Law School Episode 2 - Progress update #6 (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

This past week has been quite eventful with many things happening. We have a big progress update, so buckle up!

First of all, my 3D work output was rather slow. There are two reasons for that. The first one is that I focused more on script and story writing than usual. I found myself getting a little bored with 3D work, so instead of pushing through, I focused on writing, which turned out well since I managed to write some good scenes.

Secondly, I decided to add a money management system to the game. It was an idea I had for episode 1 that I dropped, but I thought it could be great to put players in situations where they could use money for rewards or for buying items and unlocking scenes. I then had to code it, find a way to make it work, display it on the phone, and plan for episodes 1 and 2, which took some work in Photoshop and additional planning. So, these two aspects slowed down my 3D scene creation.

But that's alright since my rendering queue is full of animations and statics. This brings me to a serious concern I've had multiple times before, but this time there's no way around it.

My setup includes two computers: one for creating scenes (Workstation) and the other for rendering scenes (Renderstation), be it animations or static images.

I first started with these two computers over three years ago, and it worked fine until now. Previously, I could place the Renderstation in the living room as I was living alone, and it wasn't an issue to have it run 24/7. However, I’ve since moved and now live with two people, meaning I can't place my Renderstation in the living room anymore, so it's in my bedroom. This means it doesn't run when I sleep. On good days, I get 16 hours of work out of it, which is only 66% of what I used to get. That's the first issue.

Another issue is that I increased the quality of my scenes to achieve better lighting, clarity, less noise, and fewer issues with darker colors.

This is an image from the first episode. You can see weird lines in the darker parts of the image, even on the MC's skin. Getting rid of these in post-work is hard and difficult, and it's much easier to do directly in the scene. However, this comes at a cost: the rendering time has nearly doubled, close to 2.4 times per image.

Now for some math to explain the issue I'm facing. Where I could create around 55 images a day before, I'm now around 23-24, which means about 700 images a month. The first episode had 2995 images, more like 3150 created since many didn't make the cut. So, let's say 4.5 months of rendering to create images. On paper, that's alright. But then we have animations.

Animations are made with images: a 1-second animation is 30 frames, so 30 images. Creating a 5-second animation is 150 images, almost a week's worth of work for the Renderstation for just one animation of 5 seconds.

The first episode has 117 animations. The longest is 450 frames, and the shortest are eyes blinking at 7 frames. If I keep things this way, the second episode won't be out for another 2 years, which is not an option.

With me constantly adding more animations for both lewd and non-lewd scenes, I'm in a big bottleneck situation. My Renderstation already has an RTX 4090, top tier for rendering 3D images. It's a little bottlenecked by my CPU, but I'll upgrade this station soon.

Right now, this isn't the main goal. I looked into rendering farms, but they're not an option. I tried rendering the environment and characters separately and then mixing them in Adobe Premiere, which I think NLT does, but I couldn't get good results due to camera movement and lighting. So, I'm left with one solution: assembling another Renderstation.

I always thought a third computer would come in handy one day, but I didn't expect it before having my own place. Like everything in the past three and a half years, plans never worked out as intended but ended up working anyway. There's always an unforeseen thing happening, but it's part of the process, I guess.

At the end of the month, I'll be ordering new components—CPU, RAM, GPU, motherboard, storage, etc.—and assembling another Renderstation. Next month, I'll upgrade my first Renderstation, and the month after, I'll upgrade my current Workstation to become a hybrid station. I sometimes work in coffee shops on the script, so I could use that computer as another rendering station, albeit much slower, because, pardon my French, I don't shit gold.

So, that's the big challenge I'm trying to overcome. The next two and a half months won't be very pleasant, but it is what it is.

I currently have over 300 images queued and a bunch of animations on the way, so it's not viable.

Anyway, let's talk about numbers!

• 487 story statics

• 13 animations

• 17 scenes fully written

As you can see, progress is good. This week was slow with 3D images, but it's not a big deal given everything I've said.

For now, I'm taking "advantage" of this situation to work on other things.

Thanks for reading. I vented a little because this is a huge investment, and I had to cancel many plans because of it. Also, if you haven't voted yet, I'd love for you to help name the new teacher joining Stocklinburg staff in episode 2, so get to it right here.

That's it! I'm going to work for a couple more hours and then relax tonight. I've been up since 5, and my sleep hasn't been great lately. I'll come back stronger tomorrow.

Thanks for reading, and I wish you all a great week.

MisterMaya