I’ve finished scene 4 of 9 and am most of the way through scene 5. There are a lot of new locations in this chapter, which are taking a long time to set up. But they’ll be used throughout the rest of the VN, so there’s that.

So far, for chapter 4, I’ve completed 361 renders. I estimate there will be about 1,000 total when I’m done with chapter 4. For quality, all of my Daz Studio renders are done at 2K (2560x1440) resolution. The images are then processed (gamma, hue, brightness, and contrast) and then reduced to 1920x1080 resolution for the final images.

Screens take anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours each to render, depending on how complicated each scene is. (Mine is a pretty beefy system: Ryzen 9 5950X, 64GB RAM, and NVIDIA RTX 3090) Breakfast scenes are the absolute worst performers. Between the immediate set and characters; their clothes and hair; the lawn, shrubbery, and fences; the neighborhood seen behind the yard fences; and all of the textures/shaders involved, scenes can max out my video card memory. Daz Studio automatically (and without warning) switches from the video card GPU to the main CPU when that happens. It’s not a sharing of resources–it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. So renders can then take 10-18 hours each. If I catch it in time, I have to stop and jigger the scene to temporarily bring down the video card memory requirements. And it can still take hours to complete.

I know I promised to announce release dates for chapter 4 in my last status update. I’m still not quite far enough along to do that. One of the longest scenes in the entire VN is in chapter 4 (scene 8: Alex’s date with Brad). I’m not sure how much more animation I’m going to include in this chapter outside of the handful already completed, which will affect the number of renders required and (obviously) the amount of time left to go. Soon.

A couple of new images from these past two weeks: