Dev Diary, 21th of July, 2023 (Patreon)

Quite an uneventful week, which is always good. Knocked out more than 220 renders and some animations, giving a total of 997 story renders and 3,398 animated frames rendered and post-edited, in addition to doing this month's custom renders for the top Patreon tier.

One of the reasons I'm very satisfied with this week's work is that I'm not pumping the render number by doing a whole lot of conversation renders, but it's five completely separate scenes with a lot going on in them.

Whenever there's a huge weekly batch like this one, there are always some surprises when I look at the result. Here are a few examples:

As you can see below, "1" is what I see when posing it. Looks normal and nothing wrong. "2" is the rendered result, and obviously the phone is upside down. So instead of enduring the "proof that Drifty has never used a phone before" comments on pirate sites, it's back to re-posing and re-rendering, and also fixing the finger clipping into the phone. Then post-editing for the "3" final result.

Another example is the lovely lady below. I wanted her glasses to be very reflective, as there's almost no dark in them, so I tinkered around a bit with the shader of the glasses to give both them and her eyes a bit more of a sparkle. Then I did the test render (1), and everything looked good. Of course, figures tend to move around a bit, which resulted in an angle where she reflected a hidden light source (2). Another one for the rework.

I've also got another character for the cameos this week. I think you're going to love that one, as I don't think the dev usually does these.

For the preview, it definitely looks like these cuties are up to some mischief. Wonder what it is.

Okay, better get back to work as I have a date with the lovely Teagan and Roxanne this weekend. Should be a good one. :) Stay safe out there, and enjoy the weekend.

// Drifty