1. Use Scene Subsets for all of your characters

The more complex the character will be, the less I save in the preset. For example if a character has 4 different hairstyles, I’ll save the Scene Subset without any hair, and save the hairstyles as wearables so I can just load them as needed.

The same goes for things like jewelry. Kaitlin for example has 2 jewelry wearable sets, one includes a necklace and bracelet, and the other is just the essentials like earrings and rings.

2. Use wearables for everything

Hair, jewelry, outfits, even genitals. You can also save things like geoshells and cameras parented to your figure as a wearable.

3. Save large environments as loadable Subsets

You can speed up render times by simply hiding objects in a scene, but having huge scenes .dufs will slow down load/save times. Each of my island buildings is saved as it’s own pre-positioned Scene Subset that can be loaded when needed, which leads me to my next point.

4. Save EVERY scene

Once your finished composing a scene, you might get 3 or 4 renders out of it. Usually I’ll create separate cameras for each shot, and if all I’m changing is facial expressions or minor arm movements I don’t normally create a new save file. However any time a character moves or a new prop is added, it’s a new scene file.

This makes it really easy when you want to go back a few days/weeks later and either re-do a render, or create some additional close up shots.

These are all things I wish I’d known during development of my last game. Feel free to let me know in the comments if there’s anything else you’d like to see!