I will be shutting this page down and moving all support over to my Patreon page. 

You can read all about the broader changes in the game I’m preparing, more on that later.

This post is just to address why I’m removing the SubscribeStar page 

Writing updates is extremely limited in comparison to Patreon. There is a limit of just 20 images per post which I find myself frequently hitting. 

The size of images and attachments is also extremely limiting, it means I either need to make 2 versions for each platform. Or more frequently as I have been doing, simply reduce the quality of both. 

The payouts system is manual and very clunky, every time I request one I have to refresh it. Wait. Then request manually whatever exists in the pot at the time. 

They then decide to take their sweet time -manually- adding this transaction. It is not a reliable source of income, they also set a minimum withdrawal which really hurt when I was first getting started. 

My new tiers start on Patreon at just £1 with an option to set your pledge at checkout. Subscribestar does not offer any such option. 

With transaction fees. And other fees (which they also add) the actual revenue I see from a $1 pledge is usually around 35 cents. 

This is anti consumer, anti artist and in my opinion. They do not do enough to justify such a cut. 

I would rather your money end up in a place where it can be useful. 

Due to Patreon operating in GBP and subscribestar is in USD if you’re on my first ever tier this does mean it will technically be a little more expensive than you’re currently paying, If this is too much for you, message me here with your name on patron and I will gift you 12 months membership (if you are part of the original tier) 

This all started with you, I want to reward your support.

For most however, the option to choose your price will most likely result in a saving for many, if that’s the choice you make. 

Pledge whatever you like at checkout. For however long you like, set whatever value my work holds for you.  

Always prioritise your personal finances. 

In the game I point out these adjustments are due to addressing privacy and money concerns. 

In light of that, if you do remain here, your name will no longer appear in the credits. 

Since listings for credits will now order contributors by total contribution (highest first, without value) this move will effectively ‘reset’ any contributions to the project from subscribestar.

If you wish to have your SubscribeStar value added to your Patreon contribution, please send an email to the following address formatted as follows:

Subject: Transfer my pledge

Subscribestar name: <your current subscribestar name, exactly as spelled>

Patreon name: <your patreon name, exactly as spelled>

Be sensible, it doesn't have to be your real name, but clearly offensive ones will not be listed.

Please do make a choice, this will enable me to clear out a lot of unused tiers.

If you choose to remain. The archive links will continue to work. But I will no longer be posting updates here. 

My deepest gratitude goes out to you all for your support over the years. This is where this all started and I will never not appreciate the choice you all made to put your faith in me. 

Thanks for reading. And I hope to see you all over there.

Enter the game

So, here we are, 

The month after my last, declarative update, where it’s now time for me to bravely step forward to have my directorial debut.

Today, I show you what a full unbridled MJ was so obsessed with. What it was that consumed me so. 

At the time of writing I have stood, facing the completed, ready to release version of this piece for nearly a week now, paralysed by the decision to release it.

I'd like to tell you it was productive, that I was doing final checks, being professional and thorough about it. What actually happened is I opened the file, watched it through, found something, closed it, and then didn't open it again for two days. Then I did exactly that again.

By about day four I wasn't finding new problems anymore, I was just visiting the old ones. Which is, I think, the point at which you have to admit you're not reviewing it, you're stalling.

The trouble is, and I have found this to be a repeating pattern, you always learn so much when you make something.

Thoughts occur, ideas spread, you animate the scene at first, and it's like, insanely hot, you've never been so absurdly turned on in your entire life, even the untextured test shots are impossibly perfect.

Then you spend weeks working out the technical details, getting it all to just, finally work and be acceptable, you tell yourself those little issues in the sim won't come out in the render, it'll be fine. It's not worth another 24 hours to fix it.

It wasn't fine, at least once.

You get used to assessing it on a technical level, you lose the magic of the moment, you, in effect, destroy the fantasy of it.

In producing a piece, I am in effect, giving away one of my fantasies, I provide it to anyone else who cares, in the hopes it might be appreciated.

It's normal, we're always going to want to do the 'best' version of whatever we want to create, you must set realistic limits, it is not, at this point, worth another week to add those little extra details just for that .5% only you can see COULD be better, it's gotta be called, good enough, let's ship it.

And I do feel I've met that, with this piece. I try to simply ask myself:

The answer is almost always no. And that, weirdly, is the good bit.

If I finished something and genuinely couldn't see a single way it could be better, that would mean I'd stopped learning, and I'd be making the same piece forever. Every project hands me a list on the way out. 

So it could be better. It could be longer. It could have alternative endings. But it's here, it's ready, and it's good, and the version of me who's learned all that is already looking at the next thing.

The problem came when I started to cut together a trailer for it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why.

This piece isn't punchy. It doesn't escalate the way you'd expect, and there isn't a moment I can lift out and put in front of you as the moment. It's built on pacing and atmosphere, it takes its time, it wants to be watched properly and in one go. Which is exactly what I wanted from it, and also exactly why thirty seconds of highlights makes it look like nothing at all.

So consider this the trailer. It's slower than my usual. It's an experience rather than a hit. Go in expecting that and I think you'll get a great deal more out of it.

There's something else going on here, and I've been trying to work out how to say it without sounding grand about it.

All of it. The characters, the world they're in, the way they move, none of it is borrowed, none of it is me doing my version of something that already exists. Every decision in this piece is a decision I made, and there was nobody's house style to stay inside and nothing I had to get right for anyone else's sake.

This is what I'm making now. More of these characters, more of this world, and no borrowed faces. If that's what you're here for then I think you're going to have a very good year.

I didn't expect that to change the work as much as it has. But it turns out that when it's all yours, you stop asking whether you've done it correctly and start asking whether you've done it well, and those are completely different questions. You push on the bits nobody asked you to push on. You spend the extra week on a detail because you want it there, not because someone would notice if it was missing.

It's more exposing, obviously. There's nowhere to hide behind a familiar face. If you don't like her, you don't like something I made up.

But it's also, by an enormous margin, the most fun I have had doing this. And I think it shows. I think there's more of me in this than in anything I've put out before, and that's going to be true of everything that comes after it as well, because this is the direction now. 

I'm taking some time.

Not because anything's wrong, and not because I'm burnt out or fed up or any of the other things a creator usually means when they say that. It's simpler than that. I've built a world I actually want to live in, and I've been making things in it faster than I've been thinking about it. That's the wrong way round.

So I'm going to go away for a bit and think properly. Who these people are, what happens to them, what this place actually is. There are things I want to try that I can't do in the gaps between releases, and there's a version of the next piece that only exists if I sit with it first.

I'll still be around. The Discord isn't going anywhere, I'll still be posting bits as they happen, and you'll see progress rather than silence. It just won't be a finished thing for a while.

And then I'm coming back with something absolutely filthy.

It has no exclusivity period, you will be able to watch the full thing on my newgrounds page, as soon as it's done uploading and transcoding, which will be within a matter of hours of me posting this update.


There's a separate post for this release under the 'tip' tier.

Unlocking it will give access to a copy you can download and keep forever, I will host it on newgrounds, but with the state of the internet today, I cannot host it without generally putting it behind some kind of ID verification wall, that requires some degree of payment.

You are technically getting a slighly superior product by paying to download it from here, but there's no 'pixel peeper' version of this one, it comes in one format, this is the best quality copy of this piece that exists and everybody gets the same, no matter the tier, it's the same version I will upload to newgrounds, they will apply some compression. 

It's already available in the archive for any existing level that has access (see collections) along with my entire catalogue, but if you are not, you can unlock it to download the file now, or check newgrounds or well, wherever you want really! You have permission to share. 

But you don't have to to watch this one.

Hello everyone. 

This was an extremely productive month. I don’t think a single waking hour has passed since my last update when I’ve not been thinking about, actively working on, or planning this project in some capacity.

I thought I’d keep it simple and go through a shot breakdown, whilst communicating some important information about the future of productions here.

Here’s the shot. Let’s break down how I got there.

My workflow for productions has usually followed a pretty distinctive pattern thus far:

I write the episode, usually consulting with writers to refine the outline.

I model the scene or have it modelled, then prep the characters. If it’s a new character model to me, it needs to be sourced and usually fixed.

I request voice work based on the script. Then, when that arrives, I listen to the audio and do my mocap take.

This time, I wanted to do things a bit differently. I had the spoken lines done in advance, as I needed them for pacing, leaving gaps so I could freeform the machine segments and then have the voice work filled to the animation.

So, the first thing to nail was the timing and ultimate length of the episode.

It took about a week to decide on this. During that time, I outlined the rough machine animation, what I wanted to happen, and get the pacing right.

Then, when I was happy with that, I ran through a mocap run for the hip and leg secondary motions.

Next up; the balls. More on this later, but I went through two stages with this: first, adding major motion and contractions.

Then I added a shape key to create visible ‘tension’ to the scrotum, so we get the effect of the skin constricting, as it does.

Then I worked on the penis using a combination of shape keys and bone animation to fully refine the movement of the organ. 

Usually I set myself up a little controller for going through it.

This model also has a foreskin, and that had to be animated. It was not the best put together model. Requiring a lot of corrective shape keys that needed manually animating, choosing to have this foreskin is also going to bite me in the ass later down the line when I get to the simulation stage.

I found the initial pass wasn’t quite enough so I went back through adding some more distinctive twitches

This polish took about another week, now it was time to start simming. If my previous comments about simulation were anything to go by, and you were picturing my reaction to this as a PTSD meme, you’re about on the money.

Suffice to say, I wasn’t looking forward to the endless iteration involved or the commitment.

As soon as you start a simulation stack, you’re effectively locking changes behind a very tall time gate. It’s not unusual for the entire stack to take a day or more to bake, so you better be sure your animation is on point.

Before I set off on the big sims, though, I thought I’d try the old setup from the Edging Lab set. It worked last time. Why shouldn’t it work again?

This was taking ages to bake so I decided to move onto one of the big sims that wouldn’t rely on it. 

I would then not leave my desk, other than for essential body activities, for the next 26 hours. I know it was that long because that’s how long this sim took to bake.

The first ‘big’ sim was to add some deformation to the parts where the penis is manipulated by the machines. I also wanted to try a new approach to the ball animation.

A friend had shown me a quick solution he whipped up for simulating the balls as actual spheres, then letting the cloth handle the scrotum.

The first tests were promising, and I found that some settings I’d previously ignored in Houdini’s maze of settings were actually very useful dials. This whole sim took me the day to refine and get right. I got it close enough that the whole thing was worth baking.

When this was done I took a look at the sim Blender was running. 

The same sim I’ve run before in near-identical circumstances in previous episodes. 

The sim I thought I could rely on to save me a bunch of time. One of the benefits of re using an old set. 

Complete and utter disaster.

More on that later. But decided at this point I’d just re-simulate it in Houdini.

Returning to the skin sim, my intended motion for the testicles was a bit too subtle. I was going for subtle, but I did want to make it more obvious what was happening.

This ultimately made me throw away all the shape key animation I’d done before, but I used the action to drive the spheres instead, using them to push the scrotum around. This resulted in a much more realistic-looking action.

It’s very easy to overanimate when you do passes like this. You try to compensate for the lack of movement in other areas. But in this case, I think I found a nice line: distinctive but realistic.

This sim was a bit of a rollercoaster. It was frustrating at first, since no matter how many times I return to this software, it always feels like I’m starting from square zero.

However, I do feel like I’ve learned something this time. There were a couple of dials I didn’t know about before that I do now. They generally improved the stability of the entire simulation and added another arrow to my quiver for future use.

Emboldened by this, I approached the next sim with renewed vigour. This was to be the glans chamber or, as I originally called it, the ‘sample collection interface’.

Off the back of the last project I did, I took the original model from the Edging Lab and decided to add the popular ‘beads’ addition. This would not be the last modification I made to this model.

Since I’d already simulated a very similar material recently for that project, I used the same setup as my starting point.

Now, this sim nearly broke me. It took a LOT of iteration to get it right.

By the end of the second day working on this, I had something kind of close.

But this is where my decision to animate a foreskin came back to bite me. At a certain point, the cloth sim would become pinched in the collider, resulting in ugly, unacceptable collision failures.

I continued to iterate. I knew this had been accomplished before, so I knew it was possible, but the more I kept messing with it, the more it felt like I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

I tried workarounds, like building a temporary collider to guide the sim around the offending geometry.

I even tried changing the animation around the area so it was clear of the intersection events, and still nothing.

I was now three full days into iterating on this sim, meaning about 36 hours sat at my desk, and getting nowhere. As I moved on to a new segment, I encountered a new issue: the collider would collapse during certain fast-moving parts.

It was coming up to another trip I had planned, that time of year, and I’d spent the last 30 to 40 hours failing to accomplish an effect I’d done before and would likely need to do again.

I finally decided to try a new simulation approach. You see, so far, I’d been using Houdini’s cloth simulation system.

The idea is that you describe the material and tell the software where it’s being supported or driven from. Then you describe how stretchy and bendy the cloth is. Finally, you have ‘struts’, which are a force that tells the solver to maintain volume.

The trouble is that you then end up with three conflicting forces. You have the pin telling the cloth to try to maintain its original position. You have the stretch needing to be high enough to maintain the shape but low enough to allow expansion, while also not being so strong that it resists the influence of the struts or prevents volume preservation.

Instead, I opted to try a tetrahedral-style simulation, where the entire mesh is divided into tetrahedrons.

And it worked basically instantly.

I got a small taste of success just before I went away on holiday for a short break, leaving the machine to cook a full run for review on my return.

I cannot overstate just how much of a breakthrough this simulation method is. For someone who often needs to simulate soft bodies (sleeves, strokers, fat bodies, breasts, genitals), it felt like the world opened up in front of me.

I then used this same method on the licker wheel and got an almost perfect result straight away.

I then needed to simulate the brush. I tried the same settings I used last time in Blender, which had previously worked in the Edging Lab scenes. That went pretty much how you’d predict.

So, this was another new thing to learn in Houdini. It ultimately led to a much better result than before. The brush looks softer and less wire-like, and it didn’t even take a full day to get a successful result.

I did have to run back to Blender a couple of times and adjust the animation to accommodate some intersections caused by their length.

I have since moved on to doing some other sims for effects not included in this shot. I have the last major sim to complete, and then I’m ready to start putting everything back together.

The last step I’m considering is whether to animate the breathing or the camera in any way. That’s an artistic decision I’ve not quite made yet. I’m divided between providing possible non-visual storytelling and direction, and preserving the self-insert intention of the piece. In either case, the intention would be to provide alternatives.

Otherwise, pending a few final sims, the project is more or less done. It will be passed to audio and fill work soon, then set for rendering once I’ve done a final pass.

Rapid progress I did indeed make. The full scene runs for 13.5 minutes and has reached this stage in about a month. Pending no major hiccups, it should be out this month.

Which leads me nicely into the big thing I wanted to talk about in this update.

Working on this project is the most engaged I’ve been with this work since I started it.

I’m talking 12 to 16-hour days. Every day. Most days, I’ve finished up sometime between 5 and 7 a.m. local time. I have been a man possessed.

And I have loved every second of it.

It reminded me why I got into this work to begin with. This was never a way for me to earn a living. It was always just me making something because the porn I wanted to see didn’t exist. So I decided to make it. Somewhere along the line, things got bigger, priorities shifted, and I lost sight of that goal.

A lot of this shift in priorities was financially driven. I needed to rely on this to keep myself and, later, other individuals involved in the work secure. Most of the work I outsource is on a contract or ‘per-project’ basis, but a couple of those arrangements evolved into something more retainer-like.

This unfortunately led to some of the pressure behind many of the issues I’ve been working through over the last year or so and, most painfully of all, the loss of a friend.

It’s one thing for the success of your product to be responsible for keeping you solvent. It’s another thing entirely for those decisions to also affect people you care about.

This ultimately led me to withdraw and stop exploring those opportunities. Plans were abandoned or simplified. I had a never-ending list of projects that different sections of my audience wanted and no idea which one to make first.

I started looking towards my greatest hits for quick wins, easy projects I could make to appease the audience and give myself time. Rivals Edging Lab and the MIP Remaster were examples of those.

As I approached those projects, though, I had a building, nagging feeling that something wasn’t right. I have this story I want to tell and a specific way I want it to go down. If I keep diverting to these ‘quick wins’, I’m basically never going to get around to the stuff I actually want to do.

It took me deciding one day: Fuck the algorithm. Fuck what you guys want (I say, with all the love in the world). Fuck the money. This one’s for me.

That’s what it took to find the passion that, for so long, I thought was lost to me.

It’s why I react so strongly to comments that question my passion. Those comments hurt because they hit. I had lost my way. I had lost my passion. I wasn’t sure I was ever going to find it again.

Now, though, I’ve found it, and it’s clear some things need to change.

First, I will no longer be creating franchise-based work with characters that are not my own.

I plan to finish:

Other than that, all my focus will be on establishing characters within my own world and exploring the storylines and themes I’ve had planned for so long that have been left rotting on the shelf.

The reasons behind this go beyond satisfying my own creative needs. Here are a few:

Every time I decide to bring in a new character, I need to acquire a decent model, weld a dick onto it if it doesn’t have one already, and usually fix the materials and rig.

I lose so much time overcoming these limitations. Even this project, which uses the same model I’ve always used for A414, was an absolute pain to wrangle. I chose it at a time when I had little to no knowledge of modelling and rigging, and simply grabbed the best I could find with zero budget.

A prime example is this Black Cat model. I had to find one and get a dick welded onto it. Everything looks fine, then you pose it in a slightly unusual way and get stuff like this:

Or, in Juno’s case, stuff like this:

I’ve not even gotten to sourcing Squirrel Girl and Emma Frost models yet, but I imagine they will have similar issues to overcome.

THEN, when you finally do get something decent that will actually animate reasonably well, you get comments like:

‘This isn’t recognisable as this character.’

I am tired of these limitations. While I do have contacts who can stitch things together, their time is not guaranteed, and their availability does not always line up with the start of my projects.

If I’m being totally honest with you all, and I have always strived for absolute honesty, I really don’t care about these characters.

I appreciate good character design, but introducing a character into a world and making it canonical means addressing the inherent mixing of those universes. How do the characters’ abilities translate? How does that compare to the world they find themselves in now? How is their presence going to affect the greater story arcs?

I care about imagining hot scenarios and putting hot characters in them. I really don’t want to have to consider, interweave, and embrace systems that I don’t want to be part of my universe.

I have my own plans for the way things work in this world, and complicating that with other people’s rules is not gonna work for me.

We adult creators skirt a fine line.

A very fine line.

Most companies turn a blind eye to the use of their characters in this content, a fact that many take advantage of, including myself.

Despite this, it remains an ever-present concern. If I get a letter from Blizzard or Marvel that says ‘stop’, I really can’t do anything about it.

This world and the stories I want to tell in it are far too important to me to leave that as a possibility. That’s not even accounting for the substantial cost that might already have been invested in a project by that point.

I’m taking this approach seriously. I plan to build a roster of my own ‘subjects’ that cover the archetypes, acquiring concept art and working towards creating truly appealing characters for my own use.

Then I’ll get them professionally sculpted, rigged, and prepared for all the wild shit I’m going to put them through.

The goal is to pick one of my roster of ready-to-go characters, place them in a well-established, well-rigged scene, and get right to exploring ideas as they come, rather than reacting to trends and requests.

This will be a slow transition. I still have the other work to complete in the meantime, but this will be the direction moving forward. I’ll keep you all up to date as it evolves, sharing concept art and development as I work through the backlog of projects I’ve committed to.

It’s risky, but I am nothing if not a risk-taker. I don’t expect you all to take my word for it. I believe the work will speak for itself.

It’s a subject that comes up from time to time. Just to be clear, this is not an issue I experience with 99% of my audience, but it does come up.

I’ve made mistakes with promises and given inaccurate or ambitious estimates. I beat myself up every single time I miss one. Whether you choose to believe it or not, there is nobody who cares more about how long this stuff takes than me.

Let’s just be, as I have always strived to be, absolutely clear:

The reason the comments smart is because I believe them. There was a long period when I felt the pace of the work had fallen off. At some point within the last couple of years, it got a lot slower.

Some of that has come from my constant need to improve and change things every time I start a new project, to not repeat myself, and to always make something new.

That’s not likely to change. A true artist never repeats themselves.

There is, however, a stark contrast between the rate at which I’ve worked on this project versus anything I’ve done in the last two years.

I don’t expect that to be the norm. Not everything is going to capture me in quite the same way this one has. Not every project I undertake is going to resonate with me on a deeper level.

I have been reminded of a time when this was all I could think about. Somewhere along the line, it became just work, and I approached it with the same slow pace as any worker doing a job they don’t really care about.

Platforms like Patreon and SubscribeStar exist to fund exactly these types of people: people who can just do the work they want to do and find an audience for it.

I know that I’m in a privileged position. Many people never get the opportunity to do what they love for a living, let alone with every project. There will likely be a balance to find in the types of content I create.

I feel it’s important to reinforce the message that I’m going to do what I want from now on. Some of it might appeal to you, and some of it might not. It’s going to take time, and I understand that won’t work for everyone.

I’m getting to the age now where regrets are not something I want to carry forward. Even if it means this all dwindles to nothing, it would be a far greater tragedy for me not to give this everything I’ve got.

I have something to show you all, and I am prepared to fail trying.

Hello all!

So, been a while. I think this is the first time since I started doing these updates that I've missed a month.

It's not like the thought didn't occur to me before to skip a month, when there's not a lot going on, but I usually find -something- to talk about. 

In this case though, with the last update falling in the middle of the month, I found myself in a position where there really wasn't -anything- to say, and I was feeling pretty down about it.

As you're all aware, my plan was to start on the remake of Mechanically Insistent Pleasure. After a short break, I sat down to listen to the voice work for the first time since receiving it sometime in early Jan.

 Unfortunately, it didn't really fit into what MIP was. The piece had a lot of subtlety to it, and the performance I received was anything but. 

That is by no means a critique against the voice actress, Pixie always delivers top class work. I can only blame myself for not adequately directing the scene.

I tried to rethink how I might approach the situation but found myself at an impasse. I wasn't happy or excited to proceed with the project as I didn't really see anything new or unique in it. The plan involved building it into a bigger arc in the future and sliding some hints as to her situation, but with all that said, it just felt a bit too misaligned to the situation I wanted to set her up for.

The idea was to try to make the best of assets I already had, that, I think, was an incorrect impulse.

In this case at least. I sat with the problem for… longer than I'm proud of. I try not to beat myself up when I find myself in these situations, self-deprecation doesn't help one get out of a creative slump after all, but time was passing rapidly and I didn't really know where to go next.

I'd gone from 'This set is ready and I just need to animate it' to 'blank slate.'

So I decided to scrap the project, at least in it’s current form, and think on what else I could use the voice work for with Lara, something a bit… harder (aye aye)

By this point in the month, I’d come up against an event I was attending: Annecy Animation Festival, which I was due to attend within a week.

So, I decided I needed an actual break.

When you live in the area where you work, it's harder to find that than it might seem. 

Sitting in the same environment trying to force myself to become creative wasn't working. A shock to no-one. 

Naturally, it seemed logical that stepping away from the space entirely might help, and immersing myself in the boundless creativity on show at such events seemed like a good way to do that.

I’m glad to say that it did help! More on that later, but before I left, I moved on to the edging lab plan and started preparing the set and model, starting with Black Cat at the clear ‘winner’ of the polls last month.

I’ve used some new genitalia on this model which has an actual foreskin. It’s one that’s been suggested before, and I was hesitant to include it as it didn’t entirely match the stylised nature of these models, but we found a way to make it fit nicely.

At this point where I was preparing and refreshing the edging lab set, looking for opportunities for quick wins and tuning, I had another thought.

What would it be like if you were in the box?

It’s a thought that planted a seed, that before I knew it had flourished into a grand idea I found myself -genuinely excited- to work on.

This was refreshing, and engaging to me, it was the first time in a -long- time I'd found myself this excited to engage with a project. Before I knew it I had a script outline and started modelling a revision to the set.

This fit nicely into my plan to return to A414 this year. I noticed a couple of comments from those who were excited to see him again, and I know I’ve been an absolute tease with where I was going with that storyline for a long time now. Perhaps I have edged you for too long.

I try to remain true to my word, however, and besides planning, life and other issues getting in the way, I do try my best to stay on target, present realignment of previously declared goals aside of course.

I ordered the voice work and set this all up to be ready after I'd returned from Annecy, and immersed myself in the frenetic world of witnessing world premieres of some of the finest works to come out of the animation industry.

Seriously, watch “Lucy Lost” the instant- it becomes available. Blew me away.

Not only was the trip relaxing (in the way that queuing up for hours in 36C heat can be), it was inspiring and rebooted my creativity in a big way.

I noodled out an excellent idea of where to take Lara to in the future, as well as fleshing out a development on what’s going to happen to Gwen, when she finds out what the deeper, darker segments of Cirimani are like.

Those ideas will all require modelling, which I am excited to get to, but for now, I have plenty to get on with, working on the edging lab: Rivals edition, along with my imagining of what a first person experience in such an environment would be like.

The voice work for A414 landed today, and since it’s a first person, non facially animated presentation that I can animate mostly from my own impulse, I expect to make rapid progress, alongside the rivals editions.

Just to note, keeping in theme with what A414 is supposed to be (self insert) -he- is not voiced.

The person directing the show is.

I’m still noodling out exactly how to approach those situations that feel rewarding and engaging to me. I have rough ideas, but if rushing forward has taught me anything, especially with recent experience. 

This is not something to blindly charge into.

The discovery of excitement for a project again has reminded me of why I started these projects all those years ago. It was just me thinking ‘yeah that’d be fun to experience, I should make it.’

Somewhere along the lines I got distracted with making everything more grandiose from the last. 

Keeping things simple, hot, and exciting to work on is a direction I’m keen on exploring more, a set doesn’t need to be insanely detailed to get the right feeling to it and communicate the message I want to send.

I know a male bodytype is not going to be the most popular, but sometimes I gotta do something for myself. I hope most of you have faith that the chances of me awaking a new fetish in you is likely greater than providing a disappointing outcome.

A thought to leave you all with, being a fixed point of view scene, the A414 is a situation where it -could- be rendered in a VR experience. I’ve received a few requests along those lines in the past, but I’m curious just how many may be able to make use of it.

The idea would be to release it as a separate version, it requires some additional work, but thanks to all the work I’ve put into the hardware side, that is mostly a passive issue.

Oh! Also I finally figured out what was causing the breaker to tip (that UPS was faulty, as I suspected) so no more being woken up by an upset UPS at 2am.

So, overall, a bit of a slow start, some lulls, but I find myself with a generally positive outlook for the future. 

That’s all, ciao for niaou!

Hey everyone,

In what could only be referred to as a photo finish, the end of last month brought the release of the re-make of the next episode from the VC arc.

I find myself in a headspace where I’m fixated on the episode. What worked, what didn’t and what’s next.

I would consider the feedback I received to have been… mixed. It’s clear that the majority of people favouring this content prefer the more ‘hard’ constraints and BDSM aspects of my work, stuff like the box, the harder side of AIMEE, and most of what goes on in Orogenix.

As ever, my work represents a mix of personal desires, and amongst that there will always be a spectrum: some people want to be strapped down and mercilessly milked whilst being told exactly what's going to happen and exactly how, some people just want to be cuddled and milked gently, some people want to have all aspects of control stripped from them, and everything in between. The intention is to show all sides of that.

Some of the challenges in this piece were ones I wasn't expecting, so I want to talk through a few of those and the lessons I've learned. Finally, I’ll give you a sneak peak at what’s (or who’s 👀) to come.

Technically, I feel that the standard of quality, simulations and workflow has reached a new baseline.

When I got my new machine I expected most of the problems to be solved forever, that never quite is how it works, as expected. Instead of doing the standard I'd achieved before faster, I pushed to exceed it. It exposed its share of issues, ones I've talked about recently here, but also no small amount of breakthroughs and improvements.

I managed to finally come across a solution to rendering (part of the reason I chose such a challenging-to-render low light scene) that satisfied my standards for fidelity, reproducibility, and technical definition.

I put all the new hardware to good use, finding a good balance between the 'should I render this in higher resolution vs more samples' question, which resulted in the improvement to the visual fidelity that, I hope, was evident.

I smoothed out aspects of my pipeline and workflow, tackled the issues that transitioning to a new operating system held (part of the reason for the encoding issues some people experienced when playing back the file).

I successfully implemented, refined and utilised my (in my opinion, best in class) render farm management software and turned rendering from an ear-splitting, sweat-inducing stress fest into a background operation that I didn't need to babysit anymore. This was such a relief after the constant monitoring, believe me.

Overall, I'm firmly placed in a workflow that works for me for getting all the final frames together, mastered and presented, and I'm personally delighted, maybe even giddy, with that accomplishment.

The story element of why the piece existed was originally inserted as an idea to make a 'quick, easy, lightweight' animation that wouldn't be too stressful, re-use existing assets and environments, and plant some seeds that should bear fruit later in the storyline. No promises.

It's possible that was a mistake, maybe I should have trusted you, dear reader (watcher?), to put the pieces together without the additional context this episode provided. Maybe it was totally unnecessary, but I had committed to it, and because I am in the position to take risks and painfully stubborn, I decided I had to take the risk.

Naturally, what was intended to be a quick and simple animation I thought I could crank out in a month or two quickly turned into a hotbed of experimentation, elaboration and expansion of ideas.

I was determined to take something I'd previously been told was a bad idea, even warned away from it, and see if I could make it great. Ultimately that quickly led to a mad-scientist-esque montage of me getting carried away and the focus slipping to, perhaps, areas that didn't need the attention they commanded.

Did I manage it? Well, that's up to you guys. 

I personally feel some aspects of the storytelling could have been done better, but I’ll always be my biggest critic.

My sound designer experienced issues of their own which resulted in quite a delay that both of us weren't expecting (hardware failure, of all things) and I really should have requested more pick ups in the audio work (the final machine was touted as the favourite, but alas, its screen time was too short).

That came down mostly to me not wanting to extend and re-simulate some aspects (that blanket) and also my indecisiveness in how I wanted the scene to play out. Originally I was going to include the original machine setup in some way (which would have extended the runtime by about another 3 minutes), but was already way over schedule at that point and I decided to cut it.

The facial animation was something I'd found myself avoiding during the production, it's part of the reason for such low lighting and how some scenes outright hide the facial expression entirely. I put this down to the implementation of facial mocap, which is a technology I've had a bit of a back and forth with. 

My first use of it was during the Kiriko scene, which worked mostly amazingly, so I considered it a mainstay from that point onward. In the scenes with this Juno model, however, it became more of a burden than an assist in many cases. I spent a ridiculous amount of time combating issues the model was throwing at me, trying to get things to be acceptable rather than a travesty, which is far from being outstanding.

I felt during this I was getting better and quicker results with my old keyframe-based approach, which was the basis for many of the models in the box and edging lab series. Of course those also had masks which easily halved the effort involved (the mouth is by far the most time-consuming aspect to get right). 

By the time many of these issues became evident, it was too late to meaningfully change any of them, re-rigging a model you'd already put a month or two's animation work into obviously ain't gonna fly.

It wasn't the show-stopper I'd hoped for, but I still consider it necessary, which is easy for me to say since I know where this story goes. As ever I must ask for your trust that it will, hopefully, make sense as to why it was so important to me to get done.

Can I promise I won't make those same mistakes again? Absolutely not. Will I try to prevent them? I hope so. 

Am I going to stop making risky bets? 

Course not.

Who do you take me for?! 

After some extended discussions with members of the discord, mulling over the feedback, and considering how long the wait has become between productions, I feel sneaking in an episode returning to what many of you know me for is the right thing to do.

The next focus will be…

🥁

The box. 

Or more specifically, the edging lab.

I think I will continue with my next intended animation: Lara in the tentacle chair (remake of Mechanically Insistent Pleasure) next, and see about slotting this in just after, but I will see how it evolves as things progress and the piece comes together.

A full body, facially animated Lara in a tentacle chair is a delightfully challenging animation, and I have everything I need to start on her right now. The edging lab is a simpler production overall, but it would require a fair amount of model preparation, voice work and writing before I could get going on it.

So the plan, loosely, is this: start on Lara immediately, use the prep time for the edging lab to run in parallel, and flip back and forth between the two as each allows. It's something I've not done before (I typically tend to be fairly laser focused on a single project at a time) but the gaps in this last production, where I was quite literally sitting on my hands waiting for input, made it clear that having a couple on the go could work in my favour. And yours.

So that might mean a segment of each participant gets released as they're ready, or between that and Lara, we will see.

To that end, I would like you all to engage in a poll to determine who it is you'd like to see placed within its clutches. To my mind, a Marvel Rivals themed episode seems to be most on the money, so I have placed a few options below, and I'd like you all to vote for your favourite participant.

Votes will be locked in at the end of May and will be aggregated across my supporter platforms.

This isn't going to guarantee their appearance, but it will likely influence what happens to them (or not), so make your choices carefully. Naturally, you can also nominate different characters in the comments but the focus is on those in the poll.

Keep edging,

Max

So, I missed my deadline. Even with a conservative ‘double the expected time’ estimate, I still missed it.

It threw me off a little, I’ll be honest. We treat failure so negatively in our society that it’s hard not to let it get to you. ‘Don’t get it wrong’ is so ingrained into our upbringings, our education, and our careers. Easy to see why it sticks. 

Even when the thing that went wrong was missing a mostly arbitrary deadline.

In this update I’ll talk about the shiny new equipment (which some of you have expressed an interest in), then move onto the NSFW previews.

I’d finally gotten my new computer. As mentioned, it came from a system integrator, so the first thing it needed was to come out of the default case and into the rack.

I’d been deliberating over which of these machines would serve as my main workstation, then landed on the obvious answer: a KVM switch. That’s exactly what they’re for. Getting the wiring to make sense took a little effort, which put my considerable sketching skills to the test.

Whilst everything was out in the open, this was a good opportunity to investigate the issues I’d been having with a node that had been crashing and not recovering mid-render. With a whole new machine joining the fleet and the rack now full, I could simply pull the offending machine, but I was curious what was actually wrong. It’s a pretty fierce machine that I could sell to recoup some of my investment, but I wouldn’t want to sell faulty hardware without disclosing it.

I took the opportunity to strip down, clean and rebuild all the nodes, replacing the bulky coolers that meant every hardware issue required removing the GPU and CPU cooler just to get to the RAM. Not ideal when you’re wanting to do a full test.

Now you may have guessed it, but the RAM was the problem. An exciting future within the clutches of a failing RMA system awaits me there.

I took the time to reconsider the OS the nodes ran, stripping them down to a minimal, headless installation. As well as being very efficient, interacting with machines in a terminal makes me feel like a cool hackerman.

I also added some spacers to the sound panel on the front of the server cabinet (still couldn’t get away with the glass, boo) which gave just enough of a gap to keep all the nodes, and most crucially the jet-engine equipped switch, tamed during renders.

The result was a rendering experience that was actually pretty peaceful. I took a moment to admire the calm whirr of the farm as it crunched numbers, rendering scenes as I completed them, with nary a lost frame, crashed node, or anxiety over overheating. It had literally never been as quiet, cool, and efficient. From where I was last year, this was a really triumphant moment.

I spent more time refining my render management system, fixing bugs, adding features, a little bit of tuning. Making sure everything is stable and ready for when something needs to render, or I just want to see a few preview frames in not a lot of time.

With two thirds of scenes down already, I approached the final scene with gusto. Shiny new super fast machine at my fingertips, the return of a classic setup (with some revisions), and a simple set of sims to do. What could go wrong?

Things started out pretty routine. The sim looked great in Houdini:

When I imported the result into Blender, however, I was getting clipping.

Clipping happens a lot in animation and is generally fine, since you don’t see the artifacts it produces. In this case though, with a transparent surface, it just looked really odd. This falls into the category of ‘unacceptable failure’ in my eyes.

So I tried running the sim on more accurate, un-remeshed collision geometry. Also no. Then I tried exporting the remeshed sim directly, No again.

Bear in mind that even with the new fancy machine, there are still hours between iterations. I lost weeks to this problem, and I’ll be honest, it wore me down. All that preparation, all that equipment, and I still couldn’t nail it.

The issue turned out to be something completely stupid and entirely unpredictable, fixed with an equally stupid workaround. C’est la vie.

I’ve been piling stress on top of what is already a stressful phase of production. By this point I’ve been staring at the same animation for months, and all I can see is errors. The internal narrative shifts from ‘This is so exciting!’ to ‘Was this ever interesting?’ and ‘Are people going to like it?’

The only reliable solution I’ve found is to step away for a time, let my barometer reset, and revisit with fresh eyes. Thinking about it further, I’m not sure this is a problem I can, or indeed want to, solve.

If I’m not failing, I’m not trying anything new. I’m not experimenting, I’m not doing the best job I possibly can at that moment. The expansion on the original idea was an attempt to bring you all something new and utterly unrecognisable from the preview I released last year. The lesson I’ve taken from this is that failure isn’t something you should punish yourself for. It’s an indication you’ve grown. It means you’re learning.

Luckily enough, my job is mostly done for now. The frames are with sound design and the writers for the finishing touches. Once done, I’ll revisit it one more time for the final stage of polish and presentation, and depending on those timescales this should be out in a couple of weeks.

Before I go, I do want to say a genuine thank you. To those of you who stick around through the quieter months, who leave comments, who drop ideas into the Discord. I read them, my support team highlights them, the community interacts with them, and more of them feed into the work than you might realise. 

The months where the work is grinding and set back after set back wears you down and progress feels invisible. They're tough, but they're made so much easier knowing there are people on the other side of it who are engaged, who care, and who are willing to wait. That's not something I take for granted.

I promise the wait will be worth it, this one is explosive.