BtS: Test Animation

As anyone who is a fan of BBN knows, there are no true animations or movie files in the game. The animations I do have are a series of still images (usually around 7 or 8) that are then looped with a dissolve transition. The end result works well enough but is rather rudimentary.

That is the result of a conscious decision at the start to stay away from them in order to keep file sizes under control and also focus on what I knew how to do rather than spending time pursuing something that felt a bit gimmicky. The lack of movies in BBN isn't something I've felt any sense of inadequacy about. I still don't, but I no longer feel it is gimmicky.

I will be the first to say other developers are doing more with animation and videos than I am, and they're doing some great stuff. I'm a big believer in boosting other creators and often find inspiration in what they're doing. And, what they're doing has made me sit back and wonder if I would be able to do something like that and is it worth the time and effort.

So, that's one of the things I've been experimenting with for the Blood and Honor concept. I don't know that BBN will ever lean heavily into movie files or animation, but I have been looking into them as part of this concept I've been working on, and there are a few things I've wanted to test. Among the considerations are:

• How does animation in Daz Studio actually work (as with anything in Daz, there are a LOT of settings to adjust)?
• How long does it take to render?
• What is the resulting file size?
• Can I do anything to adjust the file size to make it more manageable?

After some tinkering and fiddling with a very basic animation scene (a plane landing), I've learned a lot. For example, it took about 10 hours to render this 6 second clip at 30 frames per second and 3000 iterations per frame (what I consider to be a bare minimum for a typical BBN scene, which contains a lot shadows and typically requires longer to process).

The final result of this 6 second clip was a 549 MB AVI file -- more than half a gig! Obviously, that would not be sustainable to include in a visual novel. For PC and Mac, BBN is still under to 2 GB, and this single video in its original format would be more than a quarter of that. However, I was able to convert it into a webm format and it reduced the file size down to 6 MB! A huge reduction that makes it actually quite manageable for a VN.

There are other things I need to learn and consider, particularly for a looping animation (such as for a sex scene), but this has been a great learning experience for me.