BtS: The journey to make Build 0.14

I realized it's been awhile since I've made a Behind the Scenes (BtS) post, so... here we go.

Light Spoilers ahead for Build 0.14

The latest update obviously took a long time to put together and a fair amount of that is just straight-up on me. As I mentioned, there were multiple health issues, the demands of a new job, and everything else I've had with my life the last few years including raising a child (yup, I'm a dad). But, there were also a fair number of technical challenges I encountered along the way, and I thought some of you might be interested in learning about them, particularly if you're thinking of getting into making 3D images or even your own VN.

Daz Studio

First, as you may know, I used Daz Studio to make the 3d images for BBN. After the initial learning curve, I've found Daz is pretty easy and straightforward to get the basics down. However, it also has a lot of hidden depth, details and settings that can let you do some really amazing stuff -- and completely get in the way.

And that's what happened with the first 200 or 300 images for this update. When I started making the images for this update, the posing for the characters in the lab scene was painfully tedious and slow. Every little click, every fraction of movement whether an entire character or just a finger or an eyebrow, took several seconds. By comparison, posing should be smooth and effortless, allowing me to move an object through the full range of its movement and easily find the right spot. This is critical for scenes where two characters are touching one another, as the fingers (and other things) have to be posed precisely or you wind up with a gap or clipping.

I cannot describe how painful this was. When I used to be able to setup 10 images in an hour, I was down to 2 or 3 (if I was lucky). Lots of Google searching and checking on the Daz forums were fruitless. Nobody had a clue. I'd asked several times on a server for queer VN developers, and the best suggestions I got were "Maybe it's someone's hair," so I tried deleting Seth's hair for posing, then adding it back in (it didn't help, and actually made him look like he was balding in some images). Eventually, I had asked again, and Anxious Adam (affiliated with Blayke, Apollo Studios and the VN Hollow) mentioned a completely random setting I had never heard of and don't recall ever adjusting. He said if it was "on" it could really delay posing. Turns out, it had been turned on for every single model. Well, click-click-click I went, and suddenly everyone was back to posing easily and smoothly.

Photoshop

So, that was one bit of fun. Another bit was having to reinstall Windows and all the applications on my hard drive, including Photoshop. After all the images are rendered, I QC each and every one of them in Photoshop. And, before release, I run all the images through a custom filter to give them a little bit of a noir look. Well, when I had to reinstall Photoshop, all my settings had disappeared, so I had to manually recreate as best I could the general effect of that filtering. 

But... there was also the matter of Photoshop's "color profile" settings. If you're a graphic artist or have more than a passing familiarity with Photoshop, you probably know what I'm referring to... but I didn't. I'm a total noob with it. I knew every picture I opened in Photoshop looked weird (a bit of a red tint) but had no idea how to fix it. This wound up throwing off the effect of the QC and filters, making it hard for me to gauge what the actual impact of everything would be. Eventually, I figured that out, too, but once I did, I had to go back and redo the filters a third time.

Alex's Eyes

Last but not least for this BtS post, let me talk a little about Alex's eyes. After 0.14a was released, I got quite the tongue lashing over in the Discord server about how dark Alex's eyes were (specifically, the skin around them, not the eyes themselves). While it was some difficult feedback to hear (read?), I think it was fair and I hugely appreciate the Patron who made me stop and look at it anew. The challenge was, I had already spent hours and hours trying to work on it. 

The updated skin for Alex comes from the HD Aran model here. Overall, the skin is a huge improvement over the original (and also for his tongue), but it did seem to make Alex's eyes very dark. Curiously, though, the issue is less pronounced in some scenes but more pronounced in others, and in my test "studio" with very neutral, all around lighting, it's barely noticeable at all. So, I thought it was a fair compromise for a significant overall improvement to Alex's skin for a tradeoff where his eyes were sometimes a little dark in some images.

Well... no. So, after thinking about it, I decided to try again. Over the course of a week, I probably spent about 15 hours working in Photoshop to try to lighten up the skin, but that resulted in a sickly looking Alex. I then went back to the filters (again) and tweaked those, to try to minimize how they would further darken the eyes. So, I asked other VN developers. In the end, we think it's a combination of the skin texture files and the shape of Alex's head that creates some "dark pockets" where most scene lighting doesn't get to as much. I think there was a substantive improvement in the eyes with build 0.14b, but it's still not quite where I'd like. In future scenes with Alex, I'll be experimenting more with the lighting on him and see if I can develop some tricks to minimize this some more. 

Well, that's it for this BtS post. In the meantime, I've been working on the script for the next update. I'm going to keep this update a bit shorter/smaller than the last one to keep it more manageable and get it into your hands a bit faster. I'll share more information on that soon. Currently, I'm having a little bit of writers block on how to navigate a couple of choices; I think the choices are important for you and development of the story, but it's hard sometimes figuring out how to include a meaningful choice without having to then spend lots of time on divergent narratives and scenes a lot of players may never see. Put another way, how do I have consequential choices while still being able to bring everything back to a core narrative?

Anyway... more soon!

Best,

BBN