Pics 109: Reshooting Rachel

Last week I shared AI versions of Rachel, and more than a few pointed out how the Rachel in the Club picture looks so much better in AI than 3D, and I realized they were right.

But it is not because the AI pictures looks more realistic. Realism is not my goal in my art. But beauty is!  What the AI version was saying to me was not how unrealistic 3D looks, but how poorly lit the 3D looks.

In making pictures for my game, I primarily focus on 3 things: Functionality - does it look like the character is doing the actions and reacting correctly in the context of the story. Structure - Does it look like it is taking place in a location consistent with the story from the point of view of the character, since the game is about 98% first person perspective.

And thirdly, but probably most important, is the picture beautiful or at least aesthetically pleasing.

This past week, I have been focusing on "re-shoots", specifically pictures that missed the mark on one of these, mostly on the last one.

These pictures do not require me to start from scratch, but they  involve changing the lighting and the depth of field to make them look better.

I reshot nearly 100 in total.  A few from Wendy and Ariane, but the bulk of the reshoots were on Rachel. I think it has to do with these being done in August and September of 2022 when I was distracted by real life, and I just wanted the pictures done, so I didn't put as much effort into them as I should have, relying too much on the lighting and sets of the 10 year old SITA files, which I shouldn't have done.

Thanks to a hint from the AI, I added a light to the picture of Rachel in the club, and the picture looks a lot better.  I didn't add the light before, because the setting is a dark night club.  Since beauty is more important than structure, I added the light.

The second picture comes from the restaurant scene.  Since this is the first scene with Rachel and the most often looked at, having it look boring is not a good thing. So like the club I increased the lighting a little, and then added depth of field with focus on Rachel's face.

I don't use "depth of field" as well as I should.  I spend a lot of time on the backgrounds, and I want to show them off, so blurring them out seems a shame. 

But I am quickly learning that no depth of field makes the images look flat, and the backgrounds can be distracting, especially when they don't change, which is a short cut I use a lot, especially in difficult to compose crowd scenes like the amusement park. (I reshot almost all the amusement park pictures for this reason)

The third picture is Rachel at the arcade, which I added depth of field to, and then added a light coming from the game itself dramatically improving the picture both structurally and aesthetically.

Finally, I re-lit the parking garage pictures with Rachel and added better depth.  This is kind of a hack, parking garages are boring and shouldn't be so dramatically lit, but just as every Rachel story begins at the restaurant that needed improving, they mostly end at the parking garage, so giving the player a good lasting impression is important.

I'm including a couple of reshoots from the Beach Magazine, too.

Updates on the Game itself

I believe Something's In The Air Redux is almost ready for public release and will likely premiere on itch.io sometime in late April. I will probably release a 0.99 final beta version here on Patreon in early April which adds these picture changes, some rewrites of scenes, the third chapter of Rachel Meets Ariane voiced and a few sound and music changes.

I also am updating the Executive Producer list based on "producer" level of Patreons. The current list is: Achtag, Alex Kennedy, Chung-Yeh Hsu, Daniel DeVincenzo, Dragonov, DrToxicCookie, EaBullet, Enigma, Hackoperator, James F MacLeod, Justin Larrew, Marcel 758, Marquise Wilcox, and Sno0w.  I'll update it again before the 1.0 update in April.

The main hold up is the voicing of Rachel Meets Ariane. I eventually want to voice the whole game, and I'll discuss more later, but I want to finish that part at least before the public release.  To keep the size down, the Android version will not include voice, so the 1.0 version will release at the same time as the 0.99 version for desktops.

I'm also finishing up a demo version of the game.  They are scheduled to post here tomorrow for all patrons, since it is intended to be a free demo game.

I posted the NSFW trailer on Reddit already: https://www.reddit.com/r/dateariane/comments/11zadqq/somethings_in_the_air_redux_trailer/

A "Green band" (SFW) trailer will be coming soon to YouTube just before release.