Time Sinks (BTS #1) (Patreon)

Includes NSFW image.

Once again, I am making a post visible to all tiers. These BTS posts are supposed to be delayed by 2 weeks, but I want everyone to see exactly what they would be waiting for with this inaugural entry. Subsequent entries will follow the tier reward wait times.

This format will be roughly the same as my former Dev Blog thread over at F95 (not sure about direct links, add "/threads/fantasy-dating-development-thread.59190/" without quotes to the end of the F95 front page).

Like always, I welcome any comments and suggestions about this first BTS entry.

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What eats up so much of my time that 20 hours nets me about 25 images? Random errors and experimentation make up the bulk of my time sinks. I've learned from past mishaps that, every time I try something new, I need to do a test render. It really is impossible to know what you are going to get once the rendering engine creates an image. Since I render in batches, a mistake made early on can carry forward through each scene file I saved.

Let's start with the first pic, which is grainy because I halted the render shortly after it started. This was the original angle for MC holding Zimmy and bringing him to Ehrlynn, but there were some glaring issues. Strike one, there are unnatural round reflections (spotlights) in the glass. Strike two, the pose and expression look worse from this angle then the final ingame one. Strike three, all those background mirrors increased render times to an insane degree. For an image that had 4 lines of dialogue, I needed to rework it. Fairly simple, changed the camera angle, deleted all that stuff behind Ehrlynn, moved the spotlights a little bit. Boom, fixed.

Second pic. Random mesh explosion. Wasn't there in the preview nor the test render. Sometimes Daz just says "You know what... fuck you." Not a huge deal, but I do have to spend time loading another model and copying the pose over to it. Then do another test, save it, add to the render queue and hope it doesn't happen again.

This is when I noticed that I still made a mistake I didn't catch earlier. For someone who is detail oriented, I hate how I missed loading Ehrlynn's pants with the custom color. This is one of the errors you don't initially see, but if you launch FD now and look, it can't be unseen. In the apartment bedroom her pants changed color from the elevator lobby and shower stall scenes. I copied the surfaces of her crop top but not the pants. 100% on me and perfect example of carrying mistakes forward after already rendering a bunch of images.

Ah the last pic... The absolute madness behind creating the washing scene would make this long ass post even longer. The main problem with this image is the rainbow water drops. I thought it was more Iray preview shenanigans, but it wasn't. At a lost as to what to do, I deleted them and rendered again. An easy win because the ingame version of this image looks great without the drops anyway.

And hopefully you all have a better understanding of why this process can be a slow one.