Blender Experiments (Patreon)

Greetings! I apologize for the delay in posting. I kept saying "I'll make a post as soon as this is done," but I kept running into problems and delays. But now it's done (mostly) so I can talk about it! This post is a little long; I apologize in advance! I tried to edit it down, but it's still a little tl;dr. Still, it has pictures, so hopefully that helps keep it interesting!

Blender

I've been continuing my experiments with Blender. That's not all I've been working on, but it has produced the most delays. Why I'm spending time on this may not be obvious, so I want to do a quick rundown on why this is helpful for the project.

Why Blender

Up to this point, all the game's art was made in Daz Studio. Though it's quite powerful at a few specific things, it's really intended as a tool for hobbyists, or maybe as a quick visualization tool for professional productions. Pretty much anything worth seeing in Daz was first created in another, more powerful program, such as Maya, Blender, or 3DSMax. These items are then sold in the Daz store, which is the real purpose of Daz.

Though you can, with some creativity, make interesting changes to models in Daz, your ability to change characters and other things is actually quite limited. Even many fairly simple changes are hard - I've spent more time than you would believe trying to deform couches and beds so it'll look like someone's actually sitting on them (and it still usually looks bad.) Is your character's hair poking through their body/clothes/the couch? Unless you get lucky and whoever made it gave you some knobs to turn, you're just going to have to figure out a way to hide it. Speaking of hair, that's one of the things Daz really sucks at. It's usually not hard to tell if an image was made with Daz Studio, and crappy hair is the biggest giveaway. And you can forget about having it move like real hair, rather than just floating awkwardly in the air like you're doing a photo shoot in the International Space Station.

That covers some of the ways in which Daz is bad. Why Blender, then? The answer, hopefully, is better art. I want to improve the project's art, and Daz's limitations have really started to impede that. Blender is a full-fledged 3D package, giving you control over just about everything you could imagine in your scene. It also gives you particle systems (smoke, hair, even forests!) fluids and fluid simulations (which is *ahem* relevant to this project) physics (deform bodies/hair/etc as they collide with other objects) cloth simulations, advanced shader editors, sculpting, and interesting compositing tools. Oh, and it lets you do animation! (I may do a little of that in the future, but animation is a whole 'nother can of worms.)

In short, with a package like Blender, the only limit on the art will be my skill, not the software. I've felt like I've outgrown Daz for a while now; I've finally decided to start doing something about it.

Emily

In a previous post, I shared some early work I did on Emily's hair in Blender. I felt pretty good about that initial stab at the problem, but the devil's in the details. A supporter (thankfully) pointed out that Emi's hairline was far too high, and fixing that ended up being a lot of work. Then I realized I didn't like the changes I made to her face, and changing her model so that it looked more like her old one was also a lot of work. Then there was all the detail work - the pic I shared earlier only showed her good side - there was a lot of work yet to do on the parts you couldn't see! And then there were all the problems I ran into parenting her hair to her so that it moved correctly when she did, making sure she had all the right morphs for posing, and...

Anyway, I'm now done, and I've learned a lot. In addition to giving Emi a good model, the other goal of this little project was to learn so that other characters would be easier, and in that I'd judge it a success. I'm feeling much more comfortable in Blender, and I think I really will be able to switch to it entirely in 0.11. The scene for 0.10 will still be in Daz - there's still a few challenges to overcome before I'm ready to move over.

Anyway, let's have a look at Emi's hair!

I think it looks pretty good, certainly much better than it did before. Here's a pic of the old hair for reference:

I'd started with Emi because I thought her hair would be easier than others, but now that I'm done I'm no longer sure that was true. This hairstyle uses 4 separate particle (hair) systems, and it was sometimes a challenge working with both long and short hair in the same style.

I'm also much happier with her face/look now. The original revision (see last post) looked sort of bad. I still have a little work to do on her lip shader, but otherwise I think she's looking pretty good. And I'm sure she's glad to have her earrings back :)

Making expressions is pretty different in Blender. It gives you a lot more control, but you have to learn how to use it properly! I think I've had a decent eye for expressions so far, and while it's a little overwhelming now, in time I think this extra control will raise the bar on what I'm able to achieve.

Here's one more pic, just for the heck of it:

Next Blender Projects

Emily's naked in all these pics, and it's not (just) because she's an exhibitionist! I haven't yet learned how to handle clothes in Blender, so that will be one of my next projects. Still, I want to put all this hair knowledge I've learned to good use, so I'll probably make a 'do for another character soon. It'll probably be the 'mystery girl' from the last few posts. I really don't like her hair, and I know I could do better. You haven't met her yet, but you'll end up seeing quite a lot of her, so getting it right is important. She may be the first character in game to have portraits made in Blender!

I won't be starting any new Blender projects for a few weeks, though. The Emily project took a while; some of this was down to me not knowing Blender that well at the beginning (less of a problem now) but the rest was down to my computer.

A Bad Time to Build a Computer

In 3D, I work in sort of an iterative process. I change something, do a render, see how it looks, then change something else. Blender has a viewport render feature that works okay for a lot of things, but there's really no substitute for seeing a render for figuring out what you should change next. And in this project I spent a lot of time waiting for renders to finish, which is a pretty inefficient way to spend development time.

Some time ago I'd switched over to a laptop. I'd wanted it so I could do a bit of traveling and still be able to work on the game; while COVID threw that out the window, it's still what I've been using. Now, it's a quite powerful laptop, but it's still just a laptop. This project convinced me I really needed to build a proper desktop, and man, is this a bad time to do it. If you're fortunate enough to have missed out on all the craziness, let me tell you it's very difficult to find many basic components right now. Demand is through the roof, and scalpers and bots immediately snatch up whatever the cryptominers didn't get. I got pretty lucky and managed to get a GPU from Best Buy, and I've paid MSRP for everything so far, but I'm still trying to get a high-end Ryzen CPU. I'm still waiting on several components to come in, and I think I'll be able to get one by then, but we'll see. Still, I'm pretty confident it'll be done later this month. If you're in this situation too, you have my sympathy. I've found the Falcodrin Discord server pretty helpful in locating parts if you're quick, so you might want to check that out if you haven't already.

Scriptwriting

It hasn't been all art, though. I've been getting a fair bit of writing done, and I've been trying something new that seems to be helping. RPG Maker's editor isn't really the most pleasant thing to write in. The same interface that handles control flow and sprite movement also handles writing, which can make it hard to find your groove. To help with this, I dusted off an idea I'd had back in the 0.7 development cycle and started using a scriptwriting format. Scrivener (the writing tool) finally released version 3 for Windows, so I set up a scriptwriting format that matches RPGM's window width (ensuring it will look the same on your screen as it does in my writing software) and have been having fun with it. It really is helpful to have all the non-writing stuff out of the way when I'm writing.

Now, there's still the matter of getting all the stuff I wrote into RPGM, and while I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, I don't think it will be that difficult. I'm pretty familiar with RPG Maker's data structures, so I think I can write something that will parse the written script and put it into a format RPGM can understand. One could just copy/paste, but that would be pretty inefficient - much better to automate something like that.

Well, that's all I have for this time. I apologize again for the long delay; I feel bad about not providing an update, but I also feel like updates should show you something interesting or cool (which usually takes longer than I'd like.) I think I need to find a better balance between the two.

Please let me know what you think about Emily's hair - and the pictures! Thank you for your support!