Callisto 0.40 - Week 7 Update

Been a bit of a mixed week this week. Whilst the images series for the animations are looking really nice, the render time is greater than what I expected. Unlike most of the other games out there I have a far higher frame count and more complex posing. Whilst this looks way better than a 20 frame loop animation, it takes times to pose and render. As an example the first animation I undertook was 250 frames with complex lighting.

This 250 frame animation is the most complex I intend to pose for this version and took nearly 4 days to render. Some of this comes from the complexity of the scene (refractive surfaces and emissive lights), with the remainder resulting from the Lia character. Whilst I really like the Lia character, the Zelara 8 character on which she is based is a bit of a nightmare. The combination of emissive skin and very high resolution mesh (indents for HD Zelera morph), makes her character very slow to render out. As a comparison each animation frame with her in it takes about 10 times longer than any other character.

Having said all the above though, my upgraded hardware with the RTX2060 is making this process far easier. I currently use this card for Daz only (not even hooked up to a monitor), hence I currently have it running 24/7 rendering out scenes. What this means is that I can continue to use my other card GTX1060 for posing all of the scenes and for any other purpose I desire. As such, while I will finish posing the animations next week, it may be several weeks before the animations have finished rendering.

Moving forwards I'll probably release two beta versions. The first will be the main story with all of the related periphery scenes. The reason for releasing the first beta is to get some feedback on the story line, such that I can tweak prior to the completion of version 0.40. The second beta will contain all of the ship side stories and most likely the side mission. Hence the revised plan is below.

• Week 8 - Remaining animations
• Week 9 - Main mission side stories
• Week 10 - Beta 0.40a / Ship Content
• Week 11 - Ship Content
• Week 12 - Side Mission
• Week 13 - Beta 0.40b / Character tweaks for v0.50

PS: The Beta 0.40a may be missing some of the animations, due to the time to render.

PPS: Sorry for no images, however would be too much of a spoiler. I'll start posting images again in a couple of weeks.