SeptCloudGames
patreon
Two years, going strong!
🕑 Added 2024-04-01 13:45:27 +0000 UTCToday marks two years since we launched the very first update for The Seven Realms!
It's been an incredible journey, and we thank you all so much for your support. Without you, this game wouldn't exist as it does today. While our work behind the scenes can be stressful, the fact that so many of you are enjoying the game makes it all worth it.
We hope you'll stick around with us for longer still, as we're just getting started!
(Comparison of similar scenes from our first update to our newest)
While we have you here, we thought we might as well provide you with some updates :)
New Team Members
We've found someone, Spring, to help with the posing.
Even if the posing of Realm 3's main story is almost complete, Spring will help with posing the Side Paths and Realm 4 moving forward.
To keep producing high-quality updates, the lighting of each render by Shoe_Lac3 is essential. We've mentioned previously that the main thing "slowing down" the updates was that only one person was working on the lighting, and this process is slow because of Daz (the software we use to create our in-game images). To speed up our process, we needed someone skilled to match Shoe_Lac3's style and help him with lighting. Well, we did!
Luceian, who had already been posing our action scenes since late Realm 2, has joined the team full-time and will help light the updates!
We've done a few tests with our libraries syncing (because Swol Atlas and Goblin Leyala were making too many appearances), and he should soon be ready to light the future updates with Shoe_Lac3.
Below was a recent lighting test with him, and I already foresee many usages for this image, lol.
You won't see a change in update speed right away, as he still needs to adjust to the workflow and has a few fighting scenes left to pose. But we're confident we can complete Realm 3 sooner than initially expected.
However, even if Luceian helps with the lighting to speed up the process, we still have one major problem: Daz.
Which leads us to our next big announcement.
Realm 4 In Blender
But it's all good! We know the move to Blender can be worrying for some supporters, as other games attempted it and had major delays. However, we've been using Blender for our animations since Realm 2 and optimised our models in Blender since the start of Realm 3.
Here are a few images of Atlas and Ba'el in Blender. As you can see, they look exactly the same as in Daz.
We have also already moved most of our environments to Blender because of our animations, so we don't need to work on that again.
But you must wonder why we want to move to Blender… Well, there are several reasons, but here are the two big ones.
Environments
The Seven Realms is a fantasy game set in a world from my (Tae) imagination. I need more than Daz assets to describe what I have in mind. It's highly frustrating for me to have to rewrite events or scenes because I can't find an asset that matches what I have in mind.
It was manageable for the first three realms, but for Realm 4, it will be almost impossible to pose what I have written, as a lot of it is happening underwater. Anyone who has attempted water simulation in Daz knows it's atrocious.
With Blender, those problems are almost fixed, as we can create our own environments, and the water simulation is excellent. Yes, we will still use existing assets, but we can modify them or create something new if needed. The only limitation will be our ability.
Below is an example of one (work-in-progress) location our environment designers have created for Realm 4.
Working On Scenes
The other problem we encounter is opening and closing each render. Depending on your computer and how heavy a scene is, it can take 5 to 15 minutes to open one render and 5 to 15 minutes to close it. Currently, our updates involve around 275 renders. This means that just opening and closing one render takes us between 10 and 30 minutes.
In an update of 270 renders, each person working on the images wastes between 45 and 135 hours just waiting for the images to open and close. In general, at least two people are working on them: the first one (Shoe_Lac3 or Luciean) lights the scene, and the second one (us) renders them. In total, it's 90 to 270 hours wasted waiting for Daz.
In Blender, there's no waiting time. You open one blend where all your poses are, put the light for the whole scene (while adjusting it for specific shots), and then the person rendering it has to click one button, and it renders everything continuously.
This also allows us to modify something more easily when we spot an error in a render, which means higher-quality work.
What are the next steps?
The Side Paths will be posed in Blender.
To speed up the Realm 3 process, the Side Paths will be posed in Blender. As they are massive (half the size of a Realm), posing them in Blender should allow us to have them way quicker than if they were posed in Daz.
Tae will stop doing the posing:
Spring will take charge of the posing, and Tae will be able to focus on writing. That's a relief, as she had to cut things in the previous realms because she couldn't develop her ideas while posing simultaneously.
Realm 4 and beyond should explore choices and other things more thoroughly.
So now we won't hire any new members of the TSR team, as it would be useless. Adding people to pose will not speed up the process. You won't see the result immediately, as we're still working in Daz for Realm 3's main story, but you will by the end of Realm 3 and the start of Realm 4.
As the TSR team is full, we've hired others to work on a companion game for TSR. It's another small team composed of a poser and an animator. So they don't work on TSR, and the TSR team doesn't work on their project. We'll share more info about this other project soon!
Well done if you read through all of that! Again, thanks very much for sticking around, and we hope you continue to enjoy what we create in the future :)
Have a good one!
Jay & Tae
