Dev Diary, August 25th, 2023 (Patreon)

I mentioned last week that I had some problems with an asset and was running out of VRAM when rendering.

Turns out it was a much bigger problem than I anticipated initially, as I couldn't even render a scene with three people in it without the GPU refusing to work with me. That would have been a huge problem when I wanted to use this scene for the ending of the episode with 16 people in there.

So here is a short rundown of how I had to fix that problem.

I needed a beach asset for that last scene, and I also needed a full 360-degree scene so I wouldn't be hindered by not being able to use certain camera angles. First I looked at several beach assets and adjusted them slightly so they wouldn't demand a lot of resources. This meant looking in depth for things like surfaces, trees, rocks, the water shader, and backgrounds. Finally, I added more things that will be used in the scene, and this is the end result.

Did some test renders with four g8.1 figures and a g9 figure in the scene, and it rendered beautifully. One problem solved, but then I got another one.

None of the pool assets that are available in the Daz store has a diving board, which I needed for a specific segment. So I thought that would be a nice thing to learn Blender modeling on, as it doesn't have to be all that advanced.

So I spent three hours watching a tutorial. Turns out that after having seen that and jumping into Blender, it took me around 8 minutes to make this.

I'm sure it's not the best diving board asset ever made, lol, but it's more than enough for my needs. The Blender modeling tools are ridiculously powerful and easy to use, but I don't need all the small details like brackets and stuff like that, as it's not meant for closeups.

Finally, I UV-mapped it and gave it some morphs so people can jump off it with the proper diving board motion.

And here's the end result, put into the scene.

In the end, I fitted all the girls with brand-new bikinis, and gave their skin a slightly different glow due to it being hot, so that's done as well.

Finally, did an animation to test everything, which you can see here. Notice the new physics working splendidly with both her head and... other things reacting to the motion. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf3ckOZjyEE

And that's mostly what I've been doing this week. Sometimes you do things that don't amount to actual render numbers, but it's still a heck of a lot of work done. And I got to learn a whole lot of new stuff this week, so that's always a plus.

Topped it off with about 90 renders and 400 frames of animation, which you can see most of in the video above.

Anyway, now I have the location ready, and I'm looking forward to a nice day on the beach with all these characters. About 1000 renders of a nice day on the beach, that is. After that, it should be time to start plotting out a release date.

Have a nice weekend, and stay hydrated out there.

// Drifty