Ideas on Future Delegation (Patreon)

For the past year I've been delegating more aspects of my videos to other artists and performers in order to improve quality and free up some time to focus on what I do the best.  This is pretty standard for most growing creators.  Streamers hire editors, painters hire assistants, confectioners hire cashiers, yada yada.  Naturally there are some things I can hire out pretty easily, and some things I can't.

Hiring voice actors is one of the first things I did to use my money to speed up the process and increase the overall quality of the product.  With more money coming in I've thought about what else I could commission, how many people might be available for that task, and how to reach them.  Below I'll lay out different areas that I'm thinking about commissioning for.

Doing this kind of thing isn't just for the sake of feedback or transparency.  When I put things in writing, it helps me organize my thoughts and plan for the future.

Without further ado, I present to you 'The 6 A's':

1. 'Art'

There are three main places that commissioning traditional (often 2D) artists can really save a lot of time: concepting, story-boarding, and promoting.

Concepting

As an essential part of the pre-production process in larger projects; concepting can be the first time the rubber meets the road for an idea or script.  Often times concept artists breathe a tremendous amount of their own creative vision into the project, whether it's people, outfits, environments, props, or simply visual styles.  Almost every significant character you've seen has been through the concepting phase.

Since I have no outstanding skills in 2D, this is a good area to look at for commissioning.  Last year I actually took the first steps in doing this by commissioning an artist to design the outfits for the two characters in my next animation.  After that I modeled, ported, and textured them in the 3D world without having to come up with the details myself.

In the future I'd be interested in more extensive forms of this practice.  Environment and character design are high on my list within this category.  There should be plenty of artists that are capable and willing to do this kind of work.

Story-boarding

If you aren't aware, story-boarding is sort like translating a shooting script into comic form.  The purpose of the process is to give the creatives a good idea of what each shot looks like, along with what's going on within the frame.  It's not essential, but pretty much everyone will tell you how helpful it is.

I did my own story-board for Generous Donation 1's intro, since it was like 2 minutes long and fully animated, and it helped quite a bit.  Since then I've occasionally poked around to see who might be suited for this kind of thing.  However it does require me to make a shot list anyway, so it's not like I'm cutting out a ton of work.  If I could find someone who was interested, affordable, and on the right wavelength then I might jump on the opportunity.  Otherwise, I could do it myself or just block it out in 3D like I do right now.  The money might be better spent elsewhere.

Promoting

This is a somewhat small category, but it's worth thinking about.  Promotional images, titles, posters, and other types of work pop up a surprising amount even when working on small projects.  Commissioning a graphic designer could really save some time, but I don't mind doing the work myself.  However getting an artist to do custom posters or promotional art could be a fun way of working with the community.

2. 'Assets'

There's a lot to say about asset creation.  It's such a big time-sink for artists that there's already a big freelancing industry centered around it.  I'll break it down into sections that are relevant to my work.

Characters

I'm already involved in most aspects of character creation, so I'm able to go into a little more detail here.  From hair, to outfits, to the bodies themselves, every aspect of character creation is a detailed and time consuming process.  However, it's not easy to delegate.  I'm sure some of you have heard stories about how many people are involved in the process of creating just one character in big companies like Riot, Blizzard, or Pixar.

Here's the thing: I'm content developing my skills in sculpting and design when making faces and bodies, but there's a pretty high skill ceiling when it comes to things I'm less familiar with too, like hair and outfits.  Going forward, I'd be willing to let these responsibilities fall upon other more capable artists.  In some ways, I already do.

A daunting issue that affects other categories as well is that the Venn diagram of people who are capable and the people who are willing shows very little overlap.  Not only because it's adult/porn, but because many of these artists have bigger clients or their own projects to think about.  At the very least, this drives up the price.

Porting

I could really use someone for this.  Chances are there are always characters from video games that I'm interested in at least doing small animations with.  A ton of people take it upon themselves to port to smutba.se, sfmlab.com, and other sites already, but often times the characters I want aren't there or they just need more work for my purposes.

Porting to Blender is one thing, but cleaning up geometry and UVs, grafting, and setting up materials is another.  Most of it is grunt work; not very glamorous.

Rigging

Rigging can also be a lot of grunt work that doesn't require much creative input, but that could make it easier to commission.  There's also some room for improvement on a lot of my models that would make working with them faster, like better face and finger rigs.  I'm not sure how many artists are interested in doing this though.

Props

Hard surface design is not my strong suit, but then again my work doesn't require many props at the moment anyway.   If I need something in a pinch, it's pretty easy to get something off a site like blendswap.com or turbosquid.com.  Anything more specific I could probably hand off to any artists that I'm already commissioning.

Environments

At the moment I like designing environments.  There are tons of resources out there to work with and learn from.  If I were to commission someone for this, it would likely be because they're very good at what they do.

3. 'Audio'

This is the category I'm furthest along in.  Since it's fairly divorced from the complexities of a 3D pipeline, it's easier to divide and contract out.  Last year I finally started using voice actors and now I'm commissioning for sound design as well.  I'm happy enough with my mixes and it doesn't take me too much time, but there are some people in this space actively looking for that kind of work who offer decent rates.  It may be better to develop these relationships early.

I'd like to incorporate music into some of my bigger productions, but I don't know I'd start when it comes to commissioning for that sort of thing.  I know there are a lot of musicians out there, but I rarely see any interested in this space.  As of right now it's easier to search for and use stock or royalty-free music.  There's some great stuff out there.

Down the road I might hand off more post production responsibilities like editing or vfx, but for the foreseeable future I think this is as far as it goes for this category.

4. 'Animation'

Now for the tough stuff.  Obviously animation is my focus and I'm not very interested in handing the principle components off.  However there are some aspects that I barely have an understanding of that are becoming more and more important, namely mo-cap and simulation.

Motion Capture

I'll assume everyone at least has a basic idea of what motion capture (mo-cap) is.  I'm currently focused on implementing two aspects of this into my arsenal: facial capture and body capture.

Traditional body-related mo-cap just doesn't have much of a place in sex-related animation, but it can save a lot of time elsewhere.  Things like walking, idling, and falling are made much easier when motion capture is used at least as a guide.  The problem is that high-end equipment can be prohibitively expensive and lower end tools can give you questionable results.  My bigger concern is the lack of talent taking advantage of these tools in this space.  I know a hand-full of people who are even using mo-cap, let alone those willing to do that kind of work for hire.  Even people who take publicly available motion capture data and implement it could be valuable.  Unfortunately it looks like it might be a category that's in sore need of artists.

Facial capture is a little more complicated.  It could have a place throughout my scenes and it really would save me a lot of time.  I've talked to some artists interested in pursuing it so the talent pool could be much higher, which pairs great with the lower end equipment needed.  I'm confident that with enough work I could implement this kind of tech, but that's on me.  Commissioning this kind of work is difficult because it's so vitally linked to the rigs and shape keys my models are using.

In the future maybe some adult voice actors would be willing to record for facial capture remotely, perhaps even motion capture.  I doubt there will be enough money flowing through the space for that, but I can dream.

Simulation

I've already had some people offer to do simulation for me.  It's relatively easy to commission for, since it's usually done after principle animation and doesn't require much interaction.  Things like cloth and rigid body sim are simple enough to implement on my own, but fluid and soft body are a bit more menacing.  To get truly great results, you're going to have to learn a lot of tricks or learn specialty software like Houdini.  Some artists in this space are interested in this and there's a high demand for physically accurate jizz, so I'm fairly confident in this category.

5. 'Actualization'

I might've named this one actualization because I needed an 'A' word for rendering, but it gives me an opportunity to throw some other things into this section too.

Rendering is the simplest thing to commission, so much so that there are websites for it, but there's a high barrier to entry when it comes to equipment.  Ideally I can take care of most of this myself, but having one or two people to help out from time to time has really rescued me from some tough binds.

With upscaling, denoising, and image modifying GANs reaching public hands, there could be room to grow for this category in the future.

6. 'Administration'

This just isn't very important right now.  I'm not running a website or community server and I don't have much of an interest at the moment.  The thought of getting a personal assistant is humorous to me, considering what I do for a living, but maybe some day it will turn into a real necessity.  One of the reasons I've avoided starting a discord server is because I don't want to have to manage mods, or moderate it myself.  Besides, what would we even talk about?  The weather?  Stocks?

Note: I wrote that stocks line earlier in January.  Before they drifted into the current event category.

Conclusion

There's no doubt that much of this delegation could be very beneficial, but the prime issue is going to be about finding the right talent at a reasonable rate.  I don't have the benefit of thumbing through piles of applications like a mainstream studio would.  I have to take risks with every artist I work with until I can find the right fit; and that can take a lot of trial and error.

I don't intend to act on all of this information immediately, but I felt it was important enough to put thought towards.  If you feel like you have something meaningful to contribute in any of these categories, send me a message with any relevant materials.  Even if I don't need you now, there's a chance I could use you later on down the line.

If you made it to the end of this lengthy post: congratulations!