We have animations :D

We shouldn't have of course. But we have. *is currently happier than Annie being locked into a pub overnight*

Short version

By a whole series of cheats, cuts and plain good luck in faffing with things I'm able to add high quality animations at a minimal file size. Not hugely important for One or Three but there was -that- scene in Two plus there are a whole bunch of adult scenes in Four that will now hugely benefit as instead of the still images I had done, I can now add to them a series of animations as well.

There is an initial test render for One in the link here (SFW, just click and it will play)

...and a totally NSFW teaser clip here. I've kept this deliberately short to just a few seconds as I don't want to spoil your fun in game - I've got nearly eight seconds of this so far :)

(also note the size of the file. It's tiny!)

Long version!

Well, all the above naturally. But begods, I've done it! Animations have been the albatross around my neck since I started, given that so many games have them now and I just don't have the processing ooomph at the moment to be able to do them.

Except I have :D

You may gather there is a certain dev this morning who is feeling somewhat pleased with herself. :)

So, here's how I did it. It was a combination of events and good fortune really. To start with, I'll be honest in that I had given up on the idea of being able to have animation in H5. A 1060 card just isn't powerful enough to turn out the renders quickly enough. If we think that Chapter One has around 400 images, the entire chapter content only equates to some twelve seconds of animation, and -prior to the remastering- each render was taking me about an hour on average. So it just didn't make sense.

However....post remastering what I started to find was that all the resurfacing I had been doing was reducing the render time for scenes. By re-skinning the asset base I had changed the surfaces sufficiently so that Daz and the hamster were finding it easier to throw light around and that the hour had dropped to closer to 30 minutes. So if the fact everything looks better wasn't reason enough the speed advantage would have been enough to justify it.

So that got me thinking (always dangerous I know). Just how far could I tweak render times by playing with scenes and here's where starting with no asset rig to speak off at the start of the year came in.

For One and Two almost all scenes were made by rendering the background and characters separately as my old 1050 card just didn't have the memory to hold all the assets. So for the test animation earlier this week of the Princess I did the same thing again. Rendered the grass and landscape as one render and rendered her and the altar as an other.  This was allowing me to render the Princess at around 5 minutes per frame. So a ninety frame three second animation wasn't taking 90 hours, not even 45 hours but (for me) a mind blowing 7.5 hours...

I was suddenly in the realm of very, very feasible.

My next step was, partly for fun, partly as I always wanted it, and partly for a speed test was to do the opening scene animation of the Intrepid above. This turned out to be the most important piece of rendering I've ever done...(I'll explain why in a minute)

Which just left me that troublesome woman Annie and -that- animation scene. So at first I did what I did for the Princess. Render the background separately etc. Speed time was good given that there are two characters for the hamster to deal with turning out at around eight minutes per render in the end (I did play with the size and whatnot a bit and did get it down to around 4/5 minutes but it did look a bit meh). Even so eight mins is OK...except it didn't look great. The background trick that had worked from a view above POV just looked false in the room set up. Soooo....I tried adding the background to Daz as a backdrop and rendering it all together.

This looked even worse as Annie looked like a cardboard cut out as the backdrop doesn't "exist" as far as Daz is concerned so no shadows etc.

For a while I thought I'd hit a roadblock again - and then I remembered the Intrepid render. Ophion isn't actually an asset. There isn't a huge planet size prop in the background. No, it's what's called a plane. In other words just an image projected onto a prop.

I'd gained some experience with planes whilst doing Four as Sarah has a scene on some paths involving her going in water. For that scene I had to learn how to use them. A plane, I should explain, is a flattish square that you can manipulate, shade, and generally play around with to project an image. So, if I wanted Sarah with her head above water, for example, I'd drop a plane in, shade it to look like water and then lower it until her head was peeking out above it.

The big advantage of planes is that Daz realises they exist when it renders...(you can see where this is going, yes?)

So I made a plane, added to it the earlier room background, faffed with the size and the angle until the camera and the plane were showing what the complete render had showed....and made an animation.

Eight minutes per frame. With shadows. :) So entirely, totally, feasible.

Is it as good as me being able to render the entire room? No. Of course not. But on the other hand I honestly can't tell that much of a difference. If anything it looks as though I've added a little bit of depth of field to bring Annie more into view.

So, I can crack on with the remaster again now. Everything is settled. Crappy graphics replaced? Check. Real life looking characters? Check. Better GUI for movement? Check. Animations...*grins* Check!

Also...geoshells!

They are now my second favourite thing after planes. In my slightly mad drive for perfection I wanted bodily parts that had gone into other bodily parts to reflect that. I.e....to be wet. *has done that too!*  (NSFW)

Anyhoo, enough from me now. I've no more experiments etc to show. It's just crack on time. My apologies, as always!, for the delays all this faffing is causing but I think it's worth it. :)