Big updates, big upgrades and some small problems (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I wish I were better with words so that I could more deservedly express how much I appreciate your continued support. Thank you!

Speaking of thanks; thanks to you guys I’ve made a few investments this past month in order to take things to the next level. I managed to snag an RTX 3090! Compared to my old dual 1080Ti-rigg, render times are now ¼ of what they were and with 24gb of VRAM, I can render much larger and complex scenes. With new hardware comes problems and my render engine hasn't played well with the new 3000-series cards and I couldn’t revert to an older version because those don’t support Ampere GPUs at all… Luckily, things seem to work much better in the latest Beta-version, so I’m up and running again.

I received quite a bit of positive feedback for Force Feeding, especially for how the custom voice acting turned out, but I find myself struggling with animating speech. It is very time consuming, both in planning and in animating, but it is something that I want to continue to add to my work.

I started work on The Perfect Swallow right after having finished Force Feeding, having set up most models and scenes as well as starting talks with voice actors, but couldn’t really move forward without the software working, which it does now, and have certain other things in place.

Facial Motion Capture is what I need, so that I can translate the actors/actress’ performance onto a 3D-character, and not just their voice. I’ve therefore invested a couple of $K in hardware and software to start me on this journey: depth-cameras, rigging, latest gen character models and so on. A lot of R&D! It will take some time to master this and make it look good but hopefully I’ll have something to show for it in a month or two.

I’ve also started trying out Virtual Reality. I’ve done test animations in both 360-VR as well as stereoscopic VR (which has actual perceivable depth). Now, I’m not sure this is where I want to go, at least not for some time, but the immersiveness is just amazing. In the far future, perhaps 5-10 years from now, I do want to be able to create realistic VR vore-experiences. The technology is just quite not there yet.

I’m still thinking about how to continue with The Perfect Swallow. I might release a smaller mini-animation I’ve been working on on the side before that, because I need some more time to set things up. I’ll keep you posted.

Sorry for the wall of text!

Cheers,