Pic 176: Reimagining Dating in a World On Fire

 I spent the summer 1. Leaning Daz Studio while remaking Ariane in Paradise, and 2. Thinking and rethinking, and generally overthinking Dating in a World On Fire.

All my rethink plans don't involve abandoning what I've done so far. I still need to start the game with the player character on a date with Relay. But everything else is being rethought.

 The first decision was made last May when I started the AiP remake project, and realized 1440p is better than 1080p. Obviously 2150p (aka 4K) would be better graphically but 4K images are 4 times the size of 1080p, not 2 times. That means way longer renders, and way bigger picture files. 1440p is a nice happy medium and still looks awesome if you run the game in full screen mode on 4K monitor.

Of course since I already rendered everything so far in 1080p. I would have to render everything again in 1440p. While it feels like unnecessary work, it also means I can take my newly learned Daz Studio skills and apply them to the new renders.

The two pictures above are a great example. This is a picture when you walk back to your apartment from the tram in an overcrowded part of the city. I struggled with crowds in Daz, but had plenty of Poser tools for crowds, so I made the lower picture in Poser.

The top picture is fully Daz. I used This future city prop to represent my new downtown, then used this low res crowds generator for the background. Add three high resolution characters (characters from AiP of course) to the foreground, and some depth of field to defocus the lego characters in the back, and you have yourself a crowd scene.

 Here's another example. You may recognize this as a tram picture from Hopepunk City which I always meant to use temporarily.

 Here's the new Daz version of the picture. Same tram prop. but High resolution Daz characters in the front and progressively lower resolution the further you go back. If the woman on the left looks vagely familiar, it's the base character I used for Ariane in AiP.

I made an attempt to change Relay's first date outfit using a top and matching skirt I got for Ariane in AiP. Changing the outfit turned out to be way more work than I wanted to do. The outfits I have her wearing were picked because they are easy to use in multiple kinds of poses and the experimental one was not. So back to the purple V-Neck, but included the experiment below.

I have more stories about remaking the pictures I'll share later. The last two pictures I'm attaching look like they haven't changed at all from before, but they have!