Hello all!
Friday and progress post. So what's up?
Rendering... I'm not sure I am happy or annoyed with it. Daz has been weird this week. Crashing? Yeah, that's normal, and most of the time it's even my fault. Randomly increasing and decreasing the render times because one hair moved to a different position? And loading time of characters, just need to be thankful that most environments are simple. Butrender count is in a good place though, script? Eh...
Writing in other hand is in a good state overall. It's been one of those weird weeks where writing is just flowing. Sit down, open up Scrivener and before you know it the fingers are just typing text. So I'm happy with it.
And then a preview. If anyone wonders why I chose to exclude most of the main cast for various adventures this should give an idea why. There are two camels, two horses, 16 humans and one panther. It is a simple scene, needed one unfortunately, but it took over two hours to set up, rendering all the renders maybe thirty minutes. But, even though this is less complex scene than the fight with the orc chieftain, it is as resource intensive since there are more textures in this one. It's not inspiring render, it's not technically difficult but it is there to... well, something. For those interested, it took 32 GB of VRAM and 96 GB of RAM to render. And this was one of the few times I could show the extra people all at once...
Then something else. Let's talk about mythology. Yes, the scene is unloading from memory so I have time to write stuff... And a disclaimer, some of the following images are concepts. I don't know will they will appear or even be used in any future VN.
Mythology overall has been a great source of inspiration, but at the same time it has been one of the biggest frustrations. I think I've talked about it before. My frustration stems from not being able to make everything I want. Simply because there are no parts to make one. But at the same time the mythology can be a bit strange. From one end you have all kinds of monsters and the other end you have humans with their feet backwards. There are surprisingly a lot of those. It's part of being human. We mirror ourselves, our wishes, needs and fears to mythology. So at times there is a creature with their feet turned backwards. All of you who played Sorcerer have had an encounter with her at one point, or maybe not. She is the Spirit of the Glade; she doesn't have any other name, in a sense she doesn't need one. Her inspiration came from the North American native mythology, the Deer Lady. She... isn't exactly what I wanted her originally to be, parts to make her like I wanted weren't there. Now they are, but I'm not changing her as she is perfect as she is. Truthfully, the only thing I would change is the hair, and only because it lacks morphs. But... I live with it. She is something I would call a success when it comes to design. Of course, compared to the skill and complexity of some of the characters I make nowadays, she is simple. But complex isn't always better.
And there is always the "problem." What's next? A lot of mythological creatures are just humans, maybe exotic skin colour, strange coloured hair, some extra body part (duck feet), or outright a monster as said above, or hybrid of some kind, so I have to find something that I can do or is something that hasn't seen before. Ophiogenis, The Serpent Born, Greek mythology, a tribe of men who could heal poisonous snake bites with their touch. Which is why she is in a nurse uniform... There is only two references to them as far as I know so everything is a guess work. But wanted to try to make one. But, I'm not limiting myself to just Greek mythology, although it is the most prominent one along with Norse. Some mythologies that I've found initially sounded good, but when looking into them more deeply they went in to the "nope, not touching that with a ten feet pole"-category. But I'll keep digging and see what I can find and create. Have a great weekend you all!
