Haven's Port - Wardrobe!

Greetings Lads and Lasses! 

Early this month, I told you that I'd be posting some details about Haven's Port. However, the very first thing I wanted to cover hit a series of technical stumbling blocks that I only just finally overcame completely. Since I really wanted this to be the opening post in the series, due to it being something I've been unable to pull off in most of my other games to-date, that meant putting off the post series longer than I'd intended. That having been said, I did manage to work my way around the technical issues that cropped up at last, leading to me finally being able to introduce the Wardrobe System. 

In previous games (with the exception of Cosplay Cafe, to a limited extent), I've been unable to really allow the player to change much about the character. That, sadly, is still the case for things like physical transformations. However, as you can see above, it is no longer the case for outfit changes! Haven's Port will feature the ability for the player to purchase and equip a wide array of outfits...most of which will have some status effects! Most of those effects will tie into either the Reputation System, which allows you to advance up the ranks of the city from an ex-slave just off the docks to...well, a couple of different high positions that I won't spoil by listing them! Suffice it to say, as I'll be covering in other posts, you'll be able to advance in Reputation, and you might need certain outfits to help sell your new status...

Conversely, other outfits will actually affect content in a different way, by playing to how other characters see you. A slutty outfit will trigger some different events than a conservative one, or a poor outfit might prevent someone from being willing to even speak to you! The Wardrobe System will be one of several core features of Haven's Port! 

As to the technical stuff...I finally managed to make this sort of thing possible in this game by a combination of two factors. The first is simply planning the game so that I don't have to actually render the exact details of what you're wearing all that often. Jobs in the game will have their own uniforms, for example, and thus not require me to render every job scene some horrible number of times. However, as pictured above, there WILL be places in the game that you'll see what your character is wearing! In this case, the MC is in her bedroom, considering what to do/where to go. Likewise, big story events for major NPCs may show all variants that COULD be worn in that scene. And so on.  

The other half of the equation was what caused me fits for most of this month. Originally, I had intended to simply rerender the needed scenes however many times needed. Only to run into a massive technical problem I hadn't known would BE a problem. That being that, for some god-awful reason, the Iray render engine in the latest version of  Daz is PAINFULLY slow at rendering sets. The nude render you see in the images? Despite having a fairly powerful system and stripping the scene complexity down as much as I could...that render took over 4 hours. I still don't know why that is. Six months ago, with LESS powerful hardware and an earlier version of Daz, I was able to render a 2k resolution scene just like these in under an hour. Now, for whatever god-awful reason, with UPGRADED hardware, the same sort of scenes are taking between 3-9 hours. What the hell?

Obviously, I had to find a solution to the issue...so after quite a bit of brainstorming (and even more cursing) I realized that I could render the background + a nude version of the character (which I wanted anyway) into whatever scene I needed to allow wardrobe changes in. The character had to be there in some form, in order to effect the lighting at least somewhat. Then, since for some INEXPLICABLE REASON,  the far-more-complex-and-detailed-than-the-backdrops Character Model takes less than 40 minutes to render by itself...I could use the same camera, lighting and pose, and just render the character model with no background. Then with some judicious use of photoshop, I have a much quicker way of getting new outfits into the scene! It's not quite as ideal as what I'd originally intended, as clothing won't cast shadow perfectly this way (though the figure's shadow will still be present), and it also means I can't do unique poses for each outfit...but it's a viable solution to make the Wardrobe System I'd planned work :-).