Update 14: Times, they are a changin' (Patreon)

Alrighty chaps and chapesses, some big changes coming, strap on, I mean in, cause this is gonna be a long one.

What can I say, I love the sound of my own typing.

Please do read on to understand everything that’s happening however the TLDR is:

The A414 series is being placed on temporary hiatus pending some major modelling overhauls, other content will continue in the mean time.

There's also some smut splattered in the update to keep you all entertained because, I know my audience.

What’s this about the series stopping?

It’s not stopping! Who said it was stopping?

Oh I did, I put it in the title right there.

OK so no I’ve no plans to stop the series at all, but it is going to go on a bit of hiatus.

The reasoning for this is going to take some explanation:

When I started this venture, I was pretty inexperienced in the 3D space, I was just getting my feet wet with modelling assets in general, and it was an extremely slow process for me.

The one thing I was never comfortable with was making humanoid models, this was, believe it or not, the main driver behind an AI protagonist.

And this is not without good reason, we as humans are remarkably adept at recognising poorly behaving models, there are entire disciplines dedicated to the art of making a model look and respond well, I knew I wanted to produce longer format content, and I knew this meant either it was going to take ages, or I had to optimise as best as I could.

The series and characters have of course evolved since then, with AIMEE turning from my excuse to not have to worry about animating a human and getting all the deforms right into a character of her own.

But, to flesh everything out it became necessary to introduce other humans, because you can’t build a world with one place, one organisation, one corporation and one antagonist, hence Sana, Kaira, and, as teased in a couple images before, Alys.

Uh huh...

Now the more learned in the 3d space amongst you will recognise these models as Daz imports, this is because that offers you a way to import a decently rigged, accurate human model for use in blender, in effect it works like a character creator and it’s the basis for the vast majority of 3D erotica available out there (ever recognise that most bodies are very similar? It’s usually a DAZ body, with a videogame characters head put on it, it’s a process called headhacking)

However given a lot of these are community made assets, their quality varies a lot, some of you who’ve been around for a while or have looked back through my monthly updates may remember me having to do some texture work on one of them previously.

That, coupled with my own inexperience, resulted in the models you’re familiar with thus far, semi-realistic but very much on the non-stylised end of humans.

Now with them being on the realistic end, puts them dangerously close to the uncanny valley when it comes to animating them and making them feel… good. (let’s all take a moment to pause and remember episode 3)

There are billion pound companies with teams of hundreds of artists, riggers with access to millions of pounds worth of mo-cap data, actors and references that struggle to obtain believable results with humans (remember the polar express?)

And sure that’s not so much of a concern when all they’re doing is moaning or they’re mouth is otherwise full, but when they have to walk, talk and exposition-ise in several minute long episodes, that’s a huge burden on me as an animator.

Rewinding a little, whilst it wasn’t my plan at the time, Due to how certain voice line ordering worked, I ended up doing 2 BCD episodes in a row in between mainline releases, one of those being the Mercy X AIMEE episode, the other being the Sana Tentacle scene.

Several things became apparent to me coming out the back of those two projects:

• Having a model that was rigged with NSFW in mind was significantly easier to animate with.
• The Models I’d imported were comparatively a nightmare to work with.
• The models did not need to be realistic to tell the story I wanted to tell.
• The stylization fit quite well into my existing world and assets.

Working with these stylised models was not only significantly faster to get to a level I was happy with, It encouraged me to add so much more detail and little bits to the characters animation that I couldn’t get away with before.

I felt I was producing better work, faster, and perhaps just as importantly, I was having more fun doing it.

If you consider a range of animation, with realistic on one end, and overly dramatized cartoon style on the other, there exists, I believe, a happy medium somewhere in the middle, where you have slightly exaggerated expressions and motions, but still a grounded sense of reality to them, you can believe the human emotion behind them, and you don’t have the risk of falling into the valley, it’s been a common approach for a while.

Fascinating....

It allows you to convey emotion and drama and still have a little fun, after all, this is a serious, gritty world (that you all haven’t seen the really serious, gritty parts of yet) but it is pornography, and that’s something that should be fun and entertaining.

It’s something I never really knew I wanted to do until I found myself experimenting with, and enjoying doing it, because when you set out for the first time expressing an artform, there’s a very real paralysing anxiety to getting things right.

I’m pretty happy now that I get things right, now I want to explore doing things in more of my own way.

GET TO THE POINT

So, this is something I’ve been mulling over and thinking about a lot over the past month or so, coming to the ultimate conclusion that: this is where I want to take the mainline series in the future.

That being the remodelling of major characters into a more semi-stylised fashion, I’ve no examples just yet of how that might look like, but I do like the overwatch/fortnite style of characterisation, I think it’s a good mix and I think it slots into my world design nicely, bar a couple of parts, the OW models look really good in amongst my models.

It’s a decision I’ve agonised over for some time, because doing it is a LOT of work, and whereas I can (and am likely going to need to) outsource a lot of it, it’s still going to take some time, a lot of time, like, 3-6 months kind of time probably.

The result would be a far more optimised pipeline, a much more coherent and consistent style to the world and characters as a whole, and, I hope, a faster production time overall.

Now, obviously I don’t expect ya’ll to keep on supporting me whilst I take 6 months off to get all this figured out getting nothing from it, though I’ve no doubt many of you likely would (something I will eternally not stop being grateful for) , so I’m going to continue producing some of the more off the main beaten track content in the mean time, there’s plenty of other little ideas and things I can explore and show you.

It’s important, I think, to have a space to allow these ideas to flourish and to work on these smaller projects, when I have a long presentation of 15-20 minutes plus you definitely learn some things, but not nearly as much as 4-5 smaller 3-5 minute pieces, and I am, very much, still learning the artform.

About EP5....

This is something I’ve been working on at the same time as producing the BCD episode (sub-only teaser released a short while ago) I have the thing rendered and given it a review in the cold hard light of day and concluded, it’s not ready yet, It’s going to take a lot of work to make it ready, this may involve revisiting it after the re-made models are ready, I’ve not yet decided.

I’d previously mentioned this was the priority in some other spaces so, this is why I’ve made such a big deal about going over this in this update, I don’t want to keep saying ‘oh yeah I’m working on it’ when it might be a good long while before that sees the light of day.

It’s not a decision I’ve come to lightly, but to release something that I’d consider below par, especially something that is meant to represent my highest effort and mainline series, is not something I can or will do.

Difficult to give a timeframe on the BCD currently but it’s mostly done, I have just under 2 segments left to do, and I’m waiting for one more bit of voice work and some SFX tweaking to release that, hopefully soon.