First Blog Post

This is my first post for my blog about the first visual novel I am making.

I am working on this novel every day and it will take many months to complete.

Originally it was inspired by K-Pop and most of all T-ara. The story however is not about K-Pop or music, although music may become a part of some of the characters in the story.

I started with this almost half a year ago and at first I used screenshots and music from video clips from T-ara (and two clips from Girl's Day). As creation software I used Novelty.

When I realized that Novelty was lacking support in further development, I considered switching to either Ren'Py or Tyranobuilder. Ren'Py seemed to be more flexible and Tyranobuilder had more ease of use. I chose Tyranobuilder because I thought that I didn't need a lot of special features and most of all I wanted to be able to save time.

I stopped using video clips as material, because obviously these are copyrighted and I felt like I wanted to not just make this for myself, but share it with the world, and making this as fan fiction is risky, because you might still get a negative reaction from the music companies.

For making characters I then started using Fuse/Mixamo and as backgrounds I used pictures that I could find on internet, which are free for commercial use. Due to changes in policy by the developers, Fuse/Mixamo became problematic for me to keep using in the way I was doing (taking screenshots from the characters I upload to Mixamo).

After long consideration, I decided to switch to Daz Studio for making characters and environments. That was end August.

Since then I have learned the basics of Daz Studio and right away I started making renders for my novel.

So far I have a few hunderd renders in my story. I wanted the graphics to be as realistic as possible, meaning that the camera angle is always from a first person view and characters are fully integrated with the environment.

Recently I got a new lighting system, called Ghost Light Kit 2, and this made it a lot easier to have indoor lighting and also seemed to reduce render time. As a result, I will be redoing lots of renders to apply better lighting. Lighting is one of the biggest challenges in making my novel. Because I have many different camera angles and combinations of characters and environments, I need to have many different lighting set ups all the time.

Right now I am making a new scene in a small restaurant and the current image I am making combines a view on the city outside from within the restaurant as well as many props and 9 characters. I am still trying to figure out how to do the lighting and it takes more than 20 minutes for simply being able to see if my lighting is good or not. My PC is one year old with a GTX970 graphics card and for complex scenes this is not optimal. In general, I am not complaining, but this scene now is probably the most complex I made so far.

I will include here the image that I made right before the one I am still working on. This one took more than one hour to render.