Chapter 3: Dev log #3

Hello,

1. General stuff

2. Blender progress

3. Public preview

1. General stuff

WiAB Chapter 6 has finally been finished 2 weeks ago with over 6000 renders in total. (Including animation renders)

Summer's Gone now has 100% of the resources on it and the 2nd PC does show a significant productivity boost.

But I have to be honest and I have to say that the last week was horrible in terms of productivity due to my personal health.  I am not sick or so but the extreme grind of 8 - 14h of work on WiAB Chapter 6 over several months did take its toll on me.
I was mentally exhausted and I could've slept 14h a day and I would still feel tired.

I can't let this happen again so I will take a more healthy approach to future updates. 

I bought a 2nd RTX 2080Ti a week ago.. but I had to send it back.. I made the mistake of getting a 3-Slot GPU when I bought the PC. Now I can't fit the 2nd one in there without running into some serious heat-issues. 

I even bought a Riser-Cable with it but there was no way to make it fit/work.

When the new Titans (3090Ti's) come out.. I will make sure to get the 2 Slot variant. 

The current state of Chapter 3 is:

~ 250 still renders

~ 600 renders in animations

This is around 25% and even tho I officially started the development 2 months ago, it has really been in development for less than a month. I had to take the other PC back to WiAB to finish the end cinematic. 

2. Blender Progress

As I told you guys in an earlier post, I had to drop Octane because of it's buggy nature and the fact that it will never get fixed.
And I also said that Octane was just a stepping stone to Blender. 

I dedicate 1-3 hours a day to learning Blender and I assume many would think:
"Hey, you have some Daz experience.. This should help a lot!"

No, it doesn't. 

Daz teaches you nothing about materials, etc.  

The only thing I can take from Daz to Blender is my lighting & posing knowledge.

The biggest obstacle is converting all the characters and environments to Blender.  And you have to do it all yourself.  There is no button that does it for you. (Yes, there is a plugin but the shaders that come with it are unusable if you want high quality.)

This means you have to create skin shaders for your characters with the node system.
Here is an example picture of a shader in a Node system.

This is a shader just for the Subsurface Scattering (How light traverses through your skin)

I think you get the idea of what nodes are. (Or probably not because I didn't understand it either by just looking at it.)

This is obviously way above the normal Daz knowledge and I was extremely confused when I started with all this stuff. 

I have been learning Blender on a serious note for around 4 weeks now and from now on I will keep you guys informed about my progress. 

The games won't be made in Blender until Season 2 and this gives me enough time to learn and bring everything to a new level. 

Let me show you a first test render of "Dana" from Where it all began (WiAB). She is the first character I converted and she is far away from perfect but her shaders etc. will improve over time. (Learning by doing.) 

(Drag into a new tab for a better look)

A very important factor for me is how good a render engine can handle dark scenes. So the first test render was in a very dark environment.

(These are not her real boobs from the game.. Just in case anyone thinks I just spoilered Dana's tiddys.) 

In a few weeks, I will convert an SG character into Blender. I will do a poll about it and you can choose which one I should convert first. (This means you will see a lot of Blender renders/animations from this character.)

I am using the Cycles render engine. 

3. Public preview

Here are 2 public previews for every supporter. The others are in the designated tier.

- Ocean

(: