Ten Years of The Dude - Part Two: Breanna Marshall

Today, let's talk about the girl who was the first addition to the LU cast after the creation of its initial two founding members of Kayla and Yelena. The blonde brat herself, Breanna Marshall!

Like everyone else in the cast, Bree has come a long way from her first iterations. She's also the one responsible for the IP name "Lust Unleashed", as well as the character that made me realise I could turn this 3DX venture into a proper career. So without further ado, let's begin.

Breanna as we know her today. An iconic look. Out of everyone in the cast, she maybe changed least. From the very early onset I was pretty decided on what I wanted her to look like, because I had a very clear source of inspiration: a pornstar by the name of Rikki Six. A ditzy blonde with beautiful tits and a body so perfect I can still barely believe her career was as short as it turned out to be. She was active around 15 years ago, for maybe a year or two/three at most. A starlet.

Of course, Breanna in her first days wasn't quite as pretty as Rikki was, but that didn't keep me from trying (and pretending). And it's kinda funny, thinking back, that the shape I thought she had doesn't really come across now. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that really is true. With a lot of time between me and these first renders, I struggle to see the connection between Breanna and her source of inspiration.

Here we have it! The very first Breanna render ever. Clearly, the potential was there. Not quite Rikki, but... not quite nothing either! I remember making this shot and being so impressed that I was conjuring these beautiful bimbos out of what felt like thin air. The joy and discovery of a brand new creative process that I had never given any thought in the years prior. And now I was starting to build this whole world populated by all these beautiful women! The motivation to create more was incredibly strong.

Of course the name didn't come from the lady I took as inspiration from her body. That came from another pornstar, someone whose style I loved and who did some incredibly feminine lesbian scenes that I had sort of grown up on: Breanne Benson. I thought Breanna sounded just a little bit better than Breanne, and boom. There we were. I couldn't keep the last name of course, that'd be too on the nose. So first I came up with McKinnon, but then realised I wanted something punchier.

Marshall.

Isn't it funny how this render is objectively worse than the one above, but came out way later? As mentioned yesterday, I had no idea how to set up skin shaders for outdoor lighting. So you got this super flat looking skin. Didn't stop me from rendering a summer set though.

So, who was Breanna gonna be? Well, initially she was gonna be Kayla's sister! Yeah, that's right. Real oldheads might remember that initially I released two sets to Affect3D: Sin Sisters - The Museum, and its sequel. Yeah, that didn't fly. Even fictional sisterly love is frowned upon, and to be honest, I'm kinda glad I got an email from A3D asking me to reconsider what to call these sets because I don't think that angle would've held up well over time. I would've grown bored with it, or annoyed by it.

And so the IP came to be named Lust Unleashed.

With that came a re-imagining of who Breanna was supposed to be. That's where her last name came in. I wanted an authoritative sounding name because my initial idea was for her to become POTUS. Yes, that's right. If you're wondering why I've alluded to her mom being a senator over the years, it's because my initial idea was to turn this girl into the President of the United States. Why? Because in a world where Donald Trump could be elected and Stormy Daniels suddenly became a household name in US politics, it was surely no more absurd to have a bratty blonde with big tits and a ponytail become POTUS and turn the whole thing into a giant joke.

I'm kinda glad I never went through with it, but mostly because I have no idea what it would've added to Breanna. It's already absurd enough that Yelena is the Empress of a revived Russian Empire that we know very little about, so maybe not turn 20% of the LU cast into actual heads of state.

So, if she's not POTUS, maybe she's something a little bit more realistic. Maybe she's the daughter of an influential politician that Kayla wants access to. She's a spoiled brat with an addiction to pink outfits that drives supercars. Still an absurd character, but fittingly absurd. A true brat.

This is where the idea came from of having Breanna meet Mari and fall in love with her. Which I introduced as a storyline in 2019:

I wanna highlight this shot because I love how many things it contains that I knew I wanted to do but hadn't really develop a skillset for yet. So again, we're looking at massive overexposure from the store lighting, as well as super pale skin that doesn't interact with the light at all. But this is also where I wanted to do more cinematic framing, yet I had no idea of what constituted cinematic framing at the time. I didn't know about cameras, about lenses, about any of it.

Another perfect example of that is this shot:

There are so many things I would do differently about this shot now. Character positioning, focus, depth of field. All the blocking is just wrong. Then the lighting, move all the brightness to the back and turn it down, create softer fill lights in the front that allow us to read the characters. But also, just work with different lens sizes. More telephoto, so above 35mm, would be perfect to sell this scene, but instead I'm just rendering this at very default lens settings because my logic back then was simply "if you can see it, it's there."

Of course the basics of framing a narrative shot are there. Breanna's talking to Mari, Taylor's being introduced in the background, there's a sense of motion here that's leading to a new character being introduced. So it's not ALL bad. But this kind of analysis is what keeps me getting better every single year.

The reason I'm choosing Breanna's renders to talk about this, is because Breanna is the character that represents most of my big milestones. Because after finishing the Special Lady series, which the above shots are from, I redesigned Breanna to be closer to the girl we know today:

In November of 2022, Breanna reached the shape we know her in today. It was one giant overhaul. Brand new skin shaders, a brand new body, big new tits, and a facial tune to highlight everything that made her who she was. Then, in that same month, I did something that I think has paid the most dividends in my 10 years of rendering yet: I bought a brand new Fujifilm XT4 and went outside to start taking pictures of the world. It gave me an understanding of photography that immediately translated to a spike in render quality. And the first time I would apply those skills would be ONS: ACE.

It was with the ONS sets that I began to really understand the power of camerawork and framing as a narrative device. Something that I had only had an intuitive understanding of prior was now translating into something that I had control over. Something I could reproduce. It's part of why I went absolutely nuts creating shots for these sets, and why they turned out to be such massive, multi-month projects. A rhythm that I don't think I ever really abandoned since I feel like I'm now much more in control over what I make and therefore wanna hang around in certain settings for longer.

This new level of camera control, combined with the visual upgrades of the girls' bodies around that time, were what put Breanna at the forefront of my development as an artist. In many ways she's always been my guinea pig. A very good looking guinea pig who definitely stood to benefit from all the experimentation :D

And now, of course, she's getting married. All girls have to grow up.

I don't know where Lust Unleashed would be without Breanna. Definitely impossible to imagine this setting without her.

Tomorrow I'm posting new renders wedding orgy renders into Desire! And then wednesday we talk Tatiana!