Fit and Flare Dress - Turntables (and Thoughts on Shorts) (Patreon)

I had a very enjoyable Marvelous Designer working session this morning and made a dress for Victoria 9, from a pattern I found on Etsy. This was my second attempt, and it went even better than my first one I did on my own. I've been using Marvelous Designer for about 7 years and can't say I'm "fluent" in it - or rather, that's my own "internal perception" of my capabilities with the software. I actually enjoy using the app, but I don't do it often enough.

Sometimes I feel like practising during a stream, and this morning was such an occasion. Although learned clothing designers can cobble together in 20 minute what took me over 3 hours, I had a ton of fun and great company - and what else is life all about than these two things combined. I wanted to share the above render with you that serves as a thumbnail for the stream, something I've made this evening in Daz Studio. 

Making things look pretty always takes a huge amount of time (unless we use Midjourney LOL), so here's the preview I had as a thumbnail before:

Yeah, not quite as eye catching, but perhaps better than this, which was a preview of the dress I've shared earlier this week:

Speaking of eye catching, I was briefly considering to use the following image, but decided against it at the last minute (this happened during a gravity malfunction): 

Anyway... after I had rendered the pretty "three sides" thumbnail at the very top, I decided to do a quick turntable while I was at it. Those work really well on the socials as well as with this newfangled YouTube Shorts format (their answer to TikTok, something I'm not really into - even though there was a platform a few years ago that was about to take off, then got shut down. I totally forgot what it was called or who was behind it, but the idea was the same. I have a feeling it cost quite a bit of cash to run, or perhaps society wasn't open for such a format back then). 

Shorts are big right now, as they can bring in a huge amount of casual views, albeit without any other benefits whatsoever. Take this unboxing video of my new RTX 3090 card I uploaded 2 weeks ago:

Likewise, a casual 10 second clip of a colourful limo I shot with my phone had 9k views within three days. Browsing habits have definitely evolved through social feeds, and I guess auto-playing video snippets are just a logical evolution of the somewhat limiting GIF format.

Some of what I do lends itself to the Shorts format, and I thought I'd do some experiments with it. Doing so however brings up an interesting question: what aspect ration do you prefer for Shorts? We have two choices: square and vertical (9:16 portrait). The former is easier to derive from an existing 16:9 version, while the other looks better when viewed on a mobile.

Hence, here are two versions of my turntable animation:

• a square one: https://youtube.com/shorts/owJmFZeRLfE 
• and a vertical one: https://youtube.com/shorts/yE2tfn_RrPc 

YouTube handles them equally well, and for my taste it really depends on what platform I view them on. I rarely browse videos on my mobile, so the square format works better as a compromise on a landscape desktop screen. However, since the vertical versions are well presented, they work surprisingly better than I had originally expected.

How do you feel about Shorts? Let me know if you have any thoughts about them at all, and likewise if you feel that it's just an annoying fad you'd rather not think about. I have to be brutally honest: I'm torn. It's like an unexplored concept, and I have a feeling that this previous platform I can't remember only shut it down because there was no easy way to extract cash out of it. I hear YouTube and TikTok are working hard to change this so they can force more ads on the unsuspecting populous. 

Oh, and speaking of that dress in the animations, I'm planning to work on it some more this week in the afternoons on Twitch, starting Monday from 5pm EST. Drop by if you're free!