Last dev log of 2025, damn. It has been quite a year, and I have so much more planned for next year. I hope everyone got what they wanted from Santa, and I am wishing you all a prosperous new year. With the mushy stuff out of the way, let’s get down to business.
TLDR: I did stuff, some in Blender and some in DAZ.
Blender
Let’s start here. I got two new animations rendered out this week, fully scored with music and sound effects, and they are sitting in the game build as we speak. That alone feels pretty solid, and it brings the total number of animations for this episode up to five.
One of these animations was a bit of a nightmare to render thanks to adding fur to Zoe’s dog. That process completely messed with the render pipeline for a while, but after some guidance from Nuii Pointer, I managed to get it sorted. Thanks again for talking me off the ledge, buddy.
I also set up an animation picker for Zoe. This is going to be a huge help moving forward, as it lets me store important expressions and mouth poses for animation, while also giving me faster access to the bones I need in a scene. This is similar to what professional animation studios use, and it was a piece of advice from Puggy that really paid off in terms of speeding up my Blender workflow.
DAZ
I completed 100 still renders for the game this week, bringing the total renders for Episode 3 to 360 so far. I am hoping to push that past 400 before the new year. I know that does not leave me much time, but I would really like to hit that milestone within the first month.
I also created the exterior of the phone booth. This turned into a bit of a mission, because as usual, I was not satisfied with any of the off the shelf solutions I could find. I ended up getting creative by smashing assets together, retexturing parts, and adding or removing geometry where needed. The end result is very close to what I had pictured in my head. While it is probably a lot of effort for what amounts to an establishing shot and a few exterior renders, it reflects how important it is to me that the world of Moonlight feels alive and cohesive.
I do not really know what else to ramble about this week. As always, I am incredibly grateful for everyone’s support and the kind words that keep me moving forward.
Cheers,
Bat