Let's make up some numbers

As the next chapter inches to completion, let's take a sec to look at what is done, what's still to come, and if we can learn something interesting from that. As before, I'm going to try and have a look at number of images added to the game up to this point and see where that leads us.

About those numbers...

I don't wanna lie: as a metric, number of images kinda sucky, as it doesn't accurately gauge content, especially when comparing to the earlier parts of the game, as in earlier chapters, the number of moving parts of an image on screen was lower, so there's some inflation in that number in later chapters. Still, it's interesting to look at and see if we can get a general idea of how things are going.

So as of today, there's 11,725 images in light of my life. Images in this case are are the result of post processing, where I cut up a render from a daz3d scene into bits and animate those bits in the game to get the effect of moving hands, blinking eyes, etc.

Some renders go in  whole, others go in chopped up in to lots of pieces, so keep in mind that it's not exactly 1:1 (more like 1:1.25 or something I guess).

But there's also still quite a bit of running stock in the pipeline. There's about 313 renders that still need to go through post processing, so let's say that's another 391 images.

Then there's about 75 daz3d scene files that still need to be rendered out. A single daz3d file might yield 1, 2 or even 4 renders, so let's say that's 150 renders, and that'll become 188 images after post.

Then, I guess there's about 50-100 more daz3d scenes I need to produce. Let's go with the lower boundary, that's 100 renders, that means 125 images after post.

Bla, bla. Results please?

That means we could end up with the totally made up end tally of 12.329 images for this update. And that would mean that for chapter 6, we'll be adding about 5,400 images new images.

For comparison, chapter 5 "only" added 3,134 images to the game. Chapter 1 through 4 combined contained 3,800 images in total.

Tell us about the timebomb doodle scene, Naughty.

Right, the timebomb doodle scene from the update infographic we talked about earlier. That one has all the daz3d files created, and about half of the backlog of daz3d scene files waiting to be rendered out is for that.

Not all the renders are in yet, but the number of daz3d scene files for it is 193 for sprites, and 11 for sets. So let's be conservative and say those files yield about 1.75 renders each, and 1.25 images per render, that means this scene will result in 446 images, or about 8% of the projected images in this whole update. That's quite a lot.

How long do renders take, anyways?

That greatly depends on a lot of factors, and would merit a separate post. But a mitigating factor for me is that I tend to do nearly everything as sprites.

How that works is that first I create a set and place the camera's in that. Then I render an 360 degree high dynamic range image from it, and that then becomes the light source for my characters that are standing in an otherwise empty area except for some props, furniture, etc.

Since there's a lot less geometry for the ray-tracing system to work with, renders come out a lot faster. Lets say on average 30 mins per render. For some characters, it's a lot less, and for instance the office ladies usually take no more than 5 minutes per render for one of of those conversation sprites.

That's one end of the spectrum, on the other side, the monthly wallpapers usually have the set and the characters together in one daz3d file, to render out together. They are also rendered out in 4k. They can take anything from 2 to 4 hours to render to completion. But they are the exception, really.

Do you need help with rendering out images, Naughty?

No worries, I'm good in that department. I have my rig baking out the daz3d files from my backlog while I'm writing, doing post work, editing images into scenes, and doing other real life things. So while there's a bit of a backlog now, those will just get baked in parallel to other stuff, and eventually, they'll all be done without losing any time.

In fact, I try and alternate between the tasks of writing, post work and editing, and creating daz3d scenes, so that I always have a little backlog for each of those, and I'm never at a point where I have to wait on renders to finish up before I can continue with a scene, and there's always a little of each to do.

That means that when the story's not really flowing, I can do zone out doing some post work, and when I'm tired of the mindless cut-paste-save of that, I can edit some images into the scenes and add the transforms and animations, and when the daz3d file backlog is running low, I just create a fresh batch of scenes for the next story event.

That's it for now, stay safe.