Progress 09.09.2022 (Patreon)

Man, progress has been slow. Well, at least to my liking. It is what it is when you have to build all but one set from scratch. And that one set I made earlier because it was the MC's office. Nevertheless, about one and a half scenes are left to render. Not that it is saying much since I suspect I need 100 renders.

Writing is in an interesting phase, and I always stress about it because I want to have a certain amount of days as a buffer. If things go wrong, I can take a step back from writing and not to worry about it too much. I still have the two update buffer, essentially three, since I ensure I have the update finished before I start rendering the next update or shortly after. But if everything goes to plan, it will be done by Monday. Yay jinxed it.

There was one image I wanted to show. While it wouldn't be a huge spoiler story-wise, I don't want to spoil your reaction to it. So you have to wait for a bit still for that. Instead, something is happening back at the station.

And then the little extra render. I'm not a massive fan of spell circles as casting effects. But at the same time, they are one of the more straightforward ways to show it. I would love tiny sparkles around the hand. Then the circle indicates at the target location that things are happening there. There are a couple of assets like that, but I don't particularly like their effects. They are not subtle enough for my taste.  

And what I don't like about this render is that it's heavy. Sure, it's done on the graphics card running the screens, so there are about 2 or 3 GB of programs using the VRAM before this, but still, it's taking 11 GB of VRAM. The increase in VRAM usage between Genesis 8 vs. 8.1 is one of the reasons I'm not fond of 8.1 that much. But being fair, I would need to test the scene on the "proper" rendering card to see what is going on with it.

It might be the other programs eating the VRAM. But as is, there couldn't be that many characters on the screen. And granted, it is an unoptimized scene as well. The Ent that is on fire doesn't need 8k textures it probably has. Hell, even 2k textures aren't required at this distance. The same goes for the trees in the background. And a few other things. Well, I'll have to save it and try it on another day. So why did I do this? Honestly, it's testing, the clothes on Tomas, the effects, the Ent or Tree Giant as it is called. I need to know what I can use beforehand to plan future scenes. If it is this heavy, I can only add one or two extra figures to this scene with my current hardware.