[Episode Fomalhaut] Progress Update VI

Greetings,

the story is pretty much written. Just one scene needs to be written out and after that, the review process can start. I spent much time on the plugin itself this week, trying to get along with the new color-management and a few other new features of the plugin.

Announcement

Sometime next month I'm on vacation for 3 - 4 weeks, depending on my real-life work. At the beginning I thought I maybe could have a update of the game ready before my long vacation, but I'm nowhere near it at the moment. Therefore, I probably will pause the payments next time because I won't do much work on the game other than maybe some writing for the coming episodes.

Color-Management

This section is probably a bit more on tech side. The octane render plugin for DAZ finally supports ACES which I've been waiting for a while. By now ACES is the industry standard for color management. Even by default most images just look better with those color pallets. However, just saying this image is now in ACES doesn't make the cut. Because I'm doing post-processing like color grading and some other stuff I've had to setup my post processing environment (currently After Effects) for ACES as well. And I'm slightly embarrassed, but this took me a bit longer than it should have. I had to update After Effects and had to reinstall all plugins that I'm using. That took some time. And since I've set that up I'm testing around and creating a new template for me to work with.

Since the plugin changed and I can't exactly reproduce my old color-management pipeline there might be some slightly differences in the color settings within a scene from image to image, but I try to reduce this issue by trying to match them in post as best as I can.

Skin-Shader

With the updated plugin I also tried to improve my skin shader. Yet I'm not there where I want to be and still using the old one for new scenes but I think it's slowly coming along.

Current status

~ 170 rendered and edited images

~ 95% of the writing is done