Update - Inside Emi's dressing room (Patreon)

tl;dr - Well, I've been sick but I've been working on that Emi sex scene coming for PAT; I've been looking into what it would take to add animations to PAT; and I've just been straight-up recovering, which has slowed me down a lot.

This week's image

This is an image that I wanted to look like a backstage dressing room - I think it came out pretty convincing. My favourite thing about the shot, though, is that it only took 25 minutes to render! That's because I used an HDRI for the background and lighting, which basically means that the characters can move around in the scene, but there's not actually many 3D props in here to create the environment, so they don't take much time to render. The background and floor is effectively a photograph that's just carefully laid out to look like it fits where it should go. I love HDRIs when they actually give good results (which is only occasionally).

Emi/Kumi/Shuji scene

What I've been doing this week is working on a major interactive sex scene for PAT, which will be in the next patrons-only release of the game. Unfortunately, I still don't have the basic dating gameplay locked down that would allow you to find and explore the scene, so instead I'm going to put in an option at the menu screen for now so that patrons can access it. It's the scene by the pool, if you're wondering, and I hope you're going to like it!

Animations

So I've been looking into how to potentially make animations viable again. I'm not a great animator but I can do a few small loops here and there to liven things up and Visual Novel Maker should be able to support them at a much lower file size cost than they inflicted on PAL, since I won't have to use gif files.

The real problem is the huge, huge rendering time that it takes to make them (I mean, posing them is an issue too, but even if I put that work in the damn things won't render). I really need a much better PC, but I've been thinking I'll need a ridiculously powerful one to actually make much in the way of functional animations. I think, however, that I might be able to render them at a smaller resolution and then use AI upscaling software to upscale them at slightly lower quality, which might not matter that much anyway, since converting the images into a video degrades some of the quality anyway.

I'm still going to need that hardware upgrade, though. I'm really just waiting for Iray (the rendering software) to be updated to take advantage of the new nVidia RTX range of graphics cards, at which point I should be able to get much better rendering speed. I'm not yet sure whether I'm going to go for a gaming card or one of those crazy high power ones, though.

Recovering from my illness = delays

I returned from my holiday a week ago still sick after I caught something in Europe, so honestly a major thing that I've been doing this week is just trying to recover. I was hoping that I would be feeling a lot fresher this week, so I'd planned to have more energy and get more done. I've been pretty rough, so I haven't got as much work done as I'd hoped, but at least I've got started on it.

I'm through my antibiotics now and mostly better, but this has been pretty nasty and I don't expect to be able to get the release done before the end of the month, so it'll be coming early next month. Sorry about that.

Do you mind about the delay? And do you care about whether the game has any short animations like sometimes cropped up in PAL, PAF and PAC? What about the image - can you tell the background isn't real 3D props? Let me know in the comments!