Progress (And Problems)

Greetings!

Thank you all for participating in the development cycle poll! It looks like you want me to continue with the 'episode'-based schedule by about a 9 to 1 margin - that's the most lopsided result from any poll I've ever done! I hear you, so I'll be sticking with the current 'episode' format. I'm still going to try to make the 'episodes' a bit smaller to allow for a faster release cycle, but they'll continue to be complete chunks that move the story forward by a set amount.

Now, on to 0.9! I've finished the first quest and am currently working on the second (of five.) I got a lot of mapping done, too. I'd hoped to be farther along in the writing, but I had to take a detour into some 3D work, and there encountered some problems that ate up a fair bit of time, and which I still haven't fully resolved.

The new character I've been alluding to gets introduced in the first quest. I'd already made portraits for them, but in the process of writing, I decided I'd like to make a few more expressions. I did so, got inspired to make some more expressions for Alex and Ana, and that's where I discovered some problems.

I had actually started redoing Ana's entire set of portrait pics with the new model, but I started to notice something strange:

For reference, here's the original model, minus postwork:

As you can see, the hair on the new one looks terrible. Alex's hair has a similar issue. Her and Alex's hair are one of my favorite parts of their character models and really contribute to the overall look, so I was pretty bummed to find this. Thinking maybe the file for my new model got corrupted somehow, I made a render with Ana's old model:

 The hair also looks terrible on this one. Thinking maybe it had something to do with the new version of Daz (4.11), I managed to find a copy of 4.10 I had on an old backup and tried rendering it there. This time the render looked perfectly fine, just as it had when I'd originally made Ana's portraits. After a bunch of digging and poring over hair shaders, I eventually came to the conclusion that the new version of Daz (4.11) simply won't render the hair model properly - or, to put it another way, the model doesn't seem to be fully compatible with 4.11. This is bad, since 4.10 can't use my new, Turing-based video card (and it's no longer being updated, anyway.) And because of how slow they are, CPU renders - the only way I can currently render with Daz 4.10 - aren't really a viable option.

I did a bunch of messing around, learned a few things, and managed to make the hair look a lot better - though I still much prefer the look of the old one:

I tried re-rendering some old H-scene images with these modifications to the hair, and it looked pretty good - though not as good as the original. In an attempt to really fix the problem, I downloaded a trial of Substance Designer and tried to generate a new shader for it there. This is probably the approach I'll use in the end, but it's a bit complicated if you've never worked with node-based shader networks before, and I decided that trying to grok it was too much of a distraction right now. The priority is getting the writing done! So I switched back to that.

I will have to solve that problem before I start making the H-scene, though - I'm not satisfied with the 'fixed' one, and have no intention of simply settling on it. But the time wasn't wasted; while trying to fix Ana's hair, I learned several things that helped me make the new character's hair look much better. I wasn't really happy with how it looked originally, but after these changes I feel pretty good about the look. So I redid all their portraits; I'd love to show 'em to you, but I don't want to ruin the surprise! :)

Anyway, that's all I have for now. The quest I'm working on now is probably the most involved of this release, and I hope to be done with it soon. Thank you for your support!