May 2022 WIP (Patreon)

Hello Loyal Patreons,

It's time for another big roundup of the last months progress. It's been a mixed month I think. One thing I have definitely noticed this month is the steady creep of followers on Twitter, we're creeping ever closer to the 2000 marker. Exciting times! Unfortunately there have been some setbacks as well, some old & some brand new from this week. But we'll get to that.

Let's start as always with:

Big big news of course if the voice acting for the Larxene video. There was an initial setback where voice actress #1 didn't respond to my commissions or messages, or at least not until after I'd cancelled it. But voice actress #2 was much more professional, got in touch right away and an agreement was reached. I got the final version last night so we are ready to resume animation for Larxene next week. Need to do some edits on the audio. Clean it up, normalize it and so forth, but that's easy enough.

I think HaruLuna makes a great Larxene so I'm going to permanently cast her as Larxene moving forwards. And since I'll probably need each actress to cover 2/3 roles each I've cast her as Xion too. I want a nice range so we'll look elsewhere for some of the others so we have some variety. But no other speaking roles for a little bit, so we'll worry about that later.

Since the delay in getting this one ready had been much longer than anticipated I have started another much smaller project in the meantime (one of the short loop requests taken from the Discord) with Kairi & Olette giving back to back BJs:

The base loop for this is mostly done. I'm happy with what the bodies are doing & now it's a question of getting their mouth looking right & we're most of the way done. The loop animations have a weird production where the first 1 second of animation takes a REALLY long time & once that's done the rest just floods out exponentially faster. You have to get the loop perfect you see, or it all quickly falls apart.

Two new girls have been finished last month so we now have both Invi & Strelitzia on the roster:

But there is bad news too. And the bad news is I have discovered a pretty major fault in every single one of the models. There is a step in my pipeline that essentially disables a pretty major feature of the models. This being the auto corrections that make all the joints bend more naturally. It's one of the main reasons I chose the DAZ import method because they come with these baked into the model. It's a really confusing problem because I know for a fact that when I did the Aqua Thighjob joint, they were all working fine because the shoulder ones went berserk and I had to turn them off in one shot. But now, nothing. I though maybe it was a version conflict between my Blender version & my DAZ imported version but I've run a bunch of tests on Blender 9.1.0 & Blender 9.1.2 but no joy.

This isn't a game ender. The current models all still work & have been working since (so far as I can tell) the issue has been present for the last couple animation but I just haven't noticed. I can still use them in their current forms, I'll just need to build new versions & replace them.

Some of you may remember me talking about a 'point of no return' in the modelling process, after which making fundamental changes to the model becomes much much harder. Well this is occurs at that point. It's is literally the thing from which there is no return that causes the fault. This is good because every model has a backup save just before this happens & part of the pipeline is getting as much as possible done BEFORE doing this as possible. So it is not a complete do over. I just need to re do everything I did after that point. And I have some shortcuts to make it easier too. I think a days work per girl to get them back.

It's all totally fixable, just needs some extra work arounds to solve the problem. Initially the fix restored the corrective flexes but disabled by ability to pose the face bones, pelvis, breasts or individual toes. I've managed to get the everything except the toe posing back, which is a sacrifice I think I can live with. Can can still move them all together, just not individually.

It's far from the end of the road, but it is really really annoying though & I'm quite pissed off about it. But this is why we have 100s of gigs of backup saves so we can fix these problems. Expect for Kairi whose backups I accidentally deleted & might actually have to do over from scratch. But Streli only took a few days since I've done this a lot now & if it comes to it, so be it.

I have since rebuilt Kairi as a benchmark because she was going to take the longest and that was only a days work so the others will be much easier.

But alas, this is not the only problem. The version of Kairi that's in the BJ scene doesn't have the specific BJ controls. Pretty big fuckup. I was hoping that once new Kairi was finished I'd be able to just copy over her BJ controls, but unfortunately the models are different enough that doesn't work.

But this goddamn trouble shooting has eaten into a lot of the animating I wanted to do this week & explains why I've still not gotten the BJ facial animations done yet.

But I have the fix now, new Kairi works so we know the fix works. And we will reap some benefit from this since the new versions will have better eyeball controls & better breast controls since I've figured some new stuff out there & will be able to apply it to all girls.

The Medli train has officially started back up again & I've been working on her Gerudo & lingerie poses. A slight issues has arisen here too unfortunately where her clothes controls seem to have all disappeared for the UI. They are all still accessible on the meshes themselves, but it's sub-optimal. Other than that the re-build seems have been a success. I was concerned about memory bloat but I'm able to use her OK on the 1070 rig so I don't think people are going to have an issue.

Should have these coming out tomorrow:

I'm probably going to try to run through the final poses quite quickly now that we're moving forwards with her again because (to be honest) I really really want this project to be over and done with so I can focus on other things.

But it's mostly good news here. The clothes controls aren't exactly numerous & wont need to be used that often anyway.

Also been trying to do some more post production for the Medli renders. Here are some before and afters:

I've ready done the base poses for the lingerie pics, only need to light them so should have those next week too. We're full steaming Medli now so we can finally get this fucking model released.

And finally the important news! Still haven't finished the Chapter yet, but this is largely due to the fact that I added an extra little scene in the dungeon. I felt like Ohmbryn had taken a bit of a back seat this chapter and I wanted to engage her a little bit more before the chapter ends so she has an extra little scene where she straw mans Meredhel's suggestion that they adopt a more reformative justice system. Because this is the kind of porno where instead of having sex the characters debate criminal justice reform.

I'm almost certain to be finished this month though. They're in their final positions now so once I've got that scene lit the final panels will be a piece of cake. The next Chapter is set on the farm in Andell village and will be an easy build since it all takes place either in a field of vegetables or on the path running along side the field. Shouldn't take too long to knock that up & we're away.

And that's about it for the month of May. Great gains initially, which have mostly been undone by the uncovering of various issues but we're past that, we've got the voice acting & we'll just do Kairi's BJ stuff with the regular face controls. Wont be quite as good, but it's not a super closeup scene anyway so I doubt it'll be distracting, if it's even noticeable at all.

Take it easy my dudes.