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Thank you!
Yes, you do have control over everything. You could instead of using PNGs go for GIFS to animate the character (so he/she can blink or talk). Narration is also something you can add, though lip sync through Ren.Py would have to be manual (not automatic). I'm giving the main characters a lot of expressions (more so than secondary or minor characters), but the change is subtle since there's no animation to the face, just a quick transition.
Oh, let me check it!
Of course, you'd then have to consider the size of the final product. If you're releasing it only for PC, then it should be fine to add audio. But if you plan on releasing it for IOS or Android, then it might become a problem.
OK just wanted to make sure. It is a holiday weekend here in the USA so once I get back on Monday/Tuesday I will donateIf you want animated characters, then maybe it's worth it to check out Live2D. Below a Tyranobuilder link introducing this:
http://tyranobuilder.com/use-live2d-in-your-games/
If you open the link above, you will see an example of a simple Visual Novel using animated characters in Live2D. There are a few problems though. For the animations to be decent, you'll need to learn how to use Live2D in more depth, which is not the easiest task, many of the discussions and tutorials you find online are in Japanese. I also found the Trial version too simplified, which forces you to pay the monthly fee for the program even before you are sure it will be appropriate for your project.
Note that once you learn to use Live2D, you can create motions where the character opens and closes the mouth continuously, and so you would "simulate" a lip sync (though the mouth would not follow the correct phonemes).
Although the animations in Live2D are very beautiful if you are a good artist and know how to use the program in a professional way, it is necessary to keep in mind that in Visual Novels much of the expression is passed to the player / reader through the text. So it's common to find some Visual Novels where the characters have only one pose and the only thing that changes is the facial expression. This would be unacceptable in a media that wants to use art to express emotions (a comic book, for example), but is totally acceptable in a Visual Novel.
Thank you very much! If you know of anyone who likes to read visual novels, please help us spread the word!
I stayed away longer than planned, I will pledge over the weekend.I am curently working on a VN based on Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart. As there are several versions of the Lamant Configuration, I feel it's a great time to have a preqel of sorts to the Hellraiser franchise. After seeing the last film, I was sorely dissappointed, and feel it's time for a fresh start. I have 4 chapters of script written for the VN, and have completed approximatelt 27 full renders. There will be no duplicate images in theis project. Currently using Tyrano Builder and Daz Studio. What do you think?
Tyrano builder is not to bad when you consider it cost like what $15. Not sure if you seen it but VNmaker was free to use for the weekend and got to say after using Tyrano VN maker does not seem to be worth the $50
Sorry to hear the Kickstarter failed. Was wondering if you wanted some feedback on the presentationYeah, it was a trial run, so not too worried about it. We did learn how the platform worked and made note of the feedback (which is why I'm redoing all the character art --and keeping the amount of expressions within reason). All additional feedback is welcome and appreciated, but if possible, please PM me so that I don't lose track of it. I'm not in charge of the KS campaign, another team member is, but I can always rely the message and discuss it with the rest of the team. :)
Sorry about being absent for a while. I didn't get any notifications in my email about new messages here anymore. I had no idea there was a lot of conversation going on :)
I have been busy developing the story of my novel and I quit making renders for a few months. Much of what I did in DAZ last year will not be used anymore because of the changes I made to the story, but it was still a good practice of course.
I am also going to focus on making a kinetic novel first with all the graphics and music and then consider how many choices I am going to add. I was thinking about an alternative for this. Instead of having choices during the normal playthrough, give the reader the option to replay parts of the story from a certain point (instead of restarting from the beginning) and continue with a different path from there. I am not sure yet what I am going to do with that. My story is turning out to be much longer than I originally thought, and I just need to focus on the most important goal, which is to at least finish the main story line.
I will be uploading regular updates with video and you can see the first one here:
Previously I had a video with a prologue and a more chronological approach to the story, but I abandoned that concept and now it starts at a point where the protagonist suffers from memory loss, and everything that happened before that will be gradually revealed later.
I think eventually I might just release everything as a free game. In any case, the main story as a kinetic novel will be free.
What I certainly need help with is language. English is not my first language and so inevitably there will be mistakes. So if anyone likes to just read through my story and let me know that there's a mistake, that would be very helpful. You can just post something on my youtube channel for example.
Also, what can always happen is graphical issues. For example in one image I had a few fingers floating around, which was the result of a partial render that didn't cover enough space. I try to do partial renders whenever possible to save on render time and file size, but this can sometimes cause mistakes which I don't see right away.
My plan is now to first finish the main story and add all the graphics for that, then make more music or get some free songs and then I will see what I can do with adding choices.
I am attaching a few pictures from the first episode video.
I use simple mouth movements with partial renders and the show/hide command in Ren'Py. Characters will not have changing expressions during one conversation all the time, because that would take too much time to make (I don't reuse similar sets of character expressions for different scenes, as what is usually done in VNs), but instead I let them talk for a while, and then change pose after the protagonist had a reply to what they said. That's my general idea about animation.
Any comments or constructive criticism is always appreciated. Thanks!
A few newer screenshots.
This vn has gotten VERY gory / guro in parts of it so I can't put those here, lol.
Thanks for sharing more pictures. I like how you add a lot of creativity to them with special effects etc. I look forward to see some gameplay/demo ...
I saw you have almost 13000 people liking your facebook page about this. I was wondering how you managed to get so many?
Did you make publicity for your novel on sites like lemma or fuwanovel or some other place?
I started to post something about my novel on such sites. On fuwanovel I asked about why 3D prerendered novels are not so popular. You can see the discussion here: https://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/20523-full-prerendered-novel/ I got some replies that are similar to what has been already said in this thread.
While I was trying out some effects for the main screen of my story, I suddenly thought that I might just try to turn my whole novel into some cartoon like style. I don't think I can do this well with paint.net and I don't have photoshop, but I found befunky.com to be very nice. I am not sure if there's any better software available for this? I doubt that you can get the same quality for free??? It's already not terribly expensive, so I might just use this.
I add an example: first the original version, then cartoonizer1 (50%) and sketcher1 (20%). So far I think I like cartoonizer the most (maybe I could combine both of them with transparency - but that's maybe not really important and just a waste of time). I tried all artsy effects on befunky, and I like these two the most for turning my graphics into something nice that appears a bit more like drawn art.
Any thoughts about converting graphics into cartoon like style for a visual novel? Does anyone have experience with this? I think this may make it more acceptable for the usual VN public?? Also it gives a more original touch to the renders. So I kind of think that this could be a good improvement.
It's tricky and recognizable unless you're willing to do paintovers.
I'm back working on a new VN. I'm going to use commissioned handdrawn art for sprites, because they won't release a properly designed male anime figure. But I'm going to put together some really nice backgrounds using Daz and Photoshop.
Good luck with your new VN!
I have been trying out several things now with cartoonizer/sketcher on befunky. It sometimes creates dark facial lines that I think I have to remove. And the worse is that I start missing my more realistic images. I tend to feel more connected to my characters when they are more realistic ... I think I might just continue the same way as before.
I now have a downloadable demo with +6800 words on itch.io. https://imavera.itch.io/7th-goddess
I received very positive comments from two people which you can see in the comment section there and one of them put a video from it on youtube saying also that the graphics are gorgeous, so maybe I don't have to worry too much about it being pre-rendered :)
I was playing with my Red Sonja picture using the fotosketcher plugin and using the ink sketch and cartoon effects and overlayed them in photoshop, I came up with this effect which looks pretty cool for a graphic novel style effect.
Fantastic graphic novel look and feel. The foreground character and background blend well. All environmental props are easily distinguishable with the reduction of detail. At the same time the character stands out just right in contrast to the scene. I always find the hair to be the most difficult to get the look. Thank you for sharing.
i have never noticed this interesting thread about VN
@ dreamfarmer
perhaps ask the devs to move it to the art forum
in commons it goes down to quick
i am just digging deep into renpy after trying unity/game maker
and i say
do not underestimate this nice engine based on python language
you can do easy things very quick but if you like to change your VN into a real game theres so much that can be done
and finally you have a reason for your renders/animations made with studio
or what do you do with all your nice renders ?
I switched from Tyranobuilder to Ren'Py and I don't regret it. The disadvantage from Ren'Py could be that you don't see the pictures in the same screen as where you are typing code and that you may have to look up more often some help info about how to do things. But once you have some basic understanding of how the coding works, then you can actually save time on programming. The prebuilt tools like skip, history, back, auto are great also. What was holding me back in the past is that you had to define every single picture before the program would recognize them, but luckily that's no longer necessary now.
I am using ren'py now myself. Writing the script inline with placeholder art, and then I'll go back through, possibly using the Interactive Director feature, and add in the real art. Although even without the ID, I think the way the engine can be told to autoupdate itself live with script changes can make it pretty useful in terms of 'seeing pictures'.
And yeah, I LOVE that all I have to do is drop properly-named pictures in the right directory and they're automatically defined in the engine.
I just hit 6700 words on my script but it's barely even an introduction and is all placeholder art so I don't think I'll be uploading a demo anytime soon..... alas. Will check yours out later though.
and it has the best tutorial i can think of
and this shows where renpy shines
i think you can make very good tutorials with it
I didn't do much with the Interactive Director yet and just discovered now what the live update during playback does. Thanks for checking my demo later! I look forward to your comments.
Updated the demo on https://imavera.itch.io/7th-goddess, now containing +16000 words. (This will remain a kinetic novel until the main story is finished).
You can also watch it on youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNN9HBioQixqmYr4YHffHeg
Any feedback is always appreciated: do you like the story so far? (is it not too weird/confusing?), do you want to see some improvements in one or another way (graphics, music, sound effects ...).
After I put it on itch.io I got about 150 views and 30 downloads in the first 24 hours, but after that, it has fallen so far down the popularity list that no one is going to see it anymore. The only way I really can think of to try to get a lot more views is by asking people to play it on their video channels, but I am going to wait for that until the kinetic version is finished.
Hey guys, I am trying to make a Ren'py-based visual novel/game as well. I was hoping if one of you gurus can help me out here.
Can you render hair, clothes, accessories, etc separately while rendering a character so as to assemble them in ren'py later? I know how to put it together in ren'py. But I don't know how to render it into different layers in Daz. I intend to let the player choose if he wants to wear a shirt or a tuxedo, obviously on the same pose.
I am not an expert with DAZ or Ren'Py. I just know that you can make body parts / hair style / clothing invisible in DAZ. So then you could make a render for each pose with each clothing and hair etc by making the other parts invisible.
Just click on the eye icon on the left of the item you want to make invisible.
That won't work for what they want to do. For example, if you simply hide the character and render the hair seperately, it'll render both the front and back of the hair. This would make it very difficult to layer over the main character after the fact.
What you really want to do is render out masks as well as that. You can then use the mask to easily remove the parts that aren't needed, allowing you to easily layer it over the character ingame. Iray apparently has a built in method to render out masks, but I don't know how to use it. 3Delight doesn't have any built in method of doing this, so you'd either have to manually alter the object's materials to make them pure white/pure black, or use an addon (such as the "Mask and Multipass Toolbox" by the late DraagonStorm).
All that said, I don't think the whole "optional clothes and hair" thing is going to work well with Daz Studio renders. Not only would it be a lot of work to do, but it also probably won't look that good if you're using photorealistic characters. Clothes and hair cast shadows, but if you're rendering them all out seperately you won't get those shadows, which'll end up looking awkward (the fact that they're layered will be too obvious). There's a reason why 2D visual novels with custom protagonists tend to use hand-drawn characters (such as Dream Daddy). You might be able to get away with it if you're using cel-shaded Daz Studio renders, but even then it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I think it might be better to simplify your character customisation system so rather than picking out individual hairstyles, clothes, and accessories, you instead just have a small handful of complete "looks". For example, you could simply have "casual", "formal", "smart casual", and "pajamas", and just re-render the character in those specific looks. This would make the entire process much easier for you, and would look a lot better than trying to layer multiple Daz Studio renders on top of each other.
Have you tested rendering the parts seperatly and make each a character in your game?
Say you have a male and you want to have 3 hair and 4 outfits
1. Render the character (naked) in the different poses
2. do the same for each hair and outfit (each with nothing else in the scene)
3. Then create the following character in Ren
Male
Hair 1
Hair 2
hair 3
outfit 1 2 3 4
4. Make sure each character has the same name for the epressions
Then in your game if you want the man wearing outfit 1 and hair 3. Add each to the scene as seperate characters
Not sure if that will work