Ten years of The Dude - Part Three: Tatiana Tarasova

It's time for a deep dive into member number four to join the Lust Unleashed cast. The dickgirl who started it all. The consort of the Empress herself. Tatiana Tarasova! And what an evolution she's gone through. I think I added Tatiana at the tail end of 2015, either that or early 2016. After adding Breanna to the cast, I realised that the power of LU was gonna be in having a diverse cast of ladies that I would expand and support over the years. Not random girls each set, not a very minimal cast of two or three, but somewhere in the range of 7-10 girls that people would in each individual case been excited to see.

Tatiana has been an amazing success. And I think you can see that also in the extent to which I developed her story, her looks, and her visual fidelity over the years. In the Breanna post it was pretty obvious that stylistically, Bree has been fairly consistent. I had a clear view of what I wanted her to be. Tatiana is the same in a way, but has actually undergone massively overhauls. So let's take a look!

Oh my god, is that Tati? Yeah, crazy right? Each of these posts is an eye-opener to me lol. Holy fuck how far I've come. But hey, clearly she struck a chord even then because even in this visually very limited version, her sets sold amazingly well. Clearly I understood nothing about lighting in this era, but since we've already established that fact in previous posts, let's move on to some of my inspirations used in creating her!

Visually, I think you can clearly see the archetype. If you've ever seen Aletta Ocean, Anastasia Doll, Ania Kinski, Clanddi Jinkcego, or any other (eastern) European big-chested lady with long sleek hair, you can see why I designed Tati this way initially. As for her name? Well, as a Dutch kid growing up in the 90's, there were two main TV shows that everyone watched. One was a boring soap opera I never gave a shit about, think Bold and the Beautiful but in Dutch with worse production quality.

The other was a sitcom about a socially maladjusted family of tax-dodgers and petty criminals moving into an upscale neighbourhood: Flodder.

That girl on the left? That's Tatjana Simic, a Croatian-born Dutch actress that I spent my childhood years ogling on TV. Americans had Pamela Anderson. We had Tatjana Simic. She was hot, she was blonde, she was slutty, she was an absolute sex symbol that nobody even referred to by her character's name. She was just Tatjana. And because of that, her name would be forever etched into my mind as being synonymous with hot.

It's kinda funny because in Eastern Europe, the name Tatiana is about as common for women as John is for men in the US. But this was the only one I knew, and so when time came to come up with a name it was obvious which one it was gonna be. As for Tarasova? Just off a list. Sorry, no interesting story there :D I wanted it to alliterate as with Kayla so that it started with a T was the main requirement.

When Genesis 3 came out, it was time to upgrade Tati. Since I didn't really have a backstory in mind for her at the time, I created this bimbofication sequence to get an idea of how she evolved as a character. This never ended up going anywhere, but funny enough, you can see she didn't start out as a dickgirl. The idea was initially that Kayla would give her a dick, same as everyone else.

Dickgirl bimbos in big pink beds. If I had to define my content direction around 2016 to early 2017, that was basically it. It's no secret that I still love making pink stuff, but I like to think I've toned it down.

Then, in 2018, I bought my dedicated render PC. Gaining the ability to render non-stop on one PC and doing stuff on the other helped me create room for a brand new story direction for Tatiana that would play out across a series of two comics. My visual style was beginning to more sharply define, and while I still wasn't really in control of what I was doing, improvements were being made.

As much as I regretted it having to let go of Tati's (at that point well-defined) straight-hair look, transitioning to the wavy hair ended up being a massive step up. This was part of her brand new storyline too; she wasn't just a Russian dickgirl, she was the consort to Yelena herself, the Tsarina of a revived Russian empire, and together they would come up with a plan to return dickgirls to the world. Tatiana was revealed to be the last one, the single remaining carrier of a recessive gene that two ladies did not want to fade out. And who could help them? None other but Kayla Carter. She could do it. She had the technology.

It's funny because if you had asked me if I had made this comic before or after switching to a third party dick mesh, I would've said after, but clearly Tati is still using the one I made in Zbrush and had to photoshop seams out of. Nevertheless, we've now clearly moved into the visual era that I think mostly closely resembles what I make today. But with a whole bunch of technical limitations that made the production process still a lot more like what I was doing in earlier years.

These renders have no hair sim, no clothing sim, no geografting for nipples and genitalia, no subsurface effects on skin shaders, no understanding of camera settings, and no real understanding of lighting outside of "backlight good". Still, despite all those limitations, I think I was starting to get somewhere. I began to prove that I was in this for the long run.

December 2021. This set is actually a landmark for me. Every now and again I will render something that makes me jump out of my chair and go "holy fucking shit this looks nice." What causes that to happen is the difference in render quality vs viewport quality. You have to take into account that while you guys as consumers see this girls really only as finished renders, I spend FAR more time looking at them as flatly-shaded OpenGL variants in the Daz Studio interface. So usually when I turn render preview on, I go "oh that's nice." But when I go "gooooddaaaaamn", that's when I know that I just made a leap in my skillset.

This set was one of them. Tatiana came out as an absolute success. New big tits, a beautiful new cock, new sim hair, insanely good lighting... the only thing that's still missing is a subsurface skin shader but honestly in this set you can't really even tell.

From here on out, Tatiana was a completed character to me. That is to say, I'm fairly sure that as I will soon begin to upgrade to Genesis 9 across my cast, I'm going to introduce a few tweaks and forced changes here in there, but there's so much about her that's now set in stone.

Much of what makes a character work is accidental. In Tatiana's case, her current hairstyle is a perfect fit for her. But why? Only because I chose to go with wavy hair over straight hair some years prior to this render. If I had insisted on straight hair, I might've never found a simulateable upgrade to it that I liked. And I would've been more inclined to shelve her, and render her less.

But aren't we all glad I didn't? :D A perfect doll, deserving of every moment in the spotlight, with many more such moments to come!

Next up, Mari!