DevLog: Learned the Hard Way; Now I'm Reaping the Rewards

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board

TLDR;

• Pose library working wonderfully - massive speed improvements
• Scene 8 progress continues (280+ images - largest scene yet)

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

Follow-up on Last Week's DevLog

Last week I showed how I attempted motion capture, for facial expressions, body positioning, and hand poses. I also showed how it's probably not the workflow that I'll be using (at least, for now). But I also showed that pose-libraries might be a very useful tool within my workflow. I also previewed a small pose-library that I had been building, which included 100+ poses for facial expressions, 600+ body poses, and a handful (ha) of hand poses. After a full week of using this custom-made pose library, I can absolutely say that it's been (almost) a game changer.

• Facial expression pose library - This by far has been the most helpful. I've got a bunch of pre-created facial expressions, either created by me, or purchased from DAZ's store. I've noticed an estimated speed increase of roughly 4 to 5 times. Previously, it took approximately 4 minutes to pose a face (per character, per still image) - that's a lot of time. Now, with the facial expression pose library, I'm guesstimating that it takes about 30 seconds to 60 seconds per character, per still image.
• Body positioning pose library - Unfortunately, while this has been a helpful piece of the workflow, it's also been slightly annoying. Don't get me wrong, this has still been immensely helpful. But after applying a pose, for some reason and on some random body poses, they apply incorrectly. I'll show an example below, but you can see there's a few issues. Her body is TILTED to the left, causing the hands to not line up. Okay I'm being picky and it is not that big of a deal, but it still causes me to stop my workflow and fix these poses. In the long run, this is fine, I'll be able to save the "fixes" so that each of the poses are corrected and won't have that problem again; but that's a lot of fixes to save! All in all: it's been a good workflow change, and it's still helped to get poses in the scene very quickly!

• Hand pose library - While the body poses also store "hand poses", sometimes I just want to change the hands. And just to remind you, there are 17 pose-able bones in each hand for these character rigs. If I take about 5 seconds per bone, that'd be about 85 seconds to pose just one hand; 170 seconds, nearly 3 minutes for just posing the hands! Meanwhile, after using the hand pose library, I can generally get both hands posed under 20 seconds!

While setting up characters in scenes using pre-created poses isn't perfect - because sometimes, minor adjustments still have to be made almost every time - you can (hopefully) see that I'm finding ways to speed up the entire process and deliver updates faster and faster 🤯

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

Scene 8 is actually the largest scene yet. Most earlier scenes are anywhere from 50 to 120 images - Scene 8 is clocking in at over 280+!!! So, you can see why I was getting a little antsy about increasing the overall output of scene 😁

It's hard to gauge how far I am with this particular scene, because I unfortunately wanted to try out a slightly different workflow for posing - I tried to do this in "phases", 7 phases to be exact. It doesn't matter the details .... I'm not doing that again. It was too chaotic, confusing, and frustrating. However, next time, I will be trying a two phased approach: "Blocking" and then "Polishing". This is to borrow smarter workflows from smarter people than me - because what I'm attempting to go for is an overall "feel" of the scene, but VERY quickly.

Believe me, I don't want to be experimenting with random shit forever - I'm trying to get this next release FINISHED; these detours are killing me.

👀 Sneak Peek

💬 Community Corner

I missed the Behind-the-Scenes livestream (on the Discord server) this past week, and I apologize. I'm trying to be as punctual and consistent as I can.

Thank you again everyone for allowing me to ramble weekly. I also seriously appreciate the continual support that I receive from all of you.

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️