DOAHDM Devblog 4/26/23 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! I hope you're enjoying the Gravure Studio update. There's quite a bit to discuss about what I did, what I'm doing, and what I plan to do. I hope to clear up some confusion and perhaps give you a greater understanding of how much work went into this update. 

Bodies

                                   Pictured: Remastered Beloise swimsuit

When I started working on this, I knew that the next update was going to be time consuming. Essentially, I was inspired to draw a compromise between the classic Itagaki era DOA and the DOA5 onward DOA. I've talked about this in a previous post, but I would like to briefly summarize the key points behind the logic behind my choices. Although you can read what I said at the time here.

Essentially, the Itagaki era DOA girls, culminating with DOA4 and DOAX2, were slimmer and less stout in the waist/ribs/hips. This style has a lot of fans and at the same time, I was seeking a method to diversify the body types of DOA5 which are largely outright copy pasted with only a handful of meaningfully different proportioned characters. 

                                 Pictured: Ayane from DOAX2

The idea was for me to use this style in greater or lesser amounts depending on the girl in order to diversify the body types and appeal to a greater amount of tastes. Ultimately, what point is there in having so many girls if not for that? 

Obviously, as usual, my own judgement has to be used to determine how aggressively this style is applied to each girl, but I think I took somewhat of a common sense approach. For girls like Tina, Lisa, Rachel, I felt that the stout figure of DOA5 suited them, whereas with Ayane, Kasumi, Hitomi, I felt that the slimmer Itagaki era body style was more suitable for them, and in varying degrees I applied those changes using that nebulous barometer that I can't really explain in greater detail than saying it's their "vibe" or the "energy" they give off. 

There's almost 20 girls currently supported in Gravure Studio, making them all have meaningfully different bodies, capturing the energy/vibe they give off while still looking good is an incredibly hard task to undertake, and slowly over time I've put more work into doing that.

                                Pictured: Nyotengu and Rachel

Lighting, Shaders, Post Processing, and compatibility

The graphics in general have been overhauled greatly. A new version of RTGI has been deployed and used more aggressively than before, object materials were completely remade, and scene lighting was changed to reflect that. The changes were so aggressive that they broke compatibility with vanilla and third party mod models in PP. The reasoning for this is fairly hard to explain, specifically why it only affects PP, but I'll try my best.

Essentially, there's a lighting parameter that has a much higher exponent in PP than anywhere else. In the material shaders, it's labeled as Diffuse2 (I'm not sure if this is just what Doutoko, the mod tool editor called it or if it's actually called that in the game files). Diffuse 2 should be used in great moderation because it's effectively a static lighting/fullbright parameter which drowns out shadows and contours when used excessively. In PP, for whatever reason, the multiplier for this is cranked to 11 in a way that I can't seem to directly control. I prioritized the models in GS looking good in and out of PP, and making them look as good as possible, but the cost was compatibility with non GS models in PP. 

Before GS (In BP), I compensated for this by lowering the ambient lighting and HDR bleed dramatically, but the result was a bit too contrasty, in my view, like they're under a spotlight in a dark room. Better looking than the insanely dull and gray vanilla, but far from perfect. 

                             Pictured: Vanilla graphics. Yikes!

After all, you guys voted on it! I think it looks better, and so did you. Quality is what I want to focus on, so sorry for the compatibility issues!

                                 Pictured: Democracy in action

As I've already mentioned, the result is that non GS models look vastly overexposed in PP, which I wrote an article about already that you can read here. 

I quickly put out a LITE version of the mod which excises all GS models and makes the lighting look proper for non GS models.  

I also put out an article for Reshade troubleshooting. Again, if your game doesn't look like the media I put out, something is wrong. Read this article if you're having such a problem. 

I know it's far from the perfect solution, but it's a temporary holdover until I can figure out how to get them both looking right without sacrificing quality. 

Costumes

One of the most time consuming parts of the Gravure Studio update was remastering every costume for the new bodies, for new skindentation, for the new material shaders, and doing passes on low quality costumes like Beloise pictured at the top of this article. 

              Pictured: What I consider to be the flagship for skindentation

Lots of costumes got a skindentation pass for Gravure Studio, albeit not all of them (I'd like to keep some costumes loose). This is a really popular change of late and in general I plan to make it the standard. 

                      Pictured: Remastered swimsuit for Nyotengu

Generally speaking, most of the costumes have better specular materials and should look like bland and dull, and should look like the materials they're supposed to represent. 

Bottoms Off!

Pictured: A woman with a remarkably large buttocks. She's a guest character so I can mess around with her!

Bottomless was an option that people were requesting for a very long time, and trust me: it's actually not as easy to implement as you might think! However, since I was already remastering all the costumes, it was the perfect time to add this functionality and reorganize all the mesh groups to make this possible. 

Pubic Region

                                     Pictured: Nyotengu with pubic hair

What's to say that isn't self-explanatory? This has been an oft requested feature, but I had stalled on it because I know there's a real divide between shaved fans and pubic hair fans. I decided that the one I ended up going with (credit to Osiri) was a good compromise. A nice trimmed little tuft, rather than a completely bald pubic region or a jungle. 

Remaking EVERY Scene

                                           Pictured: Remastered F9 scene

While remastering all the bodies and swimsuits was a huge undertaking for me, this one was by far the most time consuming. Adding proper lighting, camerawork, and manually timing each frame for sound effects to almost all the old scenes took such an incredible amount of time. I crunched on this hard. I feel this is probably the most underappreciated aspect, because most people don't recognize how important this stuff is and the work that goes into it, but thankfully I do it because I love doing it. 

Most DOAHDM fans are pretty obsessed with the F11 row of animations, but I encourage you to go back and revisit all those scenes that've been in there for years. 

The Photo Studio

                                        Pictured: Sayuri being a tease

The photo studio (credit to Repinscourge and Shuubaru for the original import), was my solution to what I felt was the "pose reel" problem. I simply felt like it was too contrived and unnatural looking, like you were flipping through a debug menu playing animations. My solution to this was to make it seem like a photoshoot, and to add camerawork, more expressive facial animations and hard cuts to make it look like posing for a camera. I also made the scenes linger a bit longer so people have more time to enjoy them. 

My original plan for these scenes was to figure out how to toggle meshes dynamically uses addresses in the scene files to make the girls take off their clothes in the middle of the scene, and you may have noticed that I've structured each of these scenes so that they're covering themselves midway, but unfortunately I never cracked that code. I hope to in the future as it will make for exciting and cute scenes.

                                       Pictured: An unusually lusty pose

Obviously I don't plan on making every pose set in the Photo Studio going forward, and I have a couple here in the bedroom, which I fixed for AMD users by the way! 

New Scenes, and Scenes going forward

                                       Pictured: Owner sneaking a peak

I know, I know, aside from the pose reels there's only one new scene. It was such a herculean undertaking to remake basically everything that I felt like a waste to wait longer to release Gravure Studio.

Still, I really like this one! I think it really emphasizes how important camerawork is and why I spent so much time adding real camerawork to every scene. Notice how the handle on the shower door barely covers her nipples as the camera rounds the corner? How fun is that? 

The bathroom peaking scenes are my most popular ones. People really love the forbidden fruit psychology of seeing something you're not supposed to see. Going forward I want to add more of these scenes, teasing scenes, and pose reels. 

Patreon, and you

                            Thanks tremendously to my supporters!

It's been several months since I first launched this Patreon, and I'm satisfied with the progress it's making and what it offers me and fans. Twitter, simply put, is not a great place to post anything longform. Just take this post for example, what an essay! It's nice to have a classic article formatting I can really talk with you guys on.

When I first set out to make this Patreon, I wanted to make it clear that no content would ever be paywalled. I Just think that goes against the spirit of the modding community, no offense to people who do that. I work on this project because I like the project, I like working on it, and I like for people to enjoy it.

Still, in spite of that, I would really like to find a way to make a living doing this. A man can dream! The support you've given me so far is already above what most Patreons pull in, but I've put in a tremendous amount of work into this mod for over half a decade.

Basically, I'd like to take a moment to do some DSP style begging, and make a case for why you might consider supporting me if you haven't already. 

As I've said, this is a mod I've worked on for a long time. If I may be less than humble for a moment, I believe it's an essential mod for anyone who cares about DOA modding. I have put thousands of hours into working on this project, and my work has been used far and wide if not from directly using it in Beach Paradise/Gravure Studio, but also in SFM animations, Blender Renders, and as a popular base nude model for DOAXVV. /END BEGGING

The release of Gravure Paradise is also the mark of my first special Patron Tier. I wanted to be really careful about this, because as I've said, I don't want any content to be paywalled, which is why I've held off until now to even try doing this until now, but it's been a great success already! I've limited the amount of patrons because I don't want to be overloaded with work, but here are the requests I've fulfilled thus far. 

                                                               Darsovin

                                                               JoyToy

                                                              Synval

                                                               Guti

                                                          Redguard

I would like to add more tiers, preferably a more affordable one. If anyone has any good ideas, please let me know. Until next time, thanks for reading!