Update 2 - May 2018 (Patreon)

So, on to the update. I've been taking this month to re-install Windows onto an SSD I'd bought last year, and it's been a few days of trying to get everything back to how it should be (I still have the old HDD with Windows on it, so I can just switch them around to boot into my old setup when needed; it's just a little inconvenient).

So far so good... ish. My original intention had been to, as part of the reinstallation process, scoot my work from the old DAZ Studio 3.1a over to the newest version, 4.10 (which is a few years newer at this point). Came in with the hope of a fresh installation smoothing out that whole process, and while in some parts it did, the other snags... well, it turns out there is no easy fix for the fact that my old scene files - which contain not just my render scenes, but all my characters and such - simply can't be loaded in the new version of DS.

So, that's a hard stop on that front, for the moment. Now, there is a workaround, and that is to rebuild scenes and characters one-by-one in the new version. Time-consuming and not at all what I'd hoped for, but I was already in the process of re-building and updating all of my characters. Teena, Momiji, and the others I've shown off recently were recent updates, Annika is new enough to have been in this newest 'generation' of characters. I have around 40-50 characters in total, and only 9 of them have been updated so far, so starting over is not a big deal in all honesty.

Scenes are a different story, some of them may be too big to rebuild, so I'm never going to be able to discard 3.1 completely. (though there's some even older scenes that I simply can't open in any program anymore, and they're not huge losses.) In any case though, this is a large project to tackle, re-building characters one by one while also getting accustomed to the new version's UI and workflow and just...

...Anyway. It's not changing over right away. I'm going to continue in 3.1 and try to finish up a project or two, hopefully at least one this month. But I may also be taking a month or so in the near future to focus on just upgrading stuff, which will likely mean less - or no - scenes, but a lot of character updates (including possibly a bunch of characters you may not have seen me post before outside of Tumblr or really, really old stuff).

Fingers crossed for things going smoothly from here on out! I'm a little bogged-down in all of this, but optimistic that I'll be opening myself up for being more productive, gaining some new capabilities (4.10 has access to some nicer rendering engines), and all sorts of things.