Friday Progress Update, Jan 12: "Kittens"

Good day, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Welcome to Friday Progress Update number "I have no idea".

I had a dream of being done with rendering by today, but as we all know dreams are made to be broken. I had this idea of a smaller 400-450 render update but now we're looking at just over 500. It's still close though. I expect to finish rendering this weekend. I'm counting about 30 more renders and another animation. I'm sticking my neck out and claiming the next Progress Update will be a release post. Anyway, it's my dream. And ...

Aside from that, I don't know what the heck I'm supposed to write about. No one suggested any talking points and my head's empty.

Oh, I know. Someone did ask about workflow some time ago. I could write a bit about that. Feel free to drop out here if that bores you :)

So when starting an update, it usually goes like this: 1. Writing. A script has to be developed. I'm a slow writer so this takes a bit of time. I write the script in pseudo-code to make it easier to import into ren'py. I write in a plain text editor. 2. Rendering. The time-consuming part is twofold. Setting up locations, clothes, makeup and so on, and then posing characters. The more characters, the more time. Especially if they interact with each other or the environment (one character standing and just talking is the fastest). 3. Postwork. I render images and animations both as .png files. I import these into lightroom and apply whatever filter I think is suitable to them. After that I bring the images into photoshop to further fix/tweak anything I think needs it, before exporting the images as .webp files. I render everything in 1920*1080, but with less iterations for animation frames. The animation images get assembled into a .webm file through ffmpg and handbrake. 4. Coding. MtP has a very basic code, and I'm not much of a coder. A match made in Heaven! This step isn't very time-consuming, but boring. A lot of fixing formatting, inserting dissolve this and that, starting and stopping music tracks. Ugh. 5. Test playing. I try to test all scenarios and paths. I usually tweak the script some at this point because things feel off. Usually a couple of re-renders too. 6. Release! 7. Writing. A script has to be developed! That's about it. Now I'll get back to rendering. I got a deadline to meet! Thank you for reading and thank you for your support!