FUTA CONTENT WARNING! (Aw, who am I kidding. You already know I'm into that)
Sup guys!
So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to really, REALLY learn Blender. Like, not just for adding jizz to my Daz characters, but actually understanding the fundamentals. I've kind of had this weird history with Blender, where I tried twice in the past to learn the fundamentals using tutorials on YouTube. But every time, I got overwhelmed and quit. I'm not sure what was different this time, but things just started clicking.
It took about a week to finish the YouTube beginner course on how to make a donut in Blender. Every person who's ever tried to learn Blender knows the one I'm talking about, lol.
I learned pretty much most of the fundamentals I needed for more advanced stuff, and just doing things on my own without having to Google everything all the time. But before I moved on, I rigged the donut to make that little animation on the thumbnail. Needless to say, it didn't go too well, but I learned some new things, and the end result was kinda funny.
Susan woke up from her nap to help me with this demonstration
Okay, hear me out, I actually didn't spend a whole week learning Blender basics just so I could animate donuts humping, I swear.
This might seem like just a regular render of Susan, nothing out of the ordinary. Except! This was rendered in Blender, and not Daz Studio! This is my ultimate goal of learning Blender. Using and rendering my Daz Studio characters in Blender.
The whole process of fully converting a Daz Studio character for use in Blender is very convoluted and error-prone. I've failed so many times until now. Sure, I've imported characters into Blender in the past to cover them with jizz, but it was never a functional copy of the characters; that method just creates a lifeless statue version of them.
Daz And Blender Render Quality Comparison
I warned you about the futa. No turning back now 👀
Here, I decided to take things a step further, adding all the gental meshes, setting up the camera, and pre-posing the scene in Daz before importing everything to Blender.
My Daz lighting setup didn't transfer, so I had to setup brand new lights in Blender, so it's not a very fair comparison on that aspect. But overall, this was a very successful port. This and the next part took about another week to finish.
Animations
Oh boy.. Animations...
It took a while to wrap my head around this. Luckily, I found some good tutorials out there. The worst part of this was dealing with the lag, which is something I thought I wouldn't have to put up with in Blender, like in Daz Studio. Although, I would later find out ways to optimize my scenes for better preview speed. This was just to try animating in Blender for the first time.
I can make similar animations in Daz, but the tools are nowhere near as flexible or intuitive as Blender. The render engine I used (Evee) for this animation took seconds to render each frame. A similar quality in Daz Studio would take several minutes per frame.
The default animation tools in Daz Studio are so bad. In order to make animations in Daz Studio, I literally have to use a third-party plugin developed by some random dude in his free time, cuz the Daz developers can't be bothered to upgrade the default one to something that's not from the stone age.
Physics!
One of the best parts about working in Blender is the physics simulation. It's soooo good, bro. It requires a lot of effort to set up, and even more to optimize, but it's so worth it. Also, it's been almost another week since I started learning this one.
This was my first attempt at boobs physics. It was a nightmare to get working, and the end result doesn't really show the full impact of the simulated physics on the model. So I made the next one
This one is kinda cursed. butt, it was a useful way of really seeing the physics' effect on the character meshes. AND I also learned how to retarget/transfer animations from pre-made ones to my character, which could be useful for complex animations like this.
Here, I made a lot of refinements to the thigh physics. Instead of having separate jiggle sections for the thigh and ass, like the last one, I made the whole thing jiggle as one.
I also practiced some cloth physics to move the skirt dynamically with the cheeks, but that did not end well. It's a very convoluted process, especially if you want to optimize it, so instead, I found another way to move the dress with her butt and save my poor CPU.
Setting Up A Scene In Blender
Your reward for making it this far 🫡
There's an animated version of this for detective tiers.
I love making renders in Blender. Posing is fun, and you get immediate feedback when altering things like lighting. Daz Studio just takes forever, to the point where most times, I just hope the render comes out looking okay.
Do I Plan On Using Blender Now?
I would love to, but right now, there are just so many cons to do that, like:
The file sizes are BLOATED! A 7MB scene in Daz Studio can translate to more than 1 GB in Blender. To put that into perspective, Cabin Corpse's Daz save files take up 98GB. So I would need a MASSIVE memory upgrade to even consider that.
Transferring assets from Daz to Blender can be a huge pain. So many steps to repeat. And once they're finalized for characters, I can't go back to make changes.
Accessing poses, morphs, and other assets from my Daz library is very inconvenient
Some others that I seem to be forgetting right now.
The best use case I can think of right now is for occasional animations and special supporter renders.
I'll keep learning Blender, mostly cuz it's really fun. And since the new game is short and still in its early stages, there is a chance I might move that whole project to Blender.
Cabin Corpse Dialogue Update
Learning Blender has been taking up so much of my time these past few weeks, but I've had some extra time to work on 3 of the dialogue files so far.
I wanna finish writing Ch3 dialogues asap, but I need to learn a couple more things in Blender first. But I promise I'll try to have the next update (0.6.1) out by the end of April.
Conclusion
Thank you guys so much for the support and for sticking with me through this crazy game dev journey. It's been such a huge highlight of my life, and I can't wait to improve on my work and create better content for you guys in the future.
Till next time
Stay safe, and take care! Love y'all! 💖