Dev Update #17 (Patreon)

So, some good news. Render marks are all in the story, which I should have anticipated wouldn't be something that took only a couple of hours. It was an estimated 3535 renders for Chapter 6. Yeah…Massive. Then I looked at splitting it into 3 parts. Long story short, I better filled out a first half of Chapter 6 with some additional scenes, and that got us up to over 4400 renders total (I don't even want to look at what this took the word count up to).

Unless progress is very rapid, my plan now is to split Chapter 6 into three separate releases, as it would have no impact on overall development time. I anticipate my beta team will also rejoice at this news. Even in 3 parts, this thing has 3 releases the size of Chapter 5, which everyone seems very pleased was plenty of content for a release. So, good news is that most everything is ready for rendering for what will now be Chapters 6, 7, & 8. I am sure I will find a few tweaks here and there once I begin chapters 7 & 8, but I have plenty of content already written for those.

I needed a few additional models for Chapter 6 (thought I was done, but must have forgotten to note a couple of new characters in my to do list). Those are done, and we have started on game renders! Nothing fun to show yet but soon. Also, make sure you vote in the patron-only poll for new characters (poll 1 here and poll 2 here) that will be introduced in Chapter 6. I don't want to say too much about either character's role just yet, but you will want to place your votes. I ended up with several extra models, and I have no preference or specific look I'm trying to achieve for these new characters. So you, if you're a patron, go and vote. I plan to try to get a few more polls in for future chapters too.

I am still blown away but the quality improvement with these new Genesis 8.1 models from Daz. The base changes aren't anything to write home about, but the new textures for their latest character releases are phenomenal. Still not Blender quality, but damn impressive from where they were a few months ago. For new characters the last few weeks, I've been going with those figures instead of my typical Genesis 8. I'm not switching over existing characters yet, but may invest the time after this mega release is behind me to convert my existing Genesis 8 models. The big improvement has been in the new skin textures, and, since I am done with existing characters getting skin transplants, I may not see as big of an improvement with existing characters.

Other than that, it's been doing more videos for the YouTube channel, with that list growing by the day. Always a good thing to have plenty of options there. The computer has been stable, as has the NAS, so hopefully those problems are behind me for a bit. That's it from me this week. Things are moving along nicely.