Update 8 November 2021 (Patreon)

Today’s update will be a long one so grab a coffee (or other beverage of your choice 😉) and settle in. We’re going to tackle Bloodlust, the production calendar, and one of our new projects.

3DxDolls

On November 1st, we launched a new branch of the Affect3D network: 3DxDolls.com. This website is a new marketplace for life size sex dolls, or love dolls as you’ll sometimes see them called. You may already know a fair bit about love dolls if you read the blog content on Affect3D.com, but if not, you can check out our article series to learn more. The author of those posts, RedRobot3D, is a love doll guru, and worked with us to get this new site off the ground and running. In the short term, we’re offering a curated selection of existing dolls, but in the long term, 3DxDolls will be the place to get fuckable, life size dolls of Cerene and other A3D characters. To kick off the site, we are hosting the Design Your Waifu contest, which invites other 3DX artists to submit their original characters to a public vote. The winning character will join Cerene as an exclusive doll in the 3DxDolls catalogue.

Miro did spend some time working on this project, however now that the site is launched, the day-to-day management of the site is being handled by RedRobot and other staff. The manufacturing and distribution side of the business will be handled by WM Dolls, an established doll manufacturing company in China that already works with a number of other sites catering to different interests.

Reflections on production

While miro was working on the 3DxDolls launch, he had some time to reflect on existing chokepoints in our production operations. Late last year, we all agreed Patreon content had become a significant distraction to Bloodlust: Lanessa production, but we wanted to keep trying to make it work. We updated workflows, tried some new approaches, set an ambitious release date to light a fire under our ass, and then ultimately concluded there were still too many things going on to do it all. We know some of you predicted that, but we still had to make one last earnest attempt.

For years we’ve dreamed of building a 3DX studio that could produce multiple 3DX titles a year. We started the experiment with Bloodlust: Cerene, and hoped to one day expand the use of the studio to collaborations with other 3DX artists. To build such a studio, we would need to find several talented artists who were committed to being part of a studio and participating in collective projects. We’d also need talented producers (in other industries you might call these project managers) to see the productions through from beginning to end with minimal oversight from miro. Years later, we’ve found these staff hard to come by: sex animators that check all the boxes are incredibly rare, and capable producers are difficult to attract and very expensive to retain for our small operation.

Now, the switch to Blender is still working out very well for us. The rendering improvements alone are game changing. We’ve also found a few animators that look like they could become ongoing members of our production team. (A few doesn’t sound like a lot, but if those Blender animators can pivot to Bloodlust production, they would more than double our animation team.) The addition of a production coordinator to our Blender animation workflow has also been working out well, with his role taking some of the administrative duties of producing off miro’s plate. This has allowed miro more time to focus on technical problems and artistic direction.

While these advancements hold promise, miro believes we’re still not where we need to be to support all the projects we currently have going on. At least not in a timely fashion, anyway. So here’s his new plan going forward.

Bloodlust and beyond

Miro has decided to scale back all secondary production so he can focus even more on Bloodlust. Over November and December we’re going to wrap all projects currently in production, then consolidate and focus all production on Bloodlust until it’s complete. Products in pre-production will be shelved for the time being, and all Patreon content starting in January will use assets from Bloodlust: Lanessa. This means we will produce image sets and short animations that reflect the content of Bloodlust: Lanessa, rather than taking place in alternate universes. Miro will work to complete Bloodlust: Lanessa part 1 with our small Maya team, while the Blender team works to port the Bloodlust: Lanessa assets into Blender for Bloodlust: Lanessa part 2. When part 1 is complete, the teams will merge and we will stop producing content in Maya. (Update) So it's clear, we will not be able to release this year as previously hoped.

Our rendering artist has already produced a fairly faithful rendition of Bloodlust: Lanessa in Blender, if you’re curious how it will look.

(Full size images, plus a couple of test render videos can be found in the download links below, if you're interested)

Here’s what our content schedule will look like for the next two months

November -- Flying High Part 11, two Blender animations featuring Cerene (one of which you'll see tomorrow), and possibly CyPunk animation.

December -- Cypunk animation (if not already complete), Seed of Rebirth animation. We may possibly complete the Circle of Love animation, though likely we will need to drop this one, as there are a lot of errors in it.

On Hold -- Flying High short animations, Cerene Club set (we will still keep your ideas for when we resume this project -- thank you to those who submitted!), and all the scripted image sets that never progressed beyond previz.

Visual novel production will be refocused to Bloodlust. Development of our Unity software player for older releases (Bloodlust: Cerene and G4E) will continue as normal. Some short Blender animations will also continue to trickle in, because we use them to trial new animators.

Text updates will also continue, but will now feature an update from our production coordinator, James, nested inside the update. This is just to lighten Marie’s workload a bit and ensure it’s delivered more consistently. She’ll still create the audio version of the update.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with us and for supporting our team. We’ve received a lot of kind messages from some of you in the past year, and your encouragement has meant a great deal as we’ve transitioned and experimented with getting this 3DX studio to the next stage. Thank you for that, and thank you to everyone for your support as fans and patrons. Your comments and feedback are welcome, as always.