Update - Masami in the hot springs (Patreon)

This week's image

Here's one of the re-renders I've been doing recently for the ending pictures. The original was okay, but I've learned a lot since making it and I was able to get better results with a relatively small amount of work. Here I've improved the lighting, changed the shine on her skin and improved her expression a bit. For reference, here's the original:

Hopefully you can see a noticeable improvement there. It's not as radical a change as in some other re-renders, but I think the subtle differences here are worth it. I've redone the whole set of Masami's end pictures this way. I've also done Iku's (as I've mentioned in previous updates) and I'm doing Kimiko's and probably Rio's as well.

PAT programming

I'm finally getting stuck into the programming of Day 1 of Pervert Action: Timelapse in a big way, now. It takes longer than setting things up in Adrift, although part of the reason for that is probably just that I know Adrift so well after years of making games in it. I guess VNM isn't too slow, but for every line of text I have to insert a message, specify who's saying it and paste the text in - that process is way faster for me in Adrift, so it's like there's an extra chore there that wasn't there before.

VNM is also way more visual than Adrift, so I can't get away with not having an appropriate picture quite as often as I did in PAL. As I program scenes in I often find myself thinking, "oh, this bit really needs a picture change, doesn't it? Damn." Particularly in the more linear, early parts of the story I need a lot of pictures - that's true for any really linear sequence, which is part of the reason I don't like them so much, but once the game really gets rolling I expect not to be using a million pics for everything any more. Also, there's the fact that the opening and day 1 really needs to make a good impression on new players, so I can't get away with any laziness there.

Anyway, I've made some actual progress figuring out how some elements work in the system and getting some basic features to work in the game. When you play it you might well wonder why it was any difficulty at all to learn how to make things function, I don't know, but it's taken some experimentation on my part, learning things like how to get a scene to progress to the next thing after you've talked to three different people, for example.

Megumi redesign

I've mentioned that I'm using Megumi for a small cameo early on in PAT. I decided to do a little bit of a redesign of her because I wasn't really happy with the way she was looking. You see, I designed the character model for Super Pervert Action: Crisis and the images for that were rendered in the older 3Delight engine. That does lighting differently and she looked fine in that version, but once she's rendered in the newer, more photorealistic Iray lighting engine she looks really different and not nearly as good.

This is compounded by the way the Daz Studio preview window works - it shows lighting and texture previews based on how they'd look if you were rendering in 3Delight; Iray previews would be too complex, I guess. That means Megumi often looks fine when I'm posing the scene and only when I'm rendering her do I see that she's coming out looking rather strange. 

There's a comparison of what I see before the render and what I see afterward. This actually isn't too bad, because I went to so much damn effort getting the rendered version to look okay, but I kept having problems with the rendered Megumi looking old, stiff and unnatural. It's not a huge drama because she's not going to be in much of the game, but at the same time she does appear very early, so I can't have a janky character model turning up and throwing off people's impression of the quality of the game.

This is the new Megumi design I've made. I think she looks a lot better now. I know it's pretty obvious at this point that I used the same hair style for Iku that I had used for Megumi, but I suspect that probably doesn't matter too much, right? At the time of designing Iku I worried about that a little bit, because I figured people might object that I had already used that hairstyle for Megumi, but I just thought it worked really well for Iku. Now it's probably more likely that people will see this as me reusing Iku's hairdo for the anonymous doctor. :)

My daily schedule

I mentioned last week how crappy I was feeling in general - bored, unproductive and consequently anxious. Things are a little better for me this week, but that's in part because I've decided to revise my daily work schedule a bit and go back to how I used to do things. In the past I used to make a rule that I wouldn't work past about 8pm unless I had a really good idea that I needed to get down right away. After that I'd just relax and play video games, or whatever. 

I'm not actually sure when I stopped doing this or why - I think maybe I fell out of the habit because my day job schedule has been kind of time consuming for a while and I also had some serious crunch time pressure working on these games this year, trying to keep the Patreon campaign healthy. Instead I've tended to push it back to working until about 11pm, then just kind of unwinding a little bit in a sleepy way before I go to bed. While this might sound like I'd be getting a heap of work done, I find that much of that time is actually spent quite unproductively and I never feel very good about my work load despite the extra few hours technically on the job.

Therefore I've decided to change my schedule back to the earlier version, in which I'll be stopping work around 8pm and just playing some damn video games again. Early results from doing this are making me (feel) a lot more productive in the mornings, although I haven't been doing it very long yet. I'm also more interested to get back into work each day and I'm happy to be playing some games guilt-free again. Recently whenever I've played a game I've felt restless, like I don't deserve the time off and I need to get back to work, so it's nice to set myself a rule that I'm not allowed to work at certain times.

I'm also planning, at some point, to introduce an official day off one day a week - maybe Saturdays. I think that would be a healthy thing to do in the long run, although I will probably wait a few months before starting that up.

Loooong update today! Thanks if you read it all the way through - I hope you did because I felt I had a bit to say. :) I'd love to hear any thoughts or comments on any of these topics below!