I've been Kitbashing a bunch of digital assets over the easter weekend trying to get a particular scene in Episode 02 set-up. Sometimes you want something that isn't available and you need to figure out how to use the assets you do have to make things work. It's the (very minor) down-side of using prebuilt-for-Daz assets. It's still faster than building from scratch, though sometimes I wonder.

On the other hand, as I'm taking my sweet time on Consort I really shouldn't use words like 'fast' in any of these posts.

Also, as much of my experience in 3D work is in Virtual Worlds where you need to have a complete thing or else it looks pants, I catch myself doing a lot of unnecessary 'bashing'. Nobody reading Consort is ever going 'move around' their avatars like in a Virtual World. There's no need for a complete 'model'. For a VN you just need enough to render and I should be faking everything like on a movie set. To paraphrase a story about Bertrand Russell: it's plywood all the way down young man.

Finally, here's one of the renders I did over the weekend. It's sort of tangential to the main story so it might end-up on the cuttting room floor, but it'll live here for as long as subscribestar keeps the lights on.

Well, it's been longer than I had hoped since the last update on progress. Sometimes I think I'll never get anything done in my life.

In January I wasted production time getting Daz to work on Linux under WINE. In particular to get hardware accellerated Iray rendering going on my RTX 4000. It took a couple of tries, but in the end I even got 'Smart Content 'to work with a Postgres DB backend installed on the Linux side of things. Pretty cool.

Since Febuary I've been banging my head on the visuals. I'm trying to find a style I like for the GUI and the various intro and menu screens. I've tried grungy looks, daemonic looks, hellfire looks, clean looks... frustratingly, none of the results made me happy. I also did some more renders which haven't made me happy either. So I've resorted to installing all sorts of Daz assets trying to jumpstart the creative juices and get things moving again. At least I've managed to do some more writing, which is something.

I guess VN creators all have their crosses to bear, especially those who work in solitude. Mine would be the "getting on with it". All I can say is that I'm in awe of creators like Talothral who seem to be able to churn out decent episodes like clockwork.

So what's new you ask... Well, I've continued working on the new design for the UI and I've also been collecting/creating image material to be used as textures in various Episode 02 scenes. Both UI and texture visuals will be a mix of Midjourney-generated and web-searched source material pulled together in some more or less coherent fashion with GIMP.

I'll leave you with an example of some of the stuff Midjourney coughed up when I asked it to 'imagine' a succubus in the Manga style, and a Daz render where Nako is giving the punching bag a piece of her mind.

Wishing you all happy holidays and a fabulous 2024!

Well, end of November has come and gone and it's time to inform the Outside World about what got done since the last update.

1. Quite a bit of editing and proofing of the text. Still not 100% complete but the wordses are in much better shape than at the beginning of the momff. I'm almost enjoying the reading of my own prose now. Almost.

2. I created a good few new texture assets to go into the Episode 02 Museum scene. Had lots of fun with that :)

3. I've been experimenting with new graphics for the UI. Not sure I like any of the things I made and in the end I might stick with what we have now. On the other hand, inspiration could strike and leave nothing but a pair of smoking sandals at any moment.

4. I've been cherry-picking more Daz assets for the upcoming render cycle(s), no blender-pun intended.

5. Finally, I've been toying with the idea of maybe doing a 'Seasons Greetings' something, but the final word from the eternally convening Council of Overseeing Overseers hasn't been passed down to us clueless minions yet. We'll have to wait and see.

I expect the next status update to be out mid-December and hopefully there will be some Episode 02 teaser renders to share. 

I've been back at my renderbox to do some scene experiments for Episode 02 and to generally  clock some flight hours with Daz again. Funny how you forget stuff if you don't touch your tools in months. 

Anyways, I now finally grok how Futalicious is supposed to be used. Clearly, it was never meant to be used with Daz's Smart Content, yet I never understood why the icons and everything else about it was so unfriendly even in the Content pane. Well, now I know that all the pain goes away if you use Daz's view of your on-disk asset folders. #whoknew #antedeluvian

Second, here's a work-in-progress render. Yay, finally! 

:)

Since the last post, quite some progress has been made towards getting Consort to its Episode 02 release.

First off, I have refactored and built-out my story framework. It remains Ren'Py-based but it's now a lot simpler for me to add scenes to Consort and to debug those scenes given various possible permutations of the "player's" choices.

Secondly, The paths in the story are now better formulated/planned/organised - pick the word you like best. Bottom line is that branching options and story paths in Episode 02 have all been worked out.

Finally, about 75% of the Episode 02 text is complete and proofread. I've also been planning/collecting assets for the renders as I go along.

All being well, I hope to provide another status update before the end of November 2023.