Developer's Journal #9 (Patreon)

Hey everybody, hope you all had a nice week.

I am still working on the remaining scenes for Part One.  I didn't get as many renders done this week as I would like for a couple of reasons.  The first was that I was working with some assets that were VRAM heavy, so it was hard to queue up overnight renders.  The second reason I'll get to in a minute.  Still, I managed to finish with two smaller scenes pushing the total number of post-worked still renders for the update to 469.

The other big thing I was working on this week was Love Interest #4, the unmet LI.  As you saw from the game menu, all four of the LI's are already modeled.  The creation process for all five main characters took hundreds of hours combined.  A lot of that was me learning things along the way.  But a lot of it was just me reworking each character until I got each of them to look just how I liked.  There are still a few little things that aren't quite perfect and beyond my skill level to adjust, but for the most part I'm happy with the models of the five main characters.

One thing I knew was going to be a problem was LI #4's main/everyday hair.  While I liked the general effect of the hair on her overall appearance, the hair asset itself was not the same quality as the hair used by the other four main characters.  Not only did it not look as realistic as other hairs, but it didn't have any movement morphs.  That was a problem for #4 because she's a physically active person, and it's hard to convey movement when a character's hair is static.

So, this led me to a long search for a better hair asset.  This doesn't seem like it would be that difficult, but it is very time consuming.  I spent hours scouring the different websites looking at every single hair asset on the market.  I purchased several, only to see that once each asset was modeled on her it wasn't the look I wanted, or the morphs didn't work the way I needed.  I also needed to ensure that her normal everyday hair asset would be consistent with her workout hair and her getting fixed up hair.  And so for each hair asset I would make test renders.  In the end, I spent roughly 15 hours on #4 this week and settled on both a new everyday hair and a working out ponytail.  But here's the kicker: this is the second time I've done this just since the demo was released, not to mention the hours and hours I originally spent choosing a hair asset for her.  I do believe that the hair assets I've now got for her are the best possible choice among existing Daz hair assets.  But that's just an example of how much work went into creating each one of the models.

I made a couple of other changes to #4 in that 15ish hours.  She really looked too young, so I added some simple aging morphs.  I had some reservations about her shape so I played around with her body size and tone.  She didn't look Latina enough, especially being so tall, so I widened her eyes, flattened her nose just a smidge, and gave her more protruding lips.  Again, all of these changes required many test renders as I tweaked little things here and there.

So, LI #4 was a major focus this week.  You won't actually meet her this update--she'll be introduced in Part 2.  But her new model will appear on the Main Menu and I wanted to make sure she was ready for that and any promotional images.  I've attached a little collage of her new model.

Thank you for your support!