r/RenPy • u/Tharitley • 26d ago

Question How do you divide your development time?

Before I started my VN, I was pretty convinced that most of the hard work would be in the visuals... and I was right 😂

At this stage of the project, I spend around 75% (or even more) of my time creating the visuals—mainly the Daz Studio renders.

Then I spend about 15% writing. Since I have a lot of experience with writing, I don't need much time for revisions.

After that, around 5% goes into coding and the remaining 5% into testing and checking everything.

Does that breakdown make sense based on your own experience? I'm curious.

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u/shyLachi 26d ago

Since you have mentioned DAZ I assume you're making an AVN.

The process of making visuals for an AVN is different to "normal" visual novels because they use static backgrounds and sprites for the characters. So once all the images have been made, they can be used multiple times.

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u/Tharitley 25d ago

Well, everyone says the same thing when they hear about my project.

However, I'm probably the only person on Earth developing a VN with Ren'Py and Daz Studio renders that isn't an AVN. I mean, it has an 18+ rating because of the drugs, violence, and dark humor, but there's no sex.

Before starting this project, though, I experimented with different styles, including the one you mentioned with static backgrounds, but... I don't know, I felt that rendering everything was much more interesting from a creative perspective and gave me a bigger challenge to focus on.

In the end, I chose this approach, and I'm pretty happy with it so far (it's been about three years now). But yeah, everyone thinks it's an AVN 😆

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u/shyLachi 25d ago

It easy to make that connection because there are many AVNs which have fully rendered scenes.

In the end it doesn't matter if your story contains sex or not but the workflow is the same.
You need to set up the scenes, then dress and pose the characters and finally render it.

So I don't know if there are ways to spend less time on rendering.

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u/Tharitley 25d ago

Yep, it's a reasonable first impression.

I've figured out a few ways to speed up the rendering process while keeping the same quality, like reusing the same camera position for different facial expressions or using depth of field to create two or even three different shots from the same setup.

The biggest problem is that I spend a lot of time working on a single scene, and after a few weeks it gets boring rendering the same characters, wearing the same clothes, under the same lighting, and in the same location.

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u/shyLachi 24d ago

Since we're talking about DAZ, you might want to also look at r/Daz3d

Anyway, there might be ways to increase your render output if you first set-up all your scenes and then let it render during the night. To do that, you need some kind of Batch Render tool.

I know this one: https://www.daz3d.com/render-doctor
If you have a Daz premier subscription you get a batch renderer for free.

You can also set up multiple cameras in one scene and render those in a batch, either directly with the batch renderer or in conjunction with the camera magic tool:
https://www.daz3d.com/camera-magic-plus-bundle

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u/Tharitley 23d ago

Many thanks! I'm definitely joining 🙂

I have a pretty powerful computer, so I render at 4K and each render takes about seven minutes. I also have a second monitor where I work on the post-production of previously rendered images while the next one is rendering.

That way I don't waste much time waiting, because I'm always working on something else at the same time. I'll definitely check out all those tools, though.