Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

It's almost Christmas! Things are calming down here before the festivities, allowing me to tackle the challenges I've faced with the Supermodel renders. And boy, I've had some really fresh challenges to deal with this past week, for sure.

First of all, let's talk about the elephant in the room, namely the image above. I have finished all the renders for Michael's second chapter now, which will likely remain the most technically demanding chapter in this update for me to render. With that out of the way, I could move on to Anna Morgenstern's first chapter. The image above is literally the first image you ever see of Anna during the story, so this isn't really a spoiler. The first time she appears in Supermodel, she's naked. This particular image has been rattling around in my brain for well over a year. The way she looks at herself in the mirror while in her personal art gallery, surrounded by paintings and this lone marble statue, was how I always envisioned her introduction in my mind. This is going to be a very deliberate scene, not just because of its symbology (which will pay off later in the game) but because I have to be careful to show just a little of Anna without ruining the sexual tension of wanting to see her naked body in all its detail. Giving you a good glimpse of her ass (and a magnificent ass it is) with a fuzzy, small glimpse of her breasts and pubic mound in the mirror doesn't spoil much, but it definitely teases. And as anyone who's been following me for a while knows, I love to tease.

Also, I'll take any opportunity I can get to show off naked butts in Supermodel. One of my biggest regrets about Long Live the Princess was that its first-person perspective meant few opportunities to show people's backsides except during sex, so I want to make up for that now that I have a camera that I can move freely around the scenes.

But let's pivot back to Michael's scene. This one took me longer than I had anticipated for multiple reasons. The factor that I knew I would have to face was the sheer complexity of the events in that chapter, with multiple characters interacting physically in ways that I practically never had to deal with in LLtP. As a result, it took a lot of work to set up each individual render because of all the details that needed to be adjusted in everyone's poses. 

The second factor surprised me (but not entirely): I ran out of VRAM on my graphics card while rendering some of the most intensive images. It took a bit of experimentation to get around this, but it was a highly useful learning experience for later. For this particular scene, I ended up turning down the geometric detail of the character models. I doubt anyone would even be able to tell. This primarily affects really subtle details like small wrinkles and skin pores, stuff that isn't really crucial in an action scene. For sex scenes, though, I'd never do that. The final few images in this scene filled my 24 GB of VRAM to the absolute limit, but my GPU managed to squeak by with the tiniest of margins. Had it not been able to, I would also have had to reduce texture detail. Luckily, I didn't have to go that far this time. Still, the skills I picked up as part of this experience will help with later scenes. There is one coming up a few chapters later into the first version of the game that will require even more characters at once, but with the things I've learned from this chapter, I won't have to bang my head against the wall until I figure it out. Instead, I can just reduce the necessary details before they can cause any trouble.

Anyway, that's it for now. There's still a week left of the year, and I intend to take advantage of it between the festivities to get more done on Supermodel. I've been looking forward to creating Anna's opening chapter for a while now.

Until next time, and Merry Christmas!