Dev Update #81

I haven't made much progress this week.

I started by upgrading all my female cast to a new generation of 3D model, which is mainly supposed to help to craft more natural-looking expressions. And it works. I have to experiment and train a bit more before I can be efficient with this new tool but I'm pretty happy with the results. The faces are less rigid and the expressions gain a lot in subtility and finesse. That being said it wasn't that easy to convert my characters and I still have a few technical difficulties. But it should be ok, I think I can deal with it. I still have to convert the male cast. I'll take care of that this weekend.

Posing Scene 1.

I have posed about 30 shots so far, the whole of Scene 1. Half of which have already been rendered. As usual, I rewrote some parts of the script while posing. I like what I came up with.

Some changes in my workflow.

So far, post-processing the renders was the last thing I took care of and it represented only a couple of days at the end of the development process, pretty much the last step before the release. It was a scene by scene process and I was merely adding a bit of contrast to the images.

I'm going to move that step up in my process chain and work on the renders as soon as a scene is fully complete. While working on the previous release, with post-processing being the last step, I ended up finding problems in renders and I didn't have enough time to rerender everything that should have been. I hope to avoid that kind of mishaps in the future.

About image quality.

I also hope to up the global quality of my renders a bit. Working on the lights and overall quality of the renders themselves is the first step toward that goal but I'm also going to rethink the way I do my post-processing. I don't want to go crazy either but I've been trying different things this week and I think I can do better than just "tweaking the contrast". However, that means going from a scene by scene approach to a render by render process and I'll spend way more time on post-processing than what I actually do.

The quick sum up :

• Day 6 Part 1 will contain 14 scenes.
• Scenes 1 and 2 are written.
• Scene 1 is posed.
• 4998 words, 31 shots are posed, 16 are rendered.
• I'm currently working on posing scene 2.

You can follow my progress with this Trello board!

Thank you very much for your support!

The Naughty Captain