2020-01-12 News-ish

Just wanted to share what I consider to be a small victory in the fight against non-existent assets.

There are times when making this VN I’ve run into the problem of simply not having something that I envisioned in a scene when I wrote it.

I have a vision, and I never want to that vision to be hampered by “This would be cool, but I can’t find that for Daz, so we gotta do something different.”

Well, I’m happy to report I’ve taken the first tentative steps to removing that impediment. I give you, Chinese Food!

For scene I’m working on, I have Amanda and Roger eating some Chinese food in the hotel room. It’s not a big deal really, but it was something simple and I didn’t think it would be a problem finding it. Damn was I wrong. Search as I might, I was unsuccessful in turning up a simple take out container of Chinese food that I was happy with. So I said fuck it. This is a very simple geometric object that shouldn’t take very long to create in Blender.  And you know what, it didn’t. 

In about an hour I not only had my food container created, uv unwrapped and exported, but I went the extra mile and rigged the flaps so that they could be positioned on a whim so that I can create two or three “unique” props in open or closed states. Another twenty minutes or so of creating the surfaces in Photoshop, and in less than an hour and a half I had a fully functional prop ready to be put in the scene.

It did take some time to figure out how to get all the surfaces aligned in Daz and it was my first time using the Geometry Editing Tool, but now that I have and I’ve gone through the process, it’s pretty damned easy.

So my plan for this going forward is to continue using Blender to create simple props for the game. It’s good practice and will help me iron out all the nuances of combining these two programs. Then who knows, in several months when making rigged props is fast, easy and second nature, we’ll see about using Blender to create some unique environments and scenes that previously weren’t possible because the assets didn’t exist.

It’s exciting stuff that is going to free up the creative process and allow us to go virtually anywhere with this story. But in the meantime, back to work on Amanda. I’m almost done with the chapter and if all goes well, I may do one more Live Stream on Monday or Tuesday that will hopefully wrap up the art for her chapter.

So close I can taste her…IT. I meant to say it.

Salute mates, we’ll talk again soon!