Spook’s Progress Posting #0 – Practice Week

Hell-to-o, one and all out there! Time for another posting about some progress made. There’s a fair amount of stuff to touch on from the week just gone, though more so the point of this post is to start off some better habits of transparency and touching base with the fans more often. From here on, I’d like to be doing these posts, though likely shorter and sweeter as the work becomes more focused, at the end of each week or almost as often. However, they will of course be talking and teasing game content and therefor will be for beWildernaut eyes only. Got to give the wild fans something sweet, right? For the rest of the fan base, we’ll always have Discord.

Anyways. No more much a-dos. Let’s talk making sexiness!

It’s been a busy week of getting elbows deep in Daz and getting a feel for how more than just the basics work. I spread the attention around to different parts of the engine, got a feel for fabrics and how to work with the most common outfits like the Little Toscana uniform, dealt with skin-deep textures with mixed results, and even got in some rendering work for both pleasure and business. I’ll breaks some of it down into headings below for a better idea of how the bonus time’s been put to used.

Game Renders

Let’s start here, not because it was the most useful of practice topics, but because it comes with stuff I can show y’all, and that’s what you really want to hear about most, right? Well, as part of the learning this week I thought it best to learn not just skillable subjects, but about the relative strength of my set up now that the art department’s got a new leading render machine as well as an artist… But by new, I mean my own personal PC, built from entry level-ish parts from 8+ years ago. That is to say, we’re not working with the best of tech at least to begin with. That’s a bigger discussion we’ll have later, however. What matters is I spend a little time working with the game content we already have for comparison…

… And at the same time, there are a few NTR gameplays that I’ve felt needed some minor changing ups, and so I redid them! 2 thus far, in fact, though 1 of which I can’t show you on account of boobs. We can look at this 1 however.

The Original

The Redo

The reason I felt it worth giving this a try, beyond just testing a simple game scene’s prospective rendering time (sadly a lot), was because the guy in the original wasn’t the best choice for the repeatable outcome. Mostly that’s on me, actually. Back when we made it, the art cue I gave Unshi was “A pervy customer”, meaning to pull 1 from the pool, and he fits that bill. However, since then, that same pervy guy has be elevated to a named character with more content in the future (I’m sure some fans can already tell where), and so the interaction of this gameplay doesn’t really hit right when you get past that point in the game. My fault for not planning things as far as I should in the early days, but it’s fixed now!

The other redo gameplay was a more recent image. I can’t show y’all on a public post, but I can tell you, it was Kriem’s drumming. That 1 was because of an art whoopsie. Her fanboys will know from her OS that she left home in a huff, forced to abandon her few precious belongings such as her custom drum kit and a stack of letters. That might just come back around later, so it doesn’t make sense for her drums to show up earlier, huh?

In any case, it was a good use of some of the last week to find out how much time is going to be going into the render side of CGs, not just the posing and pre-productions. That’s going to be the biggest hill to climb in the near future, I’ve learned that for sure. To give you some context, the Kelsey render in the last post took 4 hours, 5 minutes, while the Noe shot above was 5-6 before it timed out rather than finish naturally, hence the noise still in it. On the plus side, you can tell from the comparison that while there is a difference in my quality vs Unshi’s, the difference is small enough we’re not looking at kid’s crayon drawings next to Picassos on the same wall, right? The game can go on, hooray!

Concepts

We’ll talk some more on in-game CGs and comparisons in the next post as that’ll be more of my focus for the week ahead, but there was more I did in Daz than just the above. Perhaps the biggest use of my time was in practicing fresh for fun concepts. 1 in particular I had on the wish list for a while now and it being summer themed it seemed perfect to start with. Even more so because it involved specially texturing clothing, another lesson learned!

Where game CGs are a quantity style of storytelling, each a stone in an archway of a story so to speak, concepts are singular, high-quality shots showing off a scene and a tale all at once. I think we can all agree Unshi has mastered that art of arts, so much so he’s made it look easy over the years. It’s not. Between learning composition, posing and camera work, making concepts are a great way to up-skill fast while having fun. It takes more than the time I had for it to get good, but it was all worthwhile I’m sure you’ll agree when you see them…

… Which will be in a few weeks, as I’m sitting on them for now. Muahaha! They feel like a good 4th of July kind of celebration posts to me after all. You only get a teaser for now!

On a more serious note, given how much NTR work there is to do, and how much rendering is going to eat into the remaining hours, I suspect there’ll only be time for making concepts for the specialist of occasions and the major holidays. We can all agree keeping the game rolling steady is the top priority

Tattooing

One of my better successes of the week, if admittedly more of a personal pleasure than a wider fandom craving. 1 of the aspects of NTR I was more anxious about taking over than some others was the recently added Tattooing part of the gameplay. It’s a lot of texture work, which is further out of my college 3D modelling days and subsequent decade of writing experiences than I like to admit, but I had some fun putting “ink” on Noemi this week. It turned out well, in fact. Well enough I’m not so worried about that part of the game anymore.

A little uncharacteristic for Noemi I know, but before y’all say anything about it I have a reason for using this design, other than it looks like something Kriem would ink on her in-game. I used that design because it’s my tattoo. It was very instructive practice too. That design spreads over 2 textures and 3 seams, so it took some work to place it in was because 3 jigsaw parts. Learning was done, I’ll tell you.

Now, I know tattooing the girls like we do in NTR isn’t to everyone’s tastes. It’s not a big part of the game for that reason, and we’ve taken some creative licence with making them temporary canonically too so as not to put off peopel. It’s in the game mostly because it’s something I personally like, plus it’s something different you don’t see in many games out there. As it stands right now, we’re actually about 40% through the content we’re going to take on involving it in NTR, so it’s not even that big of a thing to need to accomplish. Still, I’m glad I did it and it turned out well. After all, the same general techniques are what got us Noe’s permanent wrist tattoo as well as Kriem’s dragon (original art pieces, not Daz asset paint ons, like Clair’s body), plus Noe’s natural tan comes from similar texturing techniques. It’s good to have been able to learn more about all that myself for once. It could be useful for making unique future girls too.

“Water” Effects

You might be thinking what those quotation marks around water are meant to mean. You might even think you know. I’m not talking about male essence, although there was some testing with that too. Rather, what I was focusing more on was something else. Suffice it to say there will be a couple of times in the future where our ladies will want to… lubricate… certain non-procreative locations, and that’s what I wanted to get a jump on problem solving. This was my least successful experiment, at least thus far.

Unshi’s pulled off some fine effects over the versions, even some fine wine effects at that. I appreciated them then but even more do I appreciate them now. There are some especially delightful CGs of Asana giving an oily chest massage to Noe that I was hoping to be able to recreate between a different set of fleshy parts for the girls. It may be I’m just not understanding how to apply the methods, or lack the computing power for such gooey, glossy effects, or it being a mix of both, but I couldn’t get it working just yet. On the bright side, it’s not a critical part of the game that will hold us back from preforming amateur proc.tology when it comes to it in the sexy moments, but rather a level of quality I was hoping to be able to keep up. Also on the positive side of things, it’s not something that needs to be working be tomorrow either, so there’s time yet to keep learning on this from.

Misc Fun

Aside from all of the above, I still had some time for fun and frivolity, much of which I spent time on cleaning up the files and making copies of popular assets. There was time enough to play with some outfits on the girls (1 in particular owned by another girl that I wanted Noe to squeeze into, wait until you see that scene!), learn some limitations that come with the older assets (specifically the AoH ones), do some shaping testing and messed around with character anatomy.

All in all, it was a busy week of putting fingers in a lot of pies (wink-wink!) and trying to get as broad a range of practice in just a short time, all of which was lead by things I suspect the game will want and need ahead. It’s been fun, but it’s time start getting some focus back into the process next.

So that’s the week that was, #0. To start of next week we’ll have a beWildernaut post discussion as to how we pivot from here to making game content, getting on a path back to a release plan. The next public post I suspect we’ll see is our Public Teaser, though that’ll be at least a couple of weeks away as we build towards some completed game content. Until then, I hope feel informed by this post, and moreover, I hope you’ll…

Be warmed up and ready to go, and beWilder!