Dev Talk

Alright guys, I'm excited to finally come clean. This will be a bit lengthy.

So a couple of months ago I was planning to do a Christmas special focusing on a lot of fun animations. You guys may have seen a few of them that I had posted. Well, I absolutely lost my shit in frustration with doing animations in Daz. Most of the time was spent battling the software. You may have seen some of the fun bloopers in Discord where I moved the position of Sophie's foot and half her face disappeared along with half her torso. Long story short, I said, "fuck it, there's got to be a better way".

So I messaged a German Teddybear and said: "Fuck Daz, let's figure out how to leave".  To my surprise, he put the kielbasa down and was intrigued. (I don't actually hate Daz... I was just upset). Long story short, we've spent the last 1.5 months doing nothing but exploring software and figuring out workflows. You really take Daz for granted once you realize all the stuff it does behind the scenes. We settled on Cinema 4D. I put in 2 weeks learning how to rig and get some basic functioning bullshit out. Then I realized that Blender has much better rigging tools and generally more stuff available and it's free compared to the $60 a month from C4D.

So we moved on to Blender. Too many damn hours spent figuring out what we need to do to at least get to the point where we are in Daz right now. Last night was the first night I've had more than 4 hours of sleep since we've started, but now I can truly say it's been worth it. I've finally come to a point where I can start rendering for PT again. There's still some material conversions left to do but overall, all the major obstacles have been answered.

Many of you will probably ask, why? Why spend nearly two months on this when I could have been rendering more scenes for PT. The answer is simple, this is the right move. Throughout the life of PT, you've all seen me do all sorts of software and technical experiments. It may slow down production initially, but I hope I've proven to you all that in the end it was worth it and the production quality of PT was for the better. This undertaking completely dwarfs everything I've done in the past both in terms of the effort required to make it work and the expected outcome. Daz is great, especially for characters/clothes, but using a full 3D software opens the doors for so many opportunities.  To make a quick list highlighting some of the strengths.

• Blender is FAST. Waiting 3 seconds for a scene to load rather than 5 minutes (or 30 mins in the case of OZ)
• Fast viewport playback. The hard part for animating in Daz is that the viewport lags and skips 5-10 frames at a time. You can't see what you're doing. You have to waste time doing a quick low quality render for your animation and stitch it together in another software just to see the movements. Then go back and make changes, render it out again... rinse and repeat for 6 hours. In Blender it's realtime
• Better animation tools. Blender is arguably 2nd only to the industry standard when it comes to animation
• Better character control. The rig behaves exactly how you would expect. I can make an original pose from scratch in a few minutes. In Daz I'd spend 3 minutes just to find the right pose preset in the library before spending another 5 minutes tweaking it to sort of look ok
• Liquid, smoke, fire simulations, particle system, decent hair particle system  (maybe we will see simulated hair physics and animated cumshots in the future?) 
• Very decent sculpting system. I can quickly fix clothes poke-through in seconds rather than fiddling with parameters in Daz for 10 minutes for mediocre results, or spending minutes exporting it into another software for cloth simulation
• Segue: Has decent cloth simulation

There are tools and customization options that can truly be fine-tuned for my production needs. For example, I learned how to use a bone picker and script my own IK/FK switches. I can further customize it by scripting how bones operate in relation to one other. Quickly access facial bones to put together my own expressions. This is both faster than in Daz but also everything will be created custom to the scene rather than relying on presets and libraries. As I continue learning these tools and scripting, the more I can customize and improve them.

Overall guys, I'm really excited about this migration. It's taken so much damn work but has been worth it. If I didn't partner up with Oz to figure it all out, it would have easily taken us 3 or 4 months to work this out on our own. It was really critical to split the load because there were a lot of obstacles to work out. It's unfortunately not as easy as simply moving some stuff from Daz to Blender. I'm still expecting many more obstacles and bumps in the road, but at least I can confidently say that we've solved enough to move forward with production.

What does this mean? It means faster production and higher quality content (which will continue improving throughout the year). I did a quick animation test the other day, spent about 15 minutes in total. That same result would have easily taken me 6 hours to do in Daz. This shit's that good.

We're not in the clear completely. There is still so much to learn not only in Blender but the other software I've picked up over the month to increase overall production quality. Some of these improvements you will see instantly, the others you'll see in the next game. I'm really excited for 2020 and I thank you all for your continued support. I promise to make it all worth it!

Dom