Developer's Journal 3:5

Hey everybody.  The lunch scene with Jamie and Seo Jun ended up taking longer than I hoped and I didn't finish it until this morning.  All of the renders just took so long.  The worst offender was a closeup of Jamie I did in 4K which was a six-hour render (!!!) and which I redid because I didn't like the camera angle, but even spot renders took so long.  Anyways, that scene is done and today I started working on the wedding.

I've had some pretty horrible ideas in my life.  An eleven-day engagement to a college girlfriend was one.  An all-you-can-eat lunch buffet at Ryan's Buffet in Woodstock, Georgia just two hours before I was a family's invited dinner guest was another.  But I'm not sure any "what the hell was I thinking" moment will compare to this wedding in Episode Three.

I wrote the script for Episode Three prior to releasing the demo when I was still learning Daz.  I had an inkling of just how much work I was creating for myself with that scene, but somehow I thought, "Well, by then I'll be a pro with Daz and I'll be able to pull it off."  Over a year later, I am not a Daz pro yet, and I suspect that any real Daz pro would have warned me just how bad of an idea this was.

I actually don't know if I'll be able to pull off the vision I had in mind.  A large church packed with guests, a reception hall packed with guests and dancing.  The number of Daz models I would have to create, dress, and pose is immense.  And then there's the problem of saving and loading such a large scene and of course, the biggest problem: rendering the damn thing over and over in segments and putting it all together.  Every single image would have to be rendered multiple times in order to composite in Photoshop, and based in part on the size of the environment I'm using these are once again long renders.

Massive scenes have been done by better developers than myself.  I'm sure you've all played through Drifty's concert scene in Leap of Faith.  It can be done.  But (1) Drifty was more experienced/talented than I am and (2) he had help with that scene.

While I'm tempted to scale it down (e.g. smaller church, fewer guests), I'm afraid that makes the scene less effective.  And the scene does deliver an important plot point.

So, what I'm saying is that I will ask you to be patient as this scene will probably take me a while to finish.

That's all for this week.  Thank you for your support!

--Monk