vrengames

Lab Rats 2 Imaging Automation, Again.

Added 2017-10-24 07:34:26 +0000 UTC

I decided early on in the development of Lab Rats 2 that it would have a flexible clothing system, allowing you to mix and match items and dynamically add and remove them. That would mean an individual sprite for each piece of clothing, for each possible position, and for each different body type. While this work isn't hard (I did it by hand for a few outfit sets, to give me a set of images to prototype with), it is very monotonous and repetitive. That made it the perfect candidate for automation, which I did. You can read the results of that early work here.

Moving forward on LR2 I've decided to move over to Daz Studio as my 3D rendering engine, which means that automation is no longer directly useful. Luckily, Daz Studio has a script editor built in, which gave me access to everything I needed. I nerd sniped myself (relevant XCKD) and started working in Daz a few days ago, sifting through their rather poor documentation to figure out how to get things to work.

I'm happy to announce that my efforts were a success, and I now have all the tools I need to automate my image production in Daz to the same degree I had them before. The procedure looks something like this:

1) Load the current body type (1 of 10 breast sizes, or 1 of 3 body sizes).

2) Load the current position.

3) Load the current piece of clothing.

4) Render an image and save it with the appropriate name.

5) Repeat step 3 and 4 for all pieces of clothing.

6) Repeat step 2 through 5 for all positions.

7) Repeat step 1 through 6 for every body type.

By automating the process I will also be able to leave my computer rendering at night instead of it eating into my development time. This makes one of the key weaknesses of Daz (long rendering time) more bearable. I'm returning my full attention to finishing off Lab Rats 1 now, but as soon as that's done I hope to have some test renders made up for you guys so you can take a look at the new engine.