I'm going to recount the events as best I can that we went through this month as development of the scene continued, there's quite a bit to talk about!
Week 1: The Audio
To begin with, after careful review, I found I wasn't able to make the original voice work I'd had done work with the scene.
This was disappointing, but I'd had a gut feeling on an initial review that it wasn't going to fit, I had no complaints about the standard of it, It's just one of those cases where my vision for the scene didn't match the VA's interpretation, this is just something that happens sometimes, after a couple panic attacks about it, the first order of business was re-ordering voice work.
Enter Sultry Lamp who, after providing a sample which,1 if I didn't know any better, was just clipped from the actual Kiriko intro cinematic, delivered a wonderfully sensual, erotic, detailed and engrossing performance which slotted right in with how I saw the scene playing out.
At the attachments at the bottom you will find a WIP Mp4 which has audio in it for an example of the work, it truly is a fantastic performance, and has been a pleasure to work to.
This was resolved quickly, but it cost me about a week before I could really get started, as the entire animation is based around the audio performance, the new audio had to be delivered, cut, and prepared for use, this cost us the week.
Week 2: The Environment
I turned my attention in the meanwhile to establishing the environment layout. I ended up with something that had a rough idea of the space and shape I was going with. But to call it basic would be being generous:
Several hours of fiddling with this, and a growing impatience to start animating was distilling my attention here, luckily my editor managed to step up and take on the job for me, He was able to continue work on that, building not only this environment, but a modular asset pack we can use on all productions moving forward:
I seriously can't overstate how much better this guy is at this stuff than I am
It is thanks to the support and patience of my supporters that I'm able to not only attract, but pay this kind of talent. I can delegate the task to him, pay him a fair and living wage to do so, whilst I turn my attention to the area I'm best at:
Weeks 3 & 4: The Animation
This is the first time I've returned to a female (genitalia based) participant since Mercy X Aimee, and I wanted it to be -good-. Mocap and a decently thought out character rig promised that possibility, and thus I got started
We start with a mocap take, in this case, I've captured and transferred (after some adjustment) the movement of the hips and shoulders onto the character:
Yeah you're gonna have to deal with the creepy dead eyes and no head movement for a little bit here, it gets comparatively worse before it gets better!
Next we add breathing, the mocap setup is not accurate enough, and it's not really practical to get this kind of movement in a mocap scenario, so this is always a manual process:
It's not straightforward either! Here I'm finding the beginning and end points of the breath, then adjusting the curve based on the aggressiveness of the motion, we tend to breathe in steps, IE you release the breath rapidly at first, and then slower as you expend the air volume, likewise in reverse, you tend to sharply intake the volume at first, then fill the remaining volume slowly.
Especially when you're being assaulted by variable, precision applied pleasure.
It took about 2 days at 10-12 hours a day to get the breathing pacing done for the entire production.
This starts to make the motion feel a lot better! But I felt there was more that was needed to tie it all together, thus I created a controller which I then used to add a variable state of tension to her body:
The idea is this key allows me to adjust globally a few values which make her more tensed/at ease, so it changes a few things, raises shoulders, brings elbows in, tightens thighs, angles the hips, pops her abs out.
Another couple of days and that layer is then added to the entire timeline:
At this point I can consider the body animation pretty much done, it is devoid of the proper physics based responses, but for the most part, this really ties the entire body motion together.
Thus it's time to animate the things that are causing her to writhe so:
After another couple anxiety attacks at the scale of this job, far more robust rigs then I'm used to working with made this task fairly trivial, albeit time consuming, as it's a very curated, artistically driven motion. The feeling I wanted for the arms was to commune precise, but organic movements.
Worth noting at this stage that this doesn't feature her skin reactions to the arms, which is something we're going to tackle at the finalisation phase once I'm done with all the key animation, more on this later.
Next up, as I'm sure all of you have noticed, no mask on her, this production has mouth animation, voice lines and such, thus, facial animation is needed!
Now this is the first time I've worked with facial capture, my initial use of it felt a little bit underwhelming honestly.
Looking from the outside in, it would be understandable to think that mocap is simply a case of strapping in, recording the session and slapping the result onto the model. As is probably pretty clear by now, it requires far more curation and adjustment to make something that looks good.
Head motion is an interesting one, this attribute is tracked by the suit, I even did another separate take of the entire scene just to capture it, but you never know what direction you should turn your head in at a certain point, because you can't really consider how that's going to look until you have your angles all figured out, thus animating this cannot be anything other than a manual job to look it's best.
Luckily thanks to my technical lead, I have an excellent rig that allows those kind of adjustments on top of the facial capture:
This is easily the most time consuming phase of the animation, but as is hopefully obvious, absolutely necessary to bring the entire motion together into a cohesive whole.
It's this stage where I embellish the little details, fix anything erroneous, and really just polish the animation. This includes animating the head, eye targets, and making any adjustments or corrections to the mocap and lip sync.
The facial mocap adds an excellent base, takes care of a lot of the timing, and once curated together with manual animation, really sends the facial animation to a whole new level, Strange isnt it, that on it's own it doesn't seem like that much!
And whereas this process is normally the most time consuming part (you can polish forever), it only took me a week to get halfway through polishing the entire 12 ish minute production to this standard, which is pretty incredible honestly, given this scene has a lot more facial animation in view at any one time than any previous production I've undertaken.
Previously it would take me an entire day to do maybe a 20 second shot to this standard. The facial segments of the previous Brig animation took me 2 weeks to complete, and that's not even half of what I've done on this piece already.
At this stage this shot is pretty much what I'd consider key animation complete, There is a physics pass that my technical director will be adding, which will essentially provide the skin reactions to the arms, along with jiggles in the right fatty places.
Some parts though are extra jiggly, so they benefit from a little live wiggle:
Boobtacular as it is, there remains pockets of fat that would really benefit from extra jiggle, and a skin simulation would also sort out areas that are not being tackled correctly currently
Once I'm done with the key animation for the entire production, this layer will be added, along with all the rest of the parts that need simulating, mainly the hair, and the chairs cushions reaction to her body/head movements.
Be sure to check out the attached mp4 which has sultry's -decadent- audio performance, and also plays in 24 fps as opposed to the embedded GIF's in the post.
The Conclusion
So I spent a lot of time on this update because, I was very aware of the fact that it's been a while since everyone's seen some new content from me.
I also slipped into the old habit of making estimates on timescales, whereas this is a skill I've proven to be very bad at in the past, I hope that shedding some light on the production process goes some way to explaining why the nature of these long format productions is so prone to unanticipated delays, and why estimating things is far more challenging then it might seem.
I lost a lot of time overall doing everything but the part I'm best equipped to tackle, this is something I am going to take steps to improve as we move forward.
In my endless pursuit of perfection this production represents a landmark moment for me in many ways; I am finally getting -close- to exactly what I see in my head when I imagine these scenes, the models I'm using are properly optimised and the environments are going to be better than ever. it is extremely exciting to see unfold and I am incredibly excited to share it with you all when it is ready.
As excellent a job as my technical director did preparing this model for me, it is still one based on limitations, as good as this model looks, it will pale in comparison to the standard we're working on, let us look to:
The Future
I can't honestly talk about this and accurately communicate the level of passion for this project my technical director has, so I asked him to write a few paragraphs about what he's working on right now:
One of the biggest hurdles of 3D animation when aiming for humans with realism is the uncanny valley that most rigging methods will produce!
Single use, linear shape keys serve as patchwork solutions and substitutions for properly placed joints whilst contributing to file size bloat, many models are built on spaghetti solutions built to tackle problems produced by a lack of anatomy knowledge.
Big movie studios resort to muscle simulations when making realistic creatures to help take away that uncanny valley by literally simulating how the human body works in real life.
One of the best examples I can give you why this workflow comes in useful is James Cameron's: Avatar
Only one Navi was made with the inner skeleton, muscles, veins, etc… From that one base they were able to generate all the different Navi characters!
Most people tend to believe that blender being free is incapable of such rigging but this couldn’t be further from the truth! Blender has everything needed to create such a rig.What we are currently working on here at MJP will hopefully help people finally believe it is totally achievable with the right approach and a shite load of research & development!
Like any muscle simulation, we need a good accurate skeleton to drive the entire setup! Since humans are something most of us are used to looking at in films & in real life, there is a lot less room for creativity than doing a dinosaur or creature for example! I’ve downloaded and bought quite a few human skeleton assets just to be disappointed with how most of them are not very accurate unless we spend a fortune on them! Also not a good idea to go dig up a grave just to 3D scan one either hehehehe! So in this particular case, the best possible course of action was to take the time to study every single bone as madly detailed as possible to recreate an accurate sculpture of the human skeleton, as close to medically accurate as possible with the available references without going completely nuts on details!
Since the skeleton is used to simulate skin sliding on bones, muscle anchors, muscle sliding on top of bones, tendons, veins, fat and such, I needed to make sure I knew exactly where those muscles and tendons needed to sit on the skeleton! So I painstakingly studied every bone to have as many of the major bone landmarks as possible so it can be as accurate as it can be! So the idea is fairly simple (simpler than making it hehehe!): make an accurate skeleton model that is usable for animation, rig it with a fairly complex rig that allows you to change the shapes and thickness of the skeleton bones directly with the armature bones as opposed to using shape keys, allowing us to modify the underlying structure to fit whatever human character we need.
That also allows for better muscle placements as well as anchor points but also to allow the rig to be as flexible as possible while still giving us the ability to modify the overall look of the character but also to maintain complete animation control over motion capture! Not going to lie, this is a LOT of work and sculpting this skeleton was very challenging but also very rewarding! Now doing the retopology and yes, it is just as challenging! We’re taking the time to do it the right way and we are very proud of its progress!
Jeannot (Jano) Landry Aka: Blender Pirate Technical Director @ MJP
So when's it coming out?
When it's ready! More news when it's available, bye for now!
So this month has all been about preparation for the Kiriko scene. During this month the script was finalised, edited and voice work completed.
We completely re-rigged the Kiriko model with a whole new setup, featuring body and facial mocap to smooth the animation process.
Whilst this happened she received a new head of hair (particle based) and some extra juicy detailed goodies, like sweat mapping, vellus hair and texture refining and optimisation.
This has a really distorted perspective shift (orthographic) but shows the skin detail well
In addition the robot arms that I'm usually used to having to wrestle into shape finally received a good re-designing of their rig setup which will save me substantial time and headaches during the animation phase.
The selection of tools to be used in the anim, some we've seen before, some are new, some may be modified yet! I will let you all muse as to their purpose.
This phase of prep has been something I've neglected a lot for previous productions, always shooting ahead and wanting to get into my favourite phase: animation!
It's difficult to describe quite how advanced the rigs I'm now going to be using are over what I've been working with previously, suffice to say the level of control I have now has never been higher.
It is thanks to this more measured approach that we can get closer and closer to representing the vision of the scene most accurately, and trying to get what exists in my head into the crispy viewable cinematic presentations you all enjoy.
Animation has a budget, regardless of how much time you have, there will be a point where the animator (me) runs out of steam, removing road blocks like fighting bad rigs or models to get them into the shape I need just ensures the quality can climb further still.
Some early lighting testing
The unfortunate drawback of this methodology is that, it takes a while before I can do renders and previews that.... well... look any good! or at least to the standard I consider presentable.
There is no scene background or anything to speak of, and the lighting setup is still being iterated on, but all the toys are ready to go, the scene layout is finalised, and I'm going to start making things move very soon.
All placeholder lighting and no background here.
Most key assets are textured too, so all going well, I hope to finish all the animation this month.
Plush velvet seating, for only the highest tier of luxury
The entire production will come in at around 14 minutes or so depending. I imagine my sound guy is going to need some time with this, so whereas I feel confident we should have this more or less rendered this month, whether it will be available this month, time will tell!
Kiriko is here willingly, but is perhaps due for a more intense experience than expected
Once again a massive thank you to everyone's continued support, being able to sustain this level of income has guaranteed the full time employment of my technical lead, allowing these kind of developments that will not only benefit this production, but every one moving forward!
That's it for now, more developments as they come!
I hope everyone enjoyed a restful time off on the holidays and the return to normality hasn't been too jarring.
Things have been relatively quiet here for the first few weeks of the year, those who don't know my patterns, I tend to take a little more time off at the beginning of Jan to make sure I'm well rested, old habit!
Work has resumed within the last few weeks, and unfortunately that work is very much at the early development of the next scene, which just to confirm: is Kiriko in the insemination chair.
So expect female body/genitalia, and a kind of sensual but forced insemination procedure, plenty of orgasms and copious quantities of fluids, something akin to Mercy X Aimee but a bit firmer and in more of an Orogenix Style.
We've spent the last couple of weeks polishing the script and I've been hard at work developing assets for the scene, a lot of this is still in progress, I will share what snippets I can across the post, but please bear in mind it is, at this stage, all subject to change.
Some of the tools and attachments to be used.
I'd mentioned before that the next few projects would have been ones that I could use existing assets with, I had half of this setup made up from last year when I originally concepted the scene, so I consider this a 'middle ground' in terms of scene development, It is requiring some new assets, but I can make good use of some previous kit, so hopefully it will not have an excessively long production time!
I think a new year is a good time to invest some time in exploring a new circumstance and pushing the boundaries of the medium, as I am known to like to do!
There is not much to see in the scene at the moment as it is still under heavy development. The Kiriko model here is also a proxy (we're re-rigging the mesh and adding some particle hair) hence why it looks all the same colour and she has no hair.
The script was finalised as of yesterday and the voice work is now ordered so we are marching forward! This gives me most of next week to finish up the scene and animation should then begin!
We're approaching something of a middle ground in our technical development, taking advantage of some new technologies, we're not quite at the point of implementing the shiny new model we're affectionally referring to internally as Godmesh™ but thanks to having an experienced rigger on staff, we can start taking advantage of some facial mocap, which should alleviate what is normally the most time consuming part of my productions! (me, I'm the bottleneck)
Yes that's probably the first time I've 're-used' a title for my updates, but it seems apt. We run in cycles and the end of the year is always a good time to look back and reflect on where we are and what I've learned.
This time last year I was moving into my first year focusing on this project of mine full time, I was hopeful, and apprehensive at the same time.
I spent a lot of time trying to plan it out as best as I could, this was, to me, the breakout moment: It's quite a lot to abandon the security of a regular paycheque for the promise of freedom, both creatively and financially.
But abandon it I did and, it was scary! It changed my life forever, and I'm so very glad I did it.
Everyone asks the question, 'If you won the lottery, what would you do?'
It's a fun thought experiment and discussion to have amongst friends, though most of my life my answer would have been something along the lines of 'I'd buy a bigass house and nice car and sit in it living off the interest and just do fucking nothing'
Well, this time last year, I won the lottery, figuratively, I had been handed, by many thousands of generous individuals, financial freedom.
And, it was at the moment that... I paid off credit cards I'd had hilted for months, and saw my bank account with the most money it's ever had in it: period.
I realised, that wasn't my dream anymore.
I really couldn't stand to do nothing, the pull of expressive freedom this medium I was slowly coming to master was allowing me Is a drug I couldn't put down, I had to improve it, hone it.
It's great to have passion, but it can be a curse too.
I had to find balance between realising this vision and keeping my own sanity, I learned things about myself, realising where my limitations lie and recognising where I still had room to grow.
It's a big ego boost to have something 'blow up' like this, so that had to be managed too, something I handled pretty poorly in retrospect.
Therapy and regular exercise are wonderful things, however. As I head into this next year, more physically and mentally capable than I've ever been before, I can't help but get excited for what's on the horizon.
Things moved slower than I thought they would... I wanted to return to the mainline story this year and get back into getting some of that storyline focused lore heavy episodes, but I found myself at conflict with increasing 'business like' concerns.
I think anybody would agree that
If you had the choice between something you maybe wanted to do, and something that would definitely make sure you make a tonne of money, you would at least have to think about the decision.
Because it's not like I wanted a yacht or anything, that money represents opportunity, development, improvement.
So the focus reared around and I found myself torn between wanting to 'please the crowd' and 'play up to the algorithm' and 'garner mass market appeal' rather than use the medium for the freedom of expression it once provided.
Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of every one of the projects I completed over the year, I learned a lot from each one, and I like to think I improved and honed my skills during that time, but that itch remained to finish the story I'd started.
I had to weigh that want alongside my need to ensure it was rendered in the way that, to me, it needed.
It wasn't until the later stages of the year I started making the kind of contacts necessary to properly realise that vision, and I started to see the threads of potential that improving technology, and the right help can bring.
Having a properly custom mesh that was professionally rigged has been on my wish list since I started with this project, but finding the right level of help took some time.
And now here we are, at the apex of the turn.
The model has been coming forward in leaps and bounds recently, and it is very nearing production ready, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say it is the most advanced model that's been created for the purpose of rendering pornography.
Like seriously, Hollywood studio's don't go this hard.
Alongside a blossoming writing team and our asset artist working night and day tirelessly to develop exciting new scenes, I can promise that when it comes to quality, the best is yet to come.
Most of the teams energies have been focused on the creation of a new scene to display this new technology, but since this is the first time setting such a project in motion, there's a lot of work to get it ready, hence why at least for the last few months we've been exploring some old scenes with reimagined scenarios, biding time for the next big thing.
With these tools, assets and models it will allow me to return to the core storyline, and we can get into the really deep lore, and show you all the fun scenario's we have planned.
So all going well (also the TLDR)
Expect a mix of Futa, Female and Male content this year, with some reimagining of previous ideas, and and ever increasing passion for the endless pursuit of perfection.
- Expect us to see something from the main storyline
- Next up is female, cause the girls have been left out for too long now, and that needs fixing.
- I'm working on a centralised archive of all the works which may or may not be available either within the next few hours or possibly in a couple weeks when I return from my break, This will help obtaining my content easier and prevent some of the issues some people have been having with accessibility through mega, and allowing new joiners to get caught up with the available content.
- I'll be re-branding somewhat, with some new logo's, typefaces and colours. We should also launch the website this year, which will act as a hub to collate lore, content, projects and host my monthly ramblings.
For now, I bid you all adieu, and once again thank you all for your immense support that makes both my dream, and your fantasies real.
A rather productive month, I'm happy to say, animation is now finalised on the new project, It has been handed off the sound designer and the technical lead for final adjustments, fixes and simulations, I'm currently just simulating some last bits of FX and our targeted release date for this one is Friday the 15th
The transition and re-shooting the scene in Landscape was successful, and that was most definitely the favoured option between the two going by the polls, I will ensure that's the default option whenever possible as it seems people really don't favour the 'phone format' all that much.
Pay no attention to the materials in general, despite being at this late stage, finalisation of those and lighting is something I'm only now just starting on.
I'll admit I approached this project with a rather blasé attitude, thinking I had solved the majority of the technical issues that the Chun project presented, Given it was basically the same scenario with some variations, I didn't think I'd end up spending that much time on it. Similar to the Sombra in the edging lab, that scene by that point is extremely technically mature.
However, as ever, there was a couple problems that came up to circumvent, the fact that this model has an intact foreskin for instance resulted in it having a unique controller setup that presented some challenges getting everything to look right.
The little 'ridge' of skin just in front of the stroker for instance is one of those weird behaviours we still need to smooth out
Also I re-configured the setup somewhat, Ditching the 'orgasm stopper' mechanic in favour of a more open design, along with some adjustments to the restraints, so we can see more of the body movements that the mocap is doing such a good job of capturing.
In addition, inspired by watching some of the top tier animators at work at blendercon, I approached the facial animation in a new way, focusing on strong and impactful facial poses.
I've stripped away the visor from the eyes so we can see more of the facial expressions, retaining just the headphones.
Again, hair is not currently simulated, so pay no attention to the fact that it clips through and is in the same position in all these shots
Also there's no shots of the 'backdoor' area in this production.
The seam between the cock and body is representative of the material issues still to overcome as mentioned before, also not happy with the detail on it.
Overall, it will be a much more refined and focused variant of the situation I first explored with Chun, Usually I don't like to make such sweeping major adjustments like this in favour of continuity (same devices and such) but we are setting into a section of the Cirimani Labs which does offer a much more tailored experience to their respective occupants, this is something we explore further as we get further into the higher tier, more focused areas of Aimee's Labs.
I think it's fair to say in this genre of entertainment, standards are easily slipped. With erotica you can really get away with a lot of cutting corners, however that's never been the approach I intended when setting out on this venture.
I always find I'm at my best when I'm trying to really push the envelope in some way, do my absolute best to render the best work I possibly can, I find it really demoralising if I think I'm just 'going through the motions'
So whereas it's technically possible for me to run an endless stream of characters through the edging lab, I definitely would struggle with the motivation to see that through, whilst achieving the standard of animation and presentation you've all come to know me for.
Of course, there's realistic limitations to this, as there ever needs to be.
Getting people in to assist me also has this interesting little change in production timing, you expect that by doubling the workforce you'd anticipate halving the production time. Sadly it never does quite work out that way, as I've found having access to better rigged models and environments encourages me to drive my own standards upwards to 'match' the increased quality on display.
If I see an opportunity that's going to cost me some more production time but it will improve things even by 5%, it's very difficult to ignore for me, though sometimes necessary!
And I don't think that's ever going to change, it's an exciting journey, and I'm ever grateful of my supportive subscribers that continue to help to make that work possible!
So, It's interesting being in this position, I guess finally I can say that I'm taking my first baby steps into establishing this little venture into a legitimate business.
It's been a learning experience and also a period of reflection, I'm new to managing a team so it's all very exciting and/or scary.
But everyone is now set to work, and we've got some really fun things in the works.
But in the mean time, there's always time for more machine fun!
Sombra in the edging lab is 90% done at the moment, and I am in the process now of doing final grades and adding all the post work (the UI and text overlays, which are not currently present in the previews attached)
All going well this should be out by the end of this week.
Next project is either going to be Brigitte in the milking ward, or moving straight onto sombra's final section.
There's also Kiriko, which was concepted, but would require a lot of asset building, which Is something I'm trying to avoid just for the moment because it's very time consuming.
Sombra's final section will require some asset generation but not -quite- as much, so I guess I will feel that out, just for fun though, I've added a poll to this post, just to gather interest on what might be the favourite for the next project.
Also, as a final teaser, I've been getting some shots from the latest in development model that's going to be the basis for all my humans moving forward.
All of these are to be considered heavily WIP, and represent a cross section of various in progress developments and ideas.
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