Update 29 (Patreon)

tl;dr - Lots of Iray rendering and computer troubles.

Today's image

You've seen a version of this image before, but this one has been redone in Iray - doing that has composed a significant portion of my work this week, but I'll talk about that below. Anyway, I can't say much about the context of the image, but I think it tells a lot of the story for itself. I actually had some other pics I would also like to show you, but I can't for fear of spoilers. It's particularly hard to avoid showing spoilers with a number of the sex scenes' images, and I don't want to ruin the story for you!

Iray, Iray, Iray

Though I had planned to do more programming work this week the potential of the new Iray engine (along with the computer troubles, discussed below) has largely distracted me in recent days. Because of that mostly what I've been doing is re-rendering a bunch of stuff I had already designed, and redeveloping some test shots into real illustrations.

This means that in terms of moving toward the next alpha version... uh... well, there's not been a heap of progress this week. Instead I've been improving the work I've already done and fixing up a lot of pictures I wasn't all that happy with before. I had a bunch of pics, you see, that were just characters in interesting poses without proper backgrounds. I've gone back to a number of those and added props/sets to make them more well fleshed out, then rendered them in Iray to good effect. The biggest progress has been in Fumi's sex scene and Iku's sex scene, but I've made a few other pictures here and there as well. I think you'll be pleased with the results.

Also I've solved (wholly, or at least partially) a couple of problems I've had with rendering Kimiko lately, which means I'll be able to make more Kim pics again soon. The character giving me the most trouble in Iray now is Rio, whose design really doesn't suit Iray very well at all. Her hair and skin texture both look kind of weird in Iray, and I think she's just kind of perfectly designed for 3Delight. That's okay, I can keep rendering her in 3Delight and still produce good results, but in future you can bet I'll be designing all characters to look good in Iray, rather than in 3Delight.

I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of working with Iray, too, although there will be a lot more learning to do in the future, as I'm still a novice.

*SIGH* Computer troubles

So the other thing that has been distracting me this week is persistent BSOD crashes with my new PC. On the one hand this PC brings me Iray, and on the other it's been crashing during intense work loads, and I still don't know why. Sometimes these crashes happen during games (which I barely find time for anyway, but I'm not just going to accept that problem) and other times it's during 3D image rendering, which is obviously not acceptable. In fact, the computer crashed while I was writing up this update so I had to rewrite the whole damn thing from scratch. (I was rendering an image of Fumi in the background at the time.)

I took the computer back to the vendor to get them to fix it, and they said it was a faulty HDD, which they replaced. All well and good, but as soon as I got it home it started crashing again. The way they operate they just get some vague idea what might be the problem, try a fix and if they don't get a crash fairly quickly they tell you it's fixed so you can come pick it up. Therefore I'm trying to diagnose the problem myself right now with the help of online computer communities. I've eliminated a few things, and I've rolled it back from Windows 10 to 8.1 because of apparent driver issues.

We'll see how it goes. At time of writing I don't know whether this change will have any effect. If I can't find the problem myself I'll take it back to the vendor again and try to get them to take it more seriously this time.

UPDATE (added before posting): After the roll back to Windows 8.1 I haven't had any more crashes, and I have been testing it. It's not definite, but it's starting to look like Windows 10 is the problem. I'll be doing some more testing of this today, and hopefully I've found the issue.