[Episode Deneb] Progress Update V

Greetings,

today it will be a somewhat longer post. Talk-topics are editing, rendering scenes, workflow, music, next tasks and of course the current status.

Editing

The first iteration of the editing of the dialogue is pretty much finished thanks to osanaiko. He even spent time on the project over the holidays. I really appreciate that! The next iteration(s) should happen when I'm done with rendering and scripting which usually impacts the dialogue slightly again.

Rendering scenes

I started working on one of the three big scenes in this update but I'm not even halfway through the first scene and progress is slower than I expected to be honest. For the scene I'm currently working on the render time per frame is sometimes up to an hour but I don't want to reduce the render settings anymore because there is noise in the depth of field already. I fear at least one of the other two big scenes will face similar issues.

Workflow

Therefor I need to really change my workflow now. Currently I setup my scene, do one pose and render it. While it renders I do something differently. At the moment the time between shot's rendered is quite long and I start focus on something different. Before I was always eager to see how the shot I just posed turned out as a render. That attitude needs to change. I will need to finish multiple poses before batch rendering them. Otherwise I'll lose too much time.

However, I'm not really satisfied with this approach. For one, I'm a bit impatient and like to have results immediately, I think some may can relate to that. Also the result before usually impacts how I setup the next shot and pose. Therefor I fear I could lose continuity. And second, it's not uncommon for me to fix a pose after a few seconds to minutes of rendering if there are minor issues. And with longer render times it also takes longer to see this issues before I can address them.

But maybe it would be even faster if I can spot the issues and fix the poses in batches as well. I'll need to test that.

Another thought I had... I fear I could lose the focus / passion / perfectionism while posing different shots without seeing the results. Without the rewards in between it may feel less fun to create. 

However, only ~40 shots a week when I actually spent quite a lot of time on the project feels like it is to few. 

Music

One positive side-effect of the long render times I had some time in between to work on music as this doesn't need much GPU to process. Most are just sketches and skits for now but some have the potential to be useful. I think I've currently ~20 sketches. Most of the sketches have a dreamy or positive vibe to it or are for the club-scene. However, I need to create a few scores and tracks with a sad theme. Sadly, I really have a hard time to set-up the right mood for those emotionally sad scenes. But this won't stop me from trying.

On the behalf of the topic 'getting distracted' I also looked in old music projects of mine and played around with them. Most of them are absolutely not suited for the game but there are maybe one or two tracks which I'll add as Easter-eggs to the game.

Next Tasks

Of course I'll keep posing and rendering but I'll also try to adjust my workflow and see how comfortable I'am with it.

Current status

~ 120 rendered and edited images

~ 15% of scripting done