vrengames

Back to Work and Looking at Rendering Times

Added 2017-12-28 06:38:09 +0000 UTC

Hey everyone, I'm officially back on the clock now and already hard at work on LR2 again. As I type this I'm rendering all of the images associated with a new character pose: a more seductive looking standing posture. Once that rendering is done and everything is in the game I'll put up some preview images for patrons to take a look at; expect to see that in a day or two. I was able to find some time over the holidays to get some writing done too, so three out of the current eight sex positions have all of their descriptions written up. These will be expanded as development goes forward, but for now it's a little sexier than a placeholder tag.

Since I've got my computer working on rendering right now it seems like a good time to think about the total amount of render times I should be expecting across the project. I'm going to do my best to show my work here, feel free to skip to the tl;dr at the end if it doesn't interest you.

Lab Rats 2 character currently have 3 main body types and 10 breast sizes. For clothing items that don't interact with the breasts that means there will be 3 images produced per position - one for each body type. Hairstyles are even easier, they don't depend on body type at all so each hairstyle is a single image tinted different colours. Clothing that interacts with the torso of a character is by far the most resource intensive part because we generate an image for each breast and body type combination. That means 30 different images for each piece of torso clothing, per position I want that clothing rendered from. We'll assume that's our limiting factor for render time.

So lets throw some real numbers at this. I currently have 9 torso pieces (2 dresses, 4 bras, and 3 shirts), but I'm going to assume that number grows and we have 20 in the near future. That means I should expect something on the order of 600 different images to be produced per character position. A single image render takes about 5 minutes for a high res version or 30 seconds for a low res test version. That's 50 hours of render time per position for high res images, or 5 hours for low res ones.

There are two imaging positions right now, but I'll want at least 6 so there's variation in different sex positions (say, default standing, sexy standing, kneeling, lying down, doggy style, and against a wall). That brings our render time to 300 hours (12.5 days) for high res, or 30 for low res. If you want to add more outfits, positions, body styles, or breast sizes modify that time proportionally.

That's a decent chunk of time, but it's for rendering the entire library of images all at once. When one outfit or position is added at a time over a bunch of updates it's not bad at all. It's also a problem that can be solved by throwing more hardware at it - I could put together a relatively cheap computer and use it as a dedicated render box that runs 24/7 for a few hundred dollars. The actual images produced are small: the theoretical image library I described above would take up just under 200MB uncompressed, so game size shouldn't be an issue. This also really demonstrates why all my automation work was necessary to make this approach possible!

tl;dr: The rendering time for each new image position is on the order of tens of hours, and rendering the entire library of images for LR2 will take a total of two weeks of render time. Spread out over several updates, this amount of render time will be completely reasonable.