Render ups and downs (March Progress Update) (Patreon)

Yes, those are actual renders for Ménage à Moi, and yes more renders are rolling off the production line. The amount of time spent on setup for this visual novel is finally paying dividends. I'm extremely happy with how these renders turned out. Compared to the first renders I displayed for Ménage à Moi, the overall quality has been massively improved. Since then, I've figured out enough tricks in Daz to eke out higher quality within the limits of my RTX 2070.

While I'm not at the 100 render mark yet, I still want to release a test version of Ménage à Moi in April to at least allow supporters to play the opening scene. There should be enough drama and eroticism in it to whet your appetite for the full release of chapter 1. 

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I, unfortunately, have some bad news to go with the great news above. Some of you may have noticed that a lot of renders for Fantasy Dating don't look right in contrast to the promotional images. Your eyes don't deceive you, some programs (including Ren'Py) are unable to display the images correctly due to an improper color space being used when saving them.

Basically, I didn't know that certain functions in Adobe Bridge allow it to override the default color space settings (aka what is generally more compatible). So you can take the same images that are in the Fantasy Dating download and get better colors opening them in most browsers than in the Ren'Py engine itself.

I'm very disheartened when I figured out what was happening. And I'm upset at myself for thinking the color difference was a minor discrepancy for the longest time. Here is the difference, below is a screenshot of how Ren'Py handles incorrect color space using one of the images in this post as an example.

As you can see, the de-saturation effect is prominent and I'm relieved I discovered what was happening before making the same mistake with Ménage à Moi's renders.

The only solution to this issue that I can think of would be to open my original unaffected Daz renders and convert them with the correct color space. Thankfully, all the adjustment settings are saved, however, I would have to redo the edits that fixed errors like skin clipping through clothes. Remember, currently, Fantasy Dating is over 600 renders, and most, if not all, need to be reconverted. Whenever I return to working on Fantasy Dating, I'll have a huge undertaking restoring its visuals.

While this situation sucks, I'm not going to let it bog me down. I'm still moving forward with Ménage à Moi and will have to chalk this up as a lesson learned.