is a gold-mine to some

- I may start introducing custom renders for the higher tiers (with limits as I don't want it to distract too much from dev-time)

- I may have to adjust the tier costs

Some of these changes are already starting to take effect, as there's now an exclusive special render section for those that subscribed available on discord. As you know, there's also a guide being written and I've just released the guide to episode 1 to the subscribers. As for the rest, I'll talk about that in another dev-log.

Any questions, comments, concerns, let me know!

All the best,

Ezy