Rais is a nightmare... (Patreon)

...to render.

So Rais is meant to be dark-skinned. No problem, right? I have a model I like for him, found the appropriate textures and materials for the color of skin I want, smash 'em together, and bang! Sexy hetero romance time.

Except, I can't get his skin to not look like plastic. It looks noticeably, distractingly bad. And to get it looking okay, I've had to completely alter the lighting to the point where Paige's skin is very bright and almost pinkish. I've tried other skin and even other models completely, but I haven't been able to get it right. I've been struggling on and off with this for a long time now; I pushed Rais's romance back because of it. Roland is waiting for portraits because Rais needs them more as a love interest. And we can't really move on hand-drawn art until I can provide the artist with mock-ups, and I can't consider Rais finalized for that until I can render him in the same scene as Paige.

I'm going to try to get this done, but at this point it's becoming a liability. If I spend any more time messing with this, it could push the update back further into the month than I want; hell, that's already possible at my current pace.

Rais may not wind up getting portraits and rendered CGs for his romance path, which is a freaking shame, but I can't delay his romance any longer, so what I'm gonna have to do is release all his content now and add the art at a later date. I'm sorry for this, it's not really how I wanted to reveal this content to you guys, and I feel like this romance path is gonna feel like a B-side to Priscilla's until I can get the art in the game unfortunately. It is what it is, though.

I do think we need a plan though. If I can't get Rais working, I think I may need to just reach out to someone more familiar with DAZ, send them the appropriate files, and see if they can fix things for me. If you know anyone, or are yourself familiar with DAZ and competent and setting this sort of art up, particularly with lighting, let me know, I am willing to pay a reasonable price for your expertise.

As always, I appreciate your understanding. With that bad news out of the way, the good news is an update preview will be coming soon, probably sometime next week, so I hope you're looking forward to that! This update isn't massive, in spite of taking a pretty long time. I had to write six (ish) story paths and I spent the first two to three weeks of January working on mod tools and documentation. Still, I think it's shaping up to be pretty good, and it's nice to get the story moving again after spinning the wheels a bit in the last two updates.