Sectioning Sets (BTS #15) (Patreon)

As I've been mulling over the living spaces for Motherhood during it's preproduction, I've also been reminded of the extensive learning process of setting up the apartment in Fantasy Dating.

Here is the layout of Ehrlynn/MC's apartment from a top down perspective without the ceiling in place. Other than the missing ceiling, this is what the apartment looks like with everything loaded in. By the way, the lights I've added are represented by the checkered squares.

An absolutely massive benefit to this apartment asset is the room layout. I can easily delete all the items in the other rooms when the doors are closed. This cuts down render times to exponentially.

Another way to speed up render times is Iray Section Plane Nodes. Basically they tell Daz not to render beyond a certain point. With the rooms laid out the way they are, this means I can cut out everything beyond a room's walls without worry.

Here is what the bedroom looks like with the doors open, the ceiling gone, and the ISPN's in place.

Another crucial step in set creation is instances. Like the curtains, or should I say "curtain" because technically there is only one. This main curtain is placed here, but the others are instances of it. I'm not exactly certain how it works, but basically an instance is a copy of a object without most of it's properties. If I change the color of the main curtain, all of them change. And if I delete it...

They all disappear. This saves a a lot of memory and allows me to make a ton of renders quickly. I honestly would not have been able to make Ehrlynn's first sex scene over 200 renders without using these techniques, it would simply take too long to render.

In other posts, I've shown off an entire house for Motherhood. I've been tinkering with where to place objects and their instances, where to place ISPN's, and what I can delete in certain hallways/rooms that won't affect shadows or reflections.

Designing sets is a time consuming, yet crucial step for future use. The render of the two girls in that same post took almost an hour, and you can't even see most of the house. I'll need to refine that set more before it's ready for a large number of renders. There's no sense in wasting render time on stuff that isn't visible to the camera.