aaryn
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Overdue Teaser/Behind-the-Scenes
🕑 Added 2021-06-01 23:49:48 +0000 UTCHey all,
So teasers have been slow lately mostly because I've had an actual hell of a time showing one that won't really spoil anything. In the past, I've liked to drop some teaser pics of new environments, but this one is a little bit different.
I'll be honest: I'm showing this picture because it is an accomplishment that absolutely no one will notice and--for the first time in this entire update-- I actually got something to work.
So here it is, quite possibly the most involved pain in the ass shot I've ever done for absolutely zero reason.
For anyone who cares about the complexity of this and what I spent half the damn day doing, here's the long story as well as some behind the scenes pics of the development process.
So come, walk with me, down a frustrating road paved in endless bitching that took half the day to make two gay dudes look at a fucking elevator.
Behind the Scenes
In doing a game like this, you really get an appreciation for camera angles in cinematography. Wait--scratch that-- what you actually get an appreciation for is how well people hide stuff just off camera and make it look like something it's not. The shot before the teaser pic is a headon shot depicting our lovesick heroes walking into a building with double doors behind them (shown in image 2 behind them). The actual environment that I'm using is a weird school-like hallway with an elevator in it, the primary focus of the scene. The problem is shown in image 3 where there's lockers everywhere and an exceptionally long hallway that I really didn't want.
Cue, half a day worth of modification.
Step 1 was moving the double doors. As you can see from image 2, the door the boys are now positioned behind is only a single frame door when they clearly walked through a double door. So I ripped off the door from the other end of the hallway and dropped it into the single frame but then zoomed the camera in close enough so that it actually hides the fact that the other half of the door is stuck inside a wall.
Step 2: I wanted the elevator doors to open but the person who made the asset made those doors as fake props. They don't slide open but instead are just a wall that looks like doors. This caused me to have to duplicate the entire wall and then edit two different versions of that wall. Version 1 is the wall with zero doors. Version 2 is just the doors with no wall. They're actually laying on top of one another so that it still looks like one asset but now I can move them independently by just sliding Version 2 on an axis and allow the door to slide open like the finished image shows.
Step 3: imagine my surprise when I got the door opened and learned that not only were those doors fake but there's actually no elevator there at all. I about lost my mind. So then I had to get a separate asset with an elevator similar to this environment. I deleted everything in the hallway from the new asset except the elevator and then imported it into the image. Of course it was way too small so I had to inflate it to like 150% of it's actual size and fuss with it to get it to fit right into that space. In the final render, the elevator door doesn't open up all the way because it's hiding a huge gap between the elevator and the door.
So I thought I was done.
Nope.
Guess who didn't put lights in the elevator.
Step 4: The lighting you actually see in the elevator isn't a light, It's the actual door hatch in the ceiling that I modified into a light source to make it look like a fluorescent ceiling light.
The behind-the-scenes images also show the nonsense that happens off camera a lot including body parts that you don't see are either unclothed or just bent in nightmarish positions. Reason is that it saves time not to position things people don't see and the more clothes, hair--just textures in general--that I load into the scene take up more memory and slow things down sometimes.
So there you have it....the next teaser and me venting a bit despite actually being ok with how this turned out.
Comments
Surely I'm not the only one who has conversations with their models while working in DS, right?
Lol. Sorry Zach, Braden. (Especially Braden) Your genitals and pants are hogging too much VRAM and aren't even in frame. You're just gonna have to chill here looking like a pant-less eunuch for a minute.
Aaryn
Thanks a lot for the continued support. i appreciate it. I'm pretty open with my frustrations. I like to keep it real around here. Plus, I think it's good for aspiring devs to see how frustrating this stuff can be--it normalizes the struggle, ya know? Glad to have ya here :)
David Mashtal
Thank you so much for sharing this! Gives a brief example of the work and frustration involved. I appreciate you and your work so much. You don’t know what it means to be in your discord community to me. It’s literally life saving. You are amazing. Pure and simple. Thank you!
