The past two weeks were good for me overall, but also extremely tough at times. It was nice to go back to my old stomping grounds and see family and friends, but my dad isn't doing very well at all. I don't speak much about my personal life, but I will say that he's had prostate cancer for a long time now and it's finally spreading into his hips. Some days he's slow going, and other days he can't move at all due to how intense the pain is. I think I'll be visiting him more often, albeit in shorter periods so I don't lose time on work with the studio. The Dark Dreams team is amazing, and I'm quite lucky to have them, but as director I'm still working on each and every video we do and I can't take weeks off whenever I want. All of YOU are the reason we're able to do what we do, and I'm very loyal to you for that reason. That brings me into the good new I have to share.

The studio is finally getting a new computer, and it's a beast. This will allow us to render constantly across 3 different computers. People have been telling me for years, render farm, render farm, render farm, but overall this is not possible due to financial costs. We aren't a big studio at all. And although we haven't reached our goal of 2000 patrons yet, I've been saving up over the past year and it's time to upgrade. As you've noticed, our animations are getting between 1 minute and 2 minutes in length as of late without loops, and it's becoming too much to maintain our weekly release rate of 2 to 3 videos. Some videos take as long as a week to render, which is too much when you only have one computer to work from. With the new computer, this won't be the case any longer.

Our new plan is to step away from Major Studio releases and polls, and focus on 2 different types of videos. As much as we've enjoyed utilizing polls and working together, we've come to realize that most of the time spent on these was planning and not actually producing/making the videos. We don't want to spend a year planning and working on videos, when we could just be making content that you want to see. Less talk, more walk, if you will. We'll finish up the last requested Major Studio release and move on from that type of content.

The first type of video will be with models of our own creation, around 10 minutes in length. These will be released on the Patreon Comatose tier, as well as on the VRPorn Premium website. This is still quite new to us, but we believe with proper setup that we can make long videos like this a reality.

The second type of video we'll be focusing on is patron requests on the Discord channel. This was something we started in SFM and is still fairly new to us in Blender, but for those of you who are new here supporters are able to make requests with characters and positions they want to see. We're able to make that request a reality for only $10 of support. A 1-2 minute long commissions would normally cost way more than that. By making these requests first come, first serve, this allows us to give you what you want at an extremely reduced cost. These will become more of a priority with multiple artists working on them.

On top of focusing on these types of videos, we'll still be collaborating with some of your favorite artists to bring their works into VR. We'll still be doing public releases every week. We'll still be doing remasters of videos to ensure that your favorite videos are the best quality possible. And we'll still be bringing you supporters exclusives to ensure you're getting rewarded for your support of all the artists at the studio.

In short, we won't be running out of content any time soon, thus why we needed the new super computer.

That's pretty much all the major news I have at this time. It's good be back home, and it's good to be back "in the studio'. Thank you all again for your support. We truly could not do this without you and appreciate your help.

As usual...

Enjoy!

-Dark Zalivstok

TL:DR

Dad has cancer, and it's getting worse. A new computer's on the way. It's a beast. We're going to step away from Major Studio Releases after the next release and focus on Blender Requests and Premium Content while still producing public releases, exclusives, remasters, and collaborations. Thank you!

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