Story Start (nsfw!)
Flames | Chapter Start
Flames | Page 41
Flames | Page 43

Back at it again! Development was way longer than I had hoped for, but I really feel the results are worth it. Can't wait to show it off in more expansive shots to come! I am especially proud of the advanced crowd building script I developed to help me populate the background Lapsa. Every time I thought I was done, I had an idea for a new use case that would "only take a little more time to extend" this class or that. By the end I had 9 different Crowd governing classes, in a nice little hierarchy. A little muddy, but lots of options. From Crowds that form lines, to ones that stay at assigned stations, to even ones that move around along a line path then end at stations. All kinds of options for building out a little life to the background. Swimmers dive in, swim to the end, climb out, and loop around to dive in again. People walk their way around different parts of the pool area and in some cases stop to ogle some Kailum practitioners. All around, Lapsa are chit-chatting or relaxing in a jacuzzi, or enjoying the little new hires mixer. Well, Yeltsin doesn't look like he's enjoying it terribly much, does he?

There are problems, though. The lighting seemed finally well fit but in rendering these frames, I've decided to take a day or so and try another pass to improve some of the lighting on those walking past the pool. There's far more hotspots generated by the shaders than I noticed in my tests, too. But, I may have to live with that as the shots already runs between 3 to 10 hours! Might tweak a couple slowest shaders, though.

All in all, I'm very happy to be working on pages again. Barring a very minor pair of settings in about 9 pages, or so, It's almost a straight shot of page development to the end of the Flames now!