Hey guys, it's been a few weeks. I'd first of all like to apologize to all of you for being so late not only with Chapter 1's release, but also to give you an update. Some things went right, some didn't (especially on the technical side) and gave me a burnout. After weeks of trial and error I was able to figure out how to go forward, and I'd like to share this small journey with you.

SUCCESSES

It all started several weeks ago when I discovered a software called Luminar Ai, and its new version, Luminar Neo. These are image editing tools that really simplify the editing process, requiring only 5 minutes to get some pretty great results. Discovering this software gave me the idea of remastering older renders to bring their quality up to a better standard, and polish my newer renders. Here's a couple of before/afters of old renders:

Before

After

Before

After

That's a pretty nice bump in quality I would say, especially being able to use Luminar to create a pretty nice depth of field effect, although maybe a bit too exaggerated in the first example. Finding this software felt like an amazing way for me to update older content without having to go back and re-render everything, but it wasn't without its quirks and issues. I'd also like your feedback on the afters; do you like the edits? Do you think the colours are too saturated? Do let me know!

FAILURES

The main issues I've been having are related to the depth of field effect. First of all, the AI detection in Luminar is not perfect. After applying the DoF effect, I have to go in and tweak it, else I get results like this:

The red area is the AI detecting the subject to keep in focus, and as you can see it doesn't completely select Lily, especially her hair giving it a smudged look, and it also selects some areas that are not the subject, like some places inside the house. so I have to go in and manually focus/defocus things.

The other issue is that even with the subject being properly selected, the DoF effect would still create some artifacts like in the picture below around Grace's fingers, and my only way to fix it would be through Photoshop.

But all in all, these were issues I didn't really mind dealing with. Sure it would take a lot of time to go in and correct these issues, but I didn't mind it since it would up the quality of what I had already done, but a realization came to me WAY too late, as I was about 150 renders in; what about the animations?

This thought gave me pause. I would have to re-render the animations into a PNG sequence, which is easy enough to do, then edit the frames in Luminar and finally compile the PNG sequence into a looping video, which would not be that much of an issue as you can batch apply effects in Luminar, but I then realized that the DoF effect would fuck all of this up, as I would need to go in frame by frame to correct any issues caused by the DoF effect. Each animation is 3-4 seconds on average at 60fps, which would mean 180 images to edit per animation, and ToL has a decent amount of animations, 100+, which would mean over 1800 images to edit individually in addition to the 500+ still-renders. As you can imagine, the sheer number alone just made me go numb, and I started to feel the burn out. I had already edited a decent amount of images, and didn't want to give up, but going through 1800+ images one by one would be soul-crushing. I took a few days off to clear my mind and think of a solution.

That's when I came to a decision; since I still have pretty much all of the scenes saved, I would go back to my older renders, rework them to include the DoF effect in-engine to not get any of the weird artifacts and just use Luminar to edit the colours, exposure, etc.

That's where the last issue came up. The engine has two ways to create a DoF, one provided by the engine itself, and one provided via a mod, and the majority of developers prefer using the mod to create the DoF as you could go into a bit more detail with it. That's where my lack of experience with this mod slowed me down, I was able to get a somewhat serviceable DoF effect, but it would also bleed into the characters, making some part of their bodies blurry as well. I decided to use the in-engine DoF, and after several more days of tweaking and experimenting, I was FINALLY able to get it to work as I wanted it to!

PLANS GOING FORWARD & PREVIEWS

After going through this experience, there are a few things that I want to do. First of all, I want to be more consistent with not only update previews, but also talking to you guys. Beforehand I would always kinda work until I've made what I consider to be decent progress before posting here, but now I think that I'll be posting weekly updates even if there's nothing major, talk about maybe some of the technical aspects of things, what went right, what went wrong, as a way to communicate with you.

Secondly, I won't be giving time-frames for releases. Well, I might give a general ball-park, but I've found that giving a time-frame for a release puts more pressure on me, which in turn causes me to fumble and overthink more, which results in me progressing a lot slower than I would if I hadn't given myself a deadline. This will ironically make me work at a faster pace, so I believe to be for the best.

Now, here are some before/afters of a few scenes that I've remade (not yet edited in Luminar, I'll post before/after Luminar edits next week, promise). Enjoy c:

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Thanks you so much for your patience and support c: I know that it can be frustrating supporting a newbie dev because of things like this, but your support means the world to me, and that you found enough potential in Taste Of Life that you'd want to financially support it means even more! I'm eternally grateful, and I look forward to giving you more as soon as I can. Take care and have a great week c: