vrengames

More Rendering Automation!

Added 2018-11-20 05:37:27 +0000 UTC

First, a quick update on v0.11 progress. All but one of the core sex positions has been rewritten (a task that ended up being much larger in terms of word count than I was expecting), and the last one should be done a few hours after I post this. A big chunk of new renders also just finished, adding: eye shadow (two types), blush, lipstick, a vest, and a tube top. A new facial type has been added and all existing facial images have been rerendered to ensure the character is looking towards the camera.

All of these images finishing up prompted me to take a look at piece of my image rendering workflow that has been bothering me for a while but that I never got around to improving. Previously my rendering script in Daz Studio would check a master file to see if there were any clothing/face/body images that should be defined but didn't have an image and create those. I would then take the new images and run them through a batch image plugin for Gimp to crop each of the images to their appropriate size for display. This process involved more manual copying, pasting, and general fiddling than I liked, but it was a small task I had to do once for every set of images. Over time the number of positions LR2 supports has grown and the task has gotten more tedious little by little. Today I set about solving the problem once and for all.

A couple hours of work looking into the scripting tools for Gimp and coding and I have an automated script that does everything my previous efforts did with a single button press. The script searches for images that are sitting in my master render output file that are missing from the LR2 character images folder and pulls up the particular cropping requirements from a list. The image is cropped and dropped into the LR2 images folder ready to go.

It feels nice to have that nuisance out of the way so I can focus on adding more actual content rather than just maintaining the program.