The learning curve is real. (Patreon)

I haven't had as much time as normal to work on things lately due to real life obligations getting in the way, and what I did manage to get done, I'm going to redo. Once again, more issues reared their heads, though this time the new skin shaders aren't directly the problem, it's the lighting that goes along with them.

Basically, HS2 (with all the mods) has two different types of lighting and only one of them works with the shaders I'm using (if you use the other the skin is black). There's a lot of options you can mess with in the lighting settings, and until now I had been using a slightly modified preset as my base scene lighting.

I thought I had everything worked out, but I'm starting on a scene that has multiple characters with different skin tones and a couple of characters I haven't really captured in a scene yet. Problem one was, from what I've read in several places previously, a fairly common issue with lighting a scene that has light and dark skinned characters in it. I was basically using additional light sources to light the scenes showing the darker skinned characters so they didn't look too dark, but if I forgot to turn off the extra lighting when capturing the lighter skinned characters, they would be over lit and glow like the sun. Not good.

I figured out a way to deal with this, though, by first lighting the scene and then making adjustments to the characters' skin tones to be where they should be. This way I don't have to adjust things on the fly, just the first time I'm setting up the scene. Yay. Problem solved.

The other issue had to do with the hair of the characters I hadn't had in a scene before. They both had problems, though not the exact same ones. Basically, one had hair that looked like garbage when I did close-ups, and the other looked like garbage all the time. Examples: garbage up close...

and garbage all the time...

I first thought it might be the hair I was using since I've had issues with different hair styles before. I was going to change them up, and then I decided to test if they looked bad under the other lighting settings. I loaded up the default lighting and... it looked fine. Skin was black, but hair was fine. Okay... so it's the lighting.

Step two was to see if it was a certain setting causing it, so I loaded up the default settings of the sss lighting I have to use and... it looked fine. There was some slider I was using that was causing it. I found which one was the culprit and changed it back to its default setting and...

Better. I'm going to mess around a bit more to reduce the shine on Penny's hair, but that should be pretty simple to do. After that, I'm going to redo this part of the scene with the new settings. Luckily, it's just a conversation (and not a super long one at that), so it shouldn't take too long to redo. Especially since I need to do things in a slightly different way to combat the super secret third issue...

File size. These images are 4 to 5 times larger in file size than the ones I do in KK. In order to try to keep things at least reasonable in size (though it will still be bigger than the NSFW in general), I've decided to change up how I do things a bit. Up until now, I've been using a unique image for pretty much every bit of dialogue. Instead of continuing that, I'll be framing scenes a bit differently and using one image for several bits of dialogue (which is how most vns do it anyway).

I'll still change the image if there's a significant tonal shift in the conversation, but I'm going to try to do wider, multi-character shots along with just holding on one character for a back-and-forth instead of always showing who's speaking. This will actually have two benefits in that not only will it reduce the overall size of the game, but it should actually speed up the creation process because I'll be posing fewer shots and jumping around in a given scene less than normal.

Well, that's it for now... back to the grind to see what problem runs up and punches me in the groin next...