Ezy

Episode 4, Update #4

Added 2023-10-08 15:45:29 +0000 UTC

-Episode 4 development progress-
I'm currently working on the two different paths you can take. It's taking a while, as both of them interconnect and involve a lot of different people. Things happen in one path that might make you go "aha" once you've also played the other side. This is also the first time you'll hang out with some of the lesser known classmates outside of your usual training and sparring matches, so I have a lot of different poses to make and clothing to give them.

-Tech blurbs-
Speaking of clothing, devs often complain about slow loading times and running out of VRAM. Even with a 3090 or a 4090 which both have 24GB of VRAM (that's a lot!). DAZ assets are often horrendously optimized and waste resources all over the place. I have a real-time game development background and one of the more common things you'll do, is asset optimization. This usually means using the least resources possible to get the result you want. One of the biggest culprits is the amount of textures used. As I need to port anything from DAZ into Unreal Engine, I come face to face with this asset waste.

Recently I gave one of my characters a nice pair of shoes. It used 6 textures of each kind (color map, normal map and roughness map), each occupying only a tiny bit of space for several parts of the shoe. That's 18 x 4k textures, just for the shoes! Some would say, "who cares, this is not a real-time game!" and they're right. However, it doesn't matter if it's a still render or running real-time. In both cases, the same amount of VRAM is occupied by a stupid amount of textures which is completely unnecessary and slowing you and your renders down!

So what do you do about this? You start merging everything of the same kind into a single texture. Instead of the shoes previously using 18 textures, it's now only using 3. That's a huge victory, as your VRAM now has space to load an additional 15 x 4k textures used for something else. It's totally not a fun job, but it's something you do once for that asset.

All the best,

Ezy