Progress? I guess? (Patreon)

More sideways progression, but some that should help out in the end. I had managed to get a whole 24 images done, which really doesn't seem like much, but that also includes finding and lighting a new location, as well as updating an old one a bit. Those 24 images were actually enough to finish 2 little segments leading up to the big one I've been talking about, so I started to scout for a map for the next part.

And... I found one. In fact, I found one that should be good for the multiple locations I need for this bigger scene. It's a pretty big map with a lot of different rooms for me to use. The problem with this is that there are literally thousands of elements that make up the map and my computer is a piece of crap, so... I had to do a bit of work to get things ready.

The map is a mansion that's 4 levels tall (including the basement). Since I'll only be using one area at a time, I decided to go through and toggle the elements on the floors on and off to create 4 different saves I can use, depending on which floor the scene is taking place on. This took fucking forever.

I couldn't just mass select elements and turn them on or off... that would be too easy. I had to individually select each element I needed to toggle. That meant going through a list of god knows how many items four different times. Each pass through took about 2 to 3 hours. As much as this sucked, I knew I would only have to do it once and I'd be good to go with a bunch of locations to use for future scenes.

It worked, and even though it's still making my computer sweat when character count gets much past 2, it's usable so... win?

Since this was one cohesive map, I redid one of the lead-up segments (which was 12 of the 24 images I had done) to be consistent with the rest of the scene and then banged out an additional 50 images for the next two little segments. Now it's just a matter of deciding where in this map to have the next scenes and then actually writing the parts I don't have down yet.

As long as my computer keeps chugging along, things should start falling into place fairly quickly and I can hopefully get this beast of a scene behind me. I think I have a stopping point for the first part of Masters of the Island in mind and an idea for most of the scenes that get there, so... yeah. Still have some locations to find and characters to make, but I think things are moving along pretty well at the moment.

Back in a few with the next update!