Test of part of an actual ep of LHF

I just tested with posing, setting up, rendering and laying out part of LHF 1.1. Already I see some things I need to improve on.

1. First and foremost, I have way too many props, textures and gimcracks in my sets. 2 figures in an average set, which is just a sparsely decorated corner, with maybe 60 props total [mostly books :p] and 3 lights, really slows down my compooper. I can't pose characters quickly; there's a lag time of several seconds. Also rendering takes too long for my tastes, meaning that it takes 60-180 seconds. I need to relegate as much as possible to the 2-D backdrops except for furniture and 2 books, 1 telephone, 1 doll, 1 mermaid, 1 stuffed animal....the absolute essentials. I must resist the temptation to go insane with detail in the sets. They should be very simple, streamlined and highly stylized.

2. The font in the speech bubbles looks horrid. I think it needs to be 9 point BOLD.

That said, I'm enchanted with how the new medium is working out. I can get much tighter camera angles out of Daz than out of my own physical camera. I can also put the digital dolls in much more realistic, squinched-up postures than I could with my action figs. Plus the digital dolls' likeness is much closer to what Anneka and Will actually look like. Hooray!!!! Is it strange to say that I am most enchanted with the sagginess and wrinkliness of their faces and the elegance of their hands?

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Woo hoo, improvements in rendering time...

Okay, I just wrestled my aforementioned Daz scene into a state of more submissive submission. There are still 2 characters in the scene, Anneka and Will, with high-res textures on their bodies, clothes and hair. But I have reduced the number of props in the scene to 30 [from 60 -- mostly I got rid of a lot of individual books]. Also I slashed the size of most of these texture files to about 20% of original size and dropped posability information from  the props that didn't need it. [The stuffed animals don't need to be posable; they just need to sit there and look cute.]

As a result, now a render of the entire scene [OpenGL, 8 passes per light] takes 40 seconds, rather than over 60.

Hiding everything except what will appear in the frame gets the rendering time down to 18 seconds. I'd like to have it render instantaneously, a la digital camera, but that won't happen unless I get a more powerful processor or start reducing the resolution of the characters themselves, which I refuse to do.

In today's Totally Awesome category...

...please marvel at the music video for Dionysos' Tais Toi Mon Coeur. Just in case you couldn't figure it out from the associated pictures, Tais Toi Mon Coeur is French for, literally, Be Quiet, My Heart. In the dismissive, bouncy tone of the song, it can better be translated as Fuck Off, Heart. The animation reminds me of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride or The Nightmare Before Christmas. It looks like it's acted out by Victorian automatons. The general ambiance smells like Poe or Baudelaire, with that sort of cheer in gloominess. For some reason, it also reminds me of the BTVS ep Once More With Feeling and Spike singing to Buffy. Then, of course, there are the generally fascinating allusions to death, resurrection, self-objectification and mannequinization [which should be a word if it isn't]. All in all, it's quite an entertaining little number. I like the little wire-and-wood articulated hands and the shadowed eyelids the best. Clunky translation of lyrics here.