The Visit [Stiglet] (Визит)

Quick status update

Hey guys, it's just me.
I just wanted to give you a quick update on progress and not leave you in the dark.

I've still got a bit of work to do, I underestimated the backlog of renders I still had to process. Both machines have been running 24/7, there are just a few more to go.
It's still gonna take a few more days. I guesstimate a test version hopefully saturday, perhaps sunday and the general release probable the day after.
Android might take an extra day after that.
Sorry to still keep you guys waiting!

0.12.4 preview images

So as I'm mostly done with my rendering work for the next update here's a few extra preview images for you guys.

0.12.4 preview images extra

And here's a few extra tasty previews for you guys.

Holy water



Hi guys, I hope you are all doing well.

Things are fine here, I've now just about finished working on new renders, I've just got to do you guys a quick post credits scene and I'm done. As usual I'll now start working on putting everything together in renpy along with making a few fixes here and there. Expect this to take a week or so.
I was gonna talk a bit more about lighting and HDRI's but it will have to wait for now.

I've been sending out multiple messages to my top patrons each week asking if they want a custom render making. Most don't reply and I'm working my way down the list quite quickly. However this week they all did and HHUUKK (unsurprisingly) was the first to reply so he gets his scenario done first.
Karen and Haley have been bad sisters and must serve their penance (I guess).







I hope you all enjoy and that's it for this week.
Thank you all as always and take care.

Ménage à quatre



Hi guys, I hope everyone is doing okay.

I'm fine, I've just started fleshing out my first animation in Officer Juru and Dr. Williams' scene. I hoping to get it and the rest of the scene done by next week then I can start on wrapping this update up. It's been a long one, I hope you all find it to have been worth the wait.
I spoke a little about mesh lighting in Daz studio last week. This week I'll talk about Daz's own lights.
I tend to use these occasionally, and then just the spotlights or point lights.



So as with mesh lights the color setting changes the color of the light.
Intensity and photometric mode I don't change.
Spread angle, for spotlights, changes how wide the spotlight's cone is in degrees.
Beam exponent controls how evenly the light is spread across the cone, a higher exponent the brighter and more concentrated the light will be towards the center of the cone.
Light geometry allows you to give the light geometry instead of just being a single point. This is very useful as a tiny point of light will give very sharp and unrealistic shadows. I never leave this as point.
Height and width change the size of the above geometry. Larger lights create softer shadows.
Render emitter will show or hide the light so it is invisible. It doesn't change it's light output though. Note you will still be able to see the light in reflections.
Luminous Flux is how bright the light will be while temperature is the light's color temperature in kelvin, higher is more blue, lower is more red.
Not much to it really.

For this week's custom renders the lucky patron wanted to see a foursome with Nikki, Karen and Haley and I guess he couldn't wait for the next update. Well I thought what the hell, why not. It's just a single setup but from a few different angles.







I hope you all enjoy and that's all I have for you this week.
Thank you all as always and take care.

Chocolate starfish



Hi guys. I hope you are all well.

Things are still going well here for the most part. I got those two animations done, that's five so far. With two more to go that will be seven in total, the most I've done in a single update. I realize it's taking longer to complete too though, perhaps my goals for this update were a bit too much, I don't know. All I can do at this point is keep working.
I had the fans on my 1070ti fail on me this week :(. I believe it's out of warranty, I didn't bother to check, I didn't want the downtime involved in sending it back. I just "fixed" it myself.



Works pretty good. Just need to perhaps get an adapter for the fan connectors so they can run off and be controlled by the GPU itself.
I asked if anyone wanted to know anything specific about daz studio. Someone mentioned lighting. As Iray is a physically based renderer all the principals of lighting things in real life should still apply. There is loads of information already out there for how to light things for photography or movies etc. I myself tend to just use the lights that are in the scene. I guess this would just be considered practical lighting. I might add a few extra lights if characters faces look a bit to dark or I want to add some highlights/shadows, but for the most part I don't.
I could just talk about some of the lighting controls in Daz/Iray though. I can start with mesh lighting.
Mesh lighting is really just geometry in the scene with an emissive surface.



When the emission color is set to black the emission is off. Otherwise the light will be in the color selected. You can also put a texture in here if you want to do something like a TV or computer screen.
Emission temperature is the color temperature of the light. Daylight is about 6500K, Higher is more blue, lower is more red.
Two sided is you want both sides of a surface to emit light.
Emission profile can take files that adjust the direction of the light as it comes off the surface but it's a bit buggy.
Luminance is how much light the surface emits. Higher is brighter. This also accepts a texture map. You can use a grayscale image of the map you use in emission color so any screens are bright and dark where they should be.
Luminance Units is the units the above Luminance is in. The table on this page explains most of them.
And that's about it.
This week's commissioned renders are of Nikki and Karen. This patron wanted to see them share a gift the MC gave them each.






I hope you all enjoy and that's all I have for you this week.
Thank you all as always and take care.

Birthday boy



Hi guys, I hope you are all doing well.

Things are going fine here, I got a bunch more renders done and another animation. I hope to get another 2 animations done by next week and hopefully wrap up this current foursome scene I'm working on. After that I can start working on the Dr. Williams and Officer Juru scene.
Speaking of those two, above is what they look like in the dresses you guys chose. Good choice guys.
I don't have any Daz studio tips for you this week, I'll try and come up with some more for next week. Let me know if any of you want to know anything specific.
Other than that it's just a quick post this week. I still did some custom renders though.
The idea for this was from Gheel, they wanted to see Karen giving the MC a special gift for his birthday. I wasn't able to do everything they requested due to time but I think this turned out quite nicely. I hope you all enjoy.








Coincidentally it was my own birthday very recently. The MC is considerably luckier than me however :p.
That's all from me.

Thank you all as always and take care of yourselves.

Fully interactive



Hi everyone, I hope you're all still well.

Still chugging along here, progress is fine. Should be looking to start working on my next batch of animations soon.
The Dr. Williams and Officer Juru poll is now closed. I've opened it up so you guys can go check out the winners if you wish. I'll have an render of them in their outfits for next week.
A few people appreciated what I had to say about Daz/Iray's settings the past couple of weeks so I'll continue. This week will be the filtering tab, below are the settings I used for the above render.



The firefly filter is there to remove or clamp down on fireflies, these are very bright spots that sometimes occur in renders. A kind of noise, they can sometimes appear because of overly reflective surfaces or bright lights in a dark scene. Either way the firefly filter tries to put a limit of how bright a pixel can get. I'd always leave this on.
For nominal luminance I'll quote nvidia. "The nominal luminance is a hint to Iray on what is considered a “reasonable” luminance level when viewing the scene. This luminance level is used internally to tune the firefly filter and error estimate. When the nominal luminance value is set to 0, Iray Photoreal will estimate the nominal luminance value from the tonemapper settings."
So most of the time I leave it 0, but if I start having problems with fireflies I'll adjust the nominal luminance. Depending on the scene I might set it as low as 0.1 and up to 500. If it's set too low it can dull things in the scene that are supposed to be bright. You have to experiment a bit to find the right balance.
Post denoiser is Iray's AI denoise filter. I don't use it as it uses vram during the render process and if I need to denoise I'll do it in post myself. I've just made it available above to expose the settings.
Post denoiser enable - Obvious really.
Start iteration. This how many iterations/samples Iray will do before the denoising kicks in. As the denoiser is a post process if has no effect on the rendering. If you render an image for 500 iterations, the final denoised image will be the same if you started denoising at 1 iteration or 499.
Denoise alpha, I guess this is if you have transparent areas in your render.
Bloom filter. I like to use this as it adds a nice effect but I try to keep it subtle. Daz actually has some decent documentation on this.
"Bloom Filter uses three categories to create the bloom effect: Threshold, Radius, and Brightness Scale. Threshold controls how much energy hits a specific portion of an object, which will create the bloom effect. Radius controls what size radius a pixel's bloom will cover, the larger the radius the larger and more blurred the bloom effect will be. Brightness Scale controls how bright the bloom effect appears. Altering one category can significantly change the bloom effect's look."
With a handy image guide.



Pixel filter I leave as default. Not much worth tweaking here.
And that's that.
So I'm still working my way down my list of top supporters, offering them the chance for a custom render. I would say only about 1 in 3 responded so far, so check you messages guys! Though I understand if people don't wish to take part.
That wasn't the case this week though. Outrider had about 5 ideas for me.
He mainly wanted to see some "interaction" between Nikki and Karen so here's what I came up with.








I hope you all enjoy and that's all I have this week.
Thank you all as always and take care out there.

Virtual Insanity



Hi guys, I trust you are all doing well.

Things are good here, work continues as normal.
I'm sure you're all wondering how long until the next update, I'm getting closer but there is still a ways to go yet.
I'm about to start working on the "main event" as it were, with Karen, Nikki and Haley. For every extra character in a scene it takes longer to make because of the extra posing required, so It's slower going.
I've also still got a scene with Dr. Williams and Officer Juru to do as well, I want all the girls to have an animation each too, so that's 5 more animations to create. So yeah, still a fair bit to do yet. I don't dare estimate how long it's going to take. You'll know when I know :)
Following on from last week I thought I would talk about Daz studio render settings again. This time specifically the tone mapping tab.
So these are the settings I used for the above render.



Tone mapping is needed because otherwise Iray will output the raw luminance of each pixel. This is bad because Iray is a physically based renderer, the raw values will have a much higher dynamic range than our displays. To quote Wikipedia " Tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from the scene radiance to the displayable range while preserving the image details and color appearance important to appreciate the original scene content. "
A lot of these settings you don't really need to adjust. I'll just go over the main ones.
Tone mapping is a post process, It should not effect render performance at all.
The Exposure Value basically changes how bright the output will be. If your scene is too dark you can just lower this to make the image brighter, or increase to make darker.
Shutter Speed, F/Stop and Film ISO do not need to be touched unless you are trying to recreate with specific real world camera settings. All they basically do is just change the above exposure value. They do not give the other effects you would expect on a real world camera such as motion blur, depth of field or noise.
Burn highlights per component. This only it tends to desaturate the image so I leave it off.
Burn highlights and Crush blacks effect how the darkest and brightest parts of the image are mapped to the output. The higher the values the more they are compressed, Dark greys become black and bright greys become white. I find 0.1 a good balance. The output doesn't look too flat and I can always adjust it more in post if I want. If it's set too high, detail in the bright and dark areas can be lost that you can't get back in post.
And that's about it.
In this week's commission our patron wanted to see Nikki in VR. That's fine by me but as I know not everyone can view VR images and did some normal ones too.








I think these turned out well, I hope you all enjoy them.
I'll attach the VR versions below for those who can view them.
And that's all I have for you for now.

Thank you all as always and take care.

Shrug



Hi guys, it's just me again.

I hope you are all doing well out there, I'm doing fine here. Well, apart from suffering from hay fever but there's not but to be done about that.
Work still goes on, I want to tell you guys what I'm working on but I don't want to tell you either because I don't want to spoil anything. It leaves me with not a lot to say :/.
I was disappointed with myself for such a short post last week so I thought I might post a bit more this week about something I can talk about. I've mentioned in the past I use Daz studio to create the images for this game so I thought I could talk a little about that. A sort of "this is what I do and why" type thing.
I know a few of you like to use Daz studio yourselves so this might be of help to you, or maybe not. Anyways, this week I'll talk about some of the render settings.

Progressive rendering



So these are the settings I used for the above image.
The way Iray works is it repeatedly samples the scene (casting rays to form paths so it can work out how much light goes into the camera) to build the image. The more samples, the cleaner and less noisy the image. However, Iray will just keep repeatedly keep sampling the scene until you tell it to stop. So the settings above just tell Iray when to stop.
The main ones to worry about are
Max samples - This is how many samples Iray will do before it stops. 60000 is overkill, my renders never get this far as they almost always hit another stop condition first. They might reach about 20000 - 30000 samples instead.
Max time - This is 3 hours. This is normally what stops the render, I find 3 hours is the right balance between image quality and actually being able to get enough renders done.
Rendering quality and convergence ratio - This doesn't make Iray render at a higher quality or anything. It's just another stop condition. Iray will try to calculate when a pixel is "converged", this is supposed to be when the pixel is changing less and less with each new sample iray does. A kind of smart way of judging when the image is "done".
The quality part changes at what point a pixel is considered converged and the ratio stops the render when that percentage of pixels in the image are considered converged. At this setting the renders still normally stop because they run out of time, but sometimes on less complicated renders it will stop because of this setting. It means I can save some time without losing image quality.
Even with these settings though, renders can sometimes come out with noise, but I can talk about that another time, this is getting a bit too long now :) Let me know if there is anything specific you might want to know about.

This weeks commissioned render scenario was "A Karen/Rosa scene much like the one in the end of Karen solo path." The patron didn't ask to be revealed so I won't mention their name but here is what I went for.




I hope you all enjoy and that's all from me folks.
Thank you all as always and take care of yourselves.