I don’t really use the friend feature, I don’t play online and have no use for it, but I thought you could hide games in your library if you wanted to?
I agree with it, itch.io is known to be good and the best part about it… drum roll please… NO BUGS!!
Okay so, you’re 100% right compositing backgrounds and figures is lazy and looks awful. HOWEVER there is a feature in daz3d meant for compositing called “canvas” you can render an image or render a canvas like a beauty canvas. This works like a RAW image from a camera. It will save all the lighting information from the render even if it’s irrelevant. This lets you do things in photoshop like delete a light source instantly without re-rendering to turn off a lamp or the sun. One main use for this is to build a scene with more lightsources than you think you’ll need, with some variations you’re considering… so you can test/experiment and see which set of lights looks best to turn off.
I’ve heard indoor lighting is a REALLY REALLY difficult thing to get right because without enough light rendering engines like iray just flat out don’t work.
Another random render time saving tip is to do things like before rendering a scene delete the walls behind the camera or anything you can do to reduce scene complexity. Of course only deleting irrelevant objects that won’t effect that render, then re-adding them after the render. Although some daz3d studio users will design rooms with only 2or3 walls total anyways so there’s nothing behind the camera to delete since they never finished building the irrelevant part of the room anyways…
I am re-writing this paragraph because I remember both BestmanPi - Hobbyist, Digital Artist | DeviantArt and deathbycanon User Profile | DeviantArt talking about using canvas renders and compositing somewhere eons ago, but I can’t find their comments/posts anywhere anymore and my memory is foggy on the topic, so yeah. Canvas is a feature, some really amazing artists use it, and it’s really the only way to do any compositing and not have it turn out awful. I failed to find the citation on this matter. I was looking for it and eventually gave up searching for one random post I read 6-16 months ago.
If used right compositing canvases in photoshop can let you slightly adjust a render without wasting an hour re-rendering for every minor adjustment you might make. That said you’re better at this than me, so either you already know how to do that, or it’s too confusing for either of us to use properly.
tl;dr if you don’t use canvas as a feature of daz3d maybe consider using it, otherwise you’re 100% right compositing images together looks like crap and is lazy and bad.
yes there is a feature where you can hide it
I’ve got nothing against compositing. It cuts render times a lot, it reduces file sizes and it makes it easy to have different combinations of objects on screen.
When I first started work on this, I used composites (which reminds me - a few of the images at the very start of the game are still composites - I may have to redo those at some point), but wasn’t happy with how they looked, especially the lighting. I did briefly experiment with the Canvas feature, which improved things a lot, but decided against it. Yep, rendering every scene as a complete image takes far more time, but it means that I can have pretty much any camera angle/character position that I want for a scene, and if I want to move stuff around in the background then I can without having to worry about compositing at a later stage.
Iray lighting? When it works properly, it can give excellent results. But yeah, it’s hit and miss. The amount of times I’ve set a render queue of a scene off, checked that the first image is looking good after a few minutes, left to go to work/bed etc, come back and found that the first image looks lovely, but the rest are way too dark to use. That said, my version of Daz Studio is a little outdated - I had so many issues with an update six months ago that I rolled back to the previous version and won’t risk upgrading again until I have to - and this may well have been improved by now.
You’re right about quite a few Daz Studio room scenes not being ‘complete’ rooms. Which is great for cutting down on render times, but highly annoying if you’re the sort of person who likes to move the camera around within scenes - i.e. me 
As for deleting unused objects to speed up renders, I did do this to start with, but found it was way too easy to permanently delete/overwrite files. Especially as the render queue software will only work with saved files. So I don’t bother. When you’re working with dozens of different scenes, and many images within those scenes, things need to be as simple as possible 
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Yeah Daz3d… the thing has been around for a while hasn’t it? It’s truly ridiculous how much you need to spend on something that old, just to be able to make decent renders.
Just out of curiosity I went on Daz store to see how things are lately and let me tell you, I really felt bad for you tigger. It’s disgusting what lack of true competition can do.
I’m afraid the one who suggested VAM had the right idea, seems to me you can get a lot of what daz offers way cheaper and quite frankly with very good quality. Powerful morph tools, easy and intuitive interface; a pity that it’s too late, it would be unthinkable for you to make the change now; but just to give an idea here’s what I was able to do with the crappy free version of VAM and fraps just using morph sliders, without having any skill and without even animation tools GainMagic by Burpinz on DeviantArt
I’m not personally intersted in VAM, since I’m not a creator and gameplay is what I look for, i only did this shit to fool around, but I can very well imagine what such a tool could do in the hands of skilled people.
VAM isn’t really an alternative to daz though, VAM is based on daz. Many things in VAM are just purchased from daz. Although yeah, the basic VAM package is pretty nice, that’s mostly just because the VAM developer bought the re-distribution package for some daz essentials. If you want to drastically expand on what VAM is doing though you will usually do it with additional daz elements.
Also there’s HEAVY competition in this market… The daz team used to be the poser content creation team until they rebelled and broke loose and started competing against their former bosses. Additionally there’s all sorts of competition from things like maya. It’s just that daz products are ten times cheaper than maya.
If you don’t like the daz store you can always buy things from renderosity or renderotica or whatever, the thing is that those aren’t really “cheaper”. Additionally they’re still “based on” daz technology. Thing is the daz studio itself is free. The TLDR here is no one on earth wants to undercut daz’s prices because the prices are already at what the competition would consider a low enough price (even if artists find it a ripoff).
If you want to just dick around in daz for fun though? You can literally pirate all the content on the daz store super easily. It’s just that in order to sell a game made using daz assets you better darn well own the rights to do so. Just in case you wanna experiment for funsies ever @Burpinz
I see… but isn’t there actually a whole community site worth of VAM free stuff? And all the things I saw for sale seem to be generally cheaper too. I do admit however that I’m not really into it enough to seriously discuss this, mine was more of an opinion based on limited personal experience than anything else.
Yes there is a VAM repository but it a) mostly contains scenes, which… aren’t assets. Like in anyway. and b) has plenty of people on it selling paid goods and c) my point wasn’t that you couldn’t use VAM, but that since VAM is entirely based on daz, it can’t really be called a competitor. It might compete with daz studio as a tool someone might use in making a game, and in fact VAM can even run “games” inside itself, which isn’t at all something daz3dstudio can do. VAM is based on IIRC genesis 2 daz figures and VAM 2.0 will be based on genesis 8 daz figures. VAM is a derivative work of daz.
I will admit though for an amateur not looking to produce a game, VAM is a lot more fun to toy around with than daz is, because that’s what VAM is designed for.
The main two things people are sharing with each other on/through VAM are a) free scenes which are just collections of things arranged so that they can be used by someone with no creative skill of their own or b) paid assets which take base daz models and morph them to look like celebrities. Now that’s one very important distinction. DAZ has a VERY VERY hardline stance against putting anything on their store that resembles in anyway any celebrity or popular intellectual property. I think they got in trouble for it many years ago and removed many things from their store and have been hardline against it ever since. Whereas on VAM if you change 1 word in someone’s name you can just sell a lookalike of them and this is a very popular thing to do in VAM for profit and fappage both.
Hi !
Have you ever thought about adding sounds to your game? @tiggertoo
I dabbled with VAM a fair bit when it first came out. It has a hell of a lot of potential. I found it difficult to get to grips with though, especially in VR. This was a couple of years ago, and by all accounts it’s improved massively since then. Interestingly, I had no idea at the time that it used Genesis 2 stuff
I’ll have to give it another try soon, especially if it’s moving to Genesis 8.
@Nikubi I’ve thought about sounds a few times, but I doubt I ever will.
Background music? Most people just turn this off anyway.
Sound effects? Not a lot for a game like this, other than eating/burping which would soon get monotonous.
Speech? I’d love this, but apart from the cost of having to hire voice actors, even heavily compressed audio would greatly increase the size of the game. Not to mention that people all round the world play this - many of whom struggle with English. I think for a game like this, it’s more immersive to imagine the characters speaking in the way you’d imagine, rather than hearing them the way I think they should sound.
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Hmm, the only reason at all I can think of to update dazstudio… In the past couple years? That I can think of? Is filament, which provides real-time rendering for the viewport of a higher quality than just looking at meshes and a higher speed than actually having to render anything. It’s… somewhat useful maybe, sort of, kind of.
Oh also uh, @VAM vam2.0 is EONS away the dev just recently announced he was gonna work less on vam1.0 updates and start working on rebuilding the whole thing as vam2.0. Although yeah in 2022 or 2023 when VAM2.0 exists I also plan to check it out again, for sure.
I don’t get the point of background music in this type of game anyway. But then, i usually prefer playing my own soundtracks to most games rather than the built-in BGM (Old-school games, fantasy epics, and JRPGs not included). Shoegaze or trip-hop especially work for this style of game since it’s atmospheric, imo, and doing that helps me assume the characters have similar tastes to me. Win-win.
Exactly. Far simpler to just play your own background music instead
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Eons away? Hmmm, there’s a chance of me getting my game finished first, then
@tiggertoo this might have been already answered, but what is the correlation between how much Alice eats in the early stages of the game and romance? Is there a way to make her gaining faster through certain choices? When she hits a certain weight she eats like there is no stopping, but her early stages take a while (though they’re super fun!)
Nope, it hasn’t been revealed A girl has to have some secrets! That said, she does pretty much give the game away very early on when she says ‘When I’m happy, I eat’…
The game is deliberately slow paced - especially at the start. In the next version (still coming soon!), the latter stages will be slowed down a litte.
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Ah got it! My original playthrough of 5.0 took around 180 days if I remember correctly. Looking forward to the new version, this honestly has to be my favorite game on the site!
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Soon 
Let’s go! After this upcoming version, how far do you think you’re through the total project now? It’s already a pretty substantial game, really impressed it’s all a one man project.
It’s honestly really hard to say how far through I am. I’ve had a definite story in mind pretty much from the outset and that hasn’t changed. But I keep adding more and more stuff to the story And the more I add, the longer it’s going to take to finish.
If I had to put a percentage on it, I’d say we’re about 60-70% of the way through, but that said, if you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have said the game would be finished long before the end of 2020…
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