Hey folks, hope you're all doing well this week! Between daylight savings time taking effect and the weather changing, I'm feeling a bit out of sorts. But, we persevere!

Over the weekend I dropped a new teaser for the Close Friend tier, which added ~400 images to the previous total. This update has everything but the last scene, which is still being worked on. I did get it up a day late, so if anyone was subbed to the Close Friend tier over the month of October, but dropped off November 1st, shoot me a message and I'll PM you a link to the build once I've confirmed your sub status.

I'm still trying to knock out as many renders as I can, while I feel like I'm in a good groove. I had to halt things for a bit in order to build that teaser, but now I'm back at it. I'm going to try to get back to fixing up the remaining Season 1 chapters that need to be integrated, but I've been finding it difficult to switch gears. I probably just need to force myself to do it.

All in all, I'm happy with how the chapter's shaping up. I just need to bring it home, now. The scene I'm working on is the big ero scene I've mentioned, which features Gabby. That's really the main version of this chapter's ending. Buuuut, I also wanted to give a little something to people who might be keen on a different love interest. So, there are some smaller alternate endings with Nicki, Mason, and other less prominent characters.

Finally, I missed posting last week's Sneak Peek of the Week because.. I was mentally fried. To make it up to my loyal $5 tier, I'll be posting a little mini-game I made a few months ago, which you can see an image of up above. Now, when I say mini, I mean mini. It's like <25 images, and something I made as a kind of a proof of concept for a lighter, sillier game. It's something I'm always kinda turning over in the back of my mind as something I'd like to play around with. It all takes place in the same location, there's a very small regular cast, and I devised it around this idea that each episode would be short, sweet, and self-contained. Think of it as the network sitcom to Friends in Need's cable drama.

Obviously I'm too busy to mess with it now, but hopefully people will enjoy seeing one of my weird little experiments.

That's all for me, today! As always, take care of yourselves -- and thank you for your support!

Hey, folks! Hope your week's off to a good start. Sorry to get this up late again. @_@ I've been a day behind for like three weeks, and unfortunately it won't be stopping anytime soon. I've got some hectic, time-sensitive stuff in my personal life that's eating away at my days, I've been doing some annoying annual re-certification stuff at my day job, and of course I'm cranking away on renders as fast as I possibly can. I've put an extra wick in my candle, so I can burn it at more than both ends.

But, things are moving pretty well. I'm in the process of getting a test build ready for my $15+ supporters, which'll likely hit at the end of the month. It'll likely be missing the last scene, since I'm not finished with it yet. But, there'll be a good bit of content. And I mayyyy have time to squeak in a few of the less lengthy, optional endings.

Attached to this post you'll find some images for a scene I had a lot of fun with, because I got to go a little big and crazy, in an environment that doesn't usually see a lot of action -- our hero's condo. As you can see, there's a bunch of extra figures in one of the images, and poor Risa's looking more than a little flustered. I'll leave you to speculate about what's going on, but I'll take a minute to get into the nitty gritty of how I put the scene together.

For those that don't know, Daz figures can be reeeeally resource-intensive. That typically limits you to a few figures per scene, if you want the renders to process in a timely fashion. Given that I'm trying to do hundreds (and over time, thousands) of renders, I can't let renders cook for hours. If a render takes more than twenty minutes, I start getting pretty annoyed. So, for a scene like this, where I want a lot of people in it, there's a few options. I could use the Scene Optimizer, which reduces the texture map of objects within the scene. Pretty useful, but it has its limits, if I don't want the characters' skin reduced to a blobby mess.

So, I tend to prefer using billboards, two-dimensional images that you can insert into a scene. Now, you can buy some fancy ones that allow you to rotate the image on the X and Y axis, and they're pretty neat. But, those sets are expensive, and you're limited to what that asset creator has made available. So, I like to use Billboard Builder and make my own. This can be useful for all kinds of stuff, from background characters to skylines. So, I set about making my background cast of party girls.

I basically just set up a light similar to what I want in the scene, and render figures against an empty, transparent background. Boom, done. But.. This takes time. And as I've already discussed, I don't like wasting a lot of time. So, I decided to try something. I tossed a couple of these images to Perplexity, told it to match the style, and generate a bunch of dancing bikini girls on a plain background. Here are some of the figures it gave me.

In the end, a process that would've taken me a decent amount of time (posing bodies, props, facial expressions, and hair, rendering, applying costumes and hair, tattoos, etc.) took me under ten minutes. I removed the backgrounds from the images with this handy tool, put them into the Billboard Builder, and I quickly had a full scene of girls partying.

Now, would I want to use this for something important? No. I'd rather be able to fully control a character's expression, pose, etc. But for background characters, which I knew I'd be blurring with a little depth of field trickery to hide any funky AI features? Well, it's a pretty solid return on the time investment.

That's it for me, today! I'm currently pushing myself to get the alpha build for the next chapter done by the 8th. That feels doable. But, as always I'll keep you updated on my progress. Until next time, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!