Rendering Refactoring Complete!

It was about time that my rendering automation got some love. For the last week or so I have been planning and coding a ground-up rewrite of the scripts that generate the image sets used in Lab Rats 2. Tonight, the refactoring is complete! This means I've replicated all of the previous functionality while clearing out a lot of poor design decisions made as the script was created bit-by-bit.

The rewrite took a bit longer than I anticipated, but looking at the state of the code now I'm glad I did it sooner rather than later. My old scripts relied on excessively nested arrays storing clothing item file names and properties, each accessed by a specific array value. This created a house of cards that would all collapse any time I tried to add new functionality. The new system is a much more competently created object oriented system, which will make adding future functionality much easier. It has also greatly simplified the logic of finding what images don't yet exist and estimating how much time it will take to render them.

With that finally done I can move onto a real task. A number of clothing items in Lab Rats 2 have clipping issues that appear in images produced by my rendering script but not in manually started renders. The problem seems to be smoothing modifiers which are usually applied to clothing to fix exactly this issue. Normally, they find places where the character body and clothing intercept and then stretch the clothing on top of the character. Either these modifiers are not being given enough time to finish their calculations before rendering begins or they are not receiving the proper flag to apply themselves when loaded by script. Either way, I am researching and testing now. If this is fixed up I will be able to re-render a ton of existing items and eliminate or greatly reduce clipping in the current image library.