Welcome to my kitchen

I was wondering what to post that you might find interesting. After the Ask Me Anything session, maybe some of you would like to know more about the development process (struggles). Don't read if you don't want to know how the sausage is made (spoiler: it's messy 😅).

To create the art for the game, I use Daz Studio. It's a fairly simple 3D application that focuses on posing characters, setting up lighting and cameras. When the scene is finished, it needs to be "rendered", which is when the computer simulates surface materials and real-world lighting to produce a nice looking, semi-realistic image. This process is computationally intensive. It requires a powerful graphics card (GPU) from nvidia (it uses nvidia's iRay technology) and it requires a lot of video memory because the models use a lot of detailed high-resolution textures that all need to be loaded into memory to render the image.

The time it takes to render a single image varies depending on the complexity of the scene, lighting and resolution. But let's say an average Gynocracy image takes about 15-20 minutes to render.

But what happens if the scene is too complex and doesn't fit in the video memory? Then all hell breaks loose. The rendering falls back from the graphics card to the computer's CPU. Today's CPUs are pretty fast, but they are not designed for this kind of task (unlike GPUs). So rendering a single image this way can easily take HOURS. Which means it's practically useless.

Why am I talking about this? Well, what consumes the most memory are the characters and their elaborate costumes. If there are more than 4-5 characters in the scene, there's a problem.

So what do I do? I come up with the brilliant idea of a wedding scene for chapter 10. Yes, Clare and Ryan are getting married and everyone important in Queen's Isle is invited. Dozens of characters in one scene. Very clever, Brecleas, very clever.

I had to use every dirty trick in the book to make it work. Using low resolution characters for backgrounds. Rendering parts of the scene separately and then stitching them together. Use clever camera angles and hide characters that are out of frame (I hate mirrors and reflective surfaces, by the way, they show everything). In short, game development is just like filmmaking - everything is fake, just smoke and mirrors.

All that said, working on Chapter 10 has been very time consuming so far. If I ever decide to make crowd scenes again, please stop me😁

But in the end, I'm quite happy with how the wedding images turned out. I hope you'll like them as well!