A little bit of self reflection (relating to the Four Year Special)

So I just wanted to throw this one out there to everyone in the highest support tier, because you guys are my most loyal fans and I'm constantly grateful for the support you're giving me. As such, I think you guys deserve honesty from me. It's a bit of a wall of text, so if you're not interested that's completely fine. This is for the people who are interested in my behind-the-scenes thinking and thought progress that goes into creating sets.

So the Four Year Anniversary Special is now out, or rather part 1 is now out, and I have to admit to not feeling 100% right about it. If I compare it to Ascension, that one was better. Now, this isn't always a huge problem. Sometimes one set is more of a homerun than another, it just happens. But in this case it annoys me because I didn't notice that it wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be until the very end, when there was basically no time left to do anything about it.

My gripes with the set are things that I expect to find some agreement on, but they're also kinda from an artist's pov so it's probably not something that everybody paid attention to. I'm actually hoping you guys did, because then it means that my doubts rhyme with my audience's expectations.

The first thing is something I touched on in the set release post itself: not enough pose variation. This is the largest reason of why I want to do a part 2. I have more ideas and I want to execute them.

The second thing is cum consistency. For a cumshot special, when I looked back on some of the gooey-er renders, I wasn't a big fun of how the cum turned out. Too thick, too splotchy. This is strictly an issue of me not having enough time to sculpt cum in detail. There are some shots in there that I really like, but they're the shots where the cum is thinner and more ropey. The shots centering around Marcella eating out Kayla with both their cocks sticking out just aren't up to par for me.

A huge part of why this is the case has to do with technical issues I was having. Long story short: I had to re-sculpt every single cumshot every time I either moved the girl it was on, or slightly changed her pose. This was due to an issue parenting objects in the newest version of Daz Studio, and I haven't been able to find a solution for that. Usually I can and I do keep cum attached to bodies that move, and unexpectedly not being able to do that this time really threw a wrench in the gears of a production focused around cumshots. I still don't know if I can solve this issue or if it's simply a new reality until Daz gets around to fixing it.

Lastly, the shading isn't consistent. I actually used an improved cumshader for the later shots, which ended up looking better. Overall though the cumshader had like 95% similarity to the one I used for Kayla & Marcella, and the reason it looks so much better there has to do with the lighting situation. I could've taken that into account here, but I didn't.

Now some of the reasons to do with all of this are time constraints. I expected to have more time but the absolutely ridiculous heatwave that hit Europe in the final week of production knocked my effective work hours down by 50% if not more. It was almost impossible to be indoors in my apartment, and I didn't want to risk overheating my rendering computers either.

Now of course it shouldn't come down to that, but it did. In an ideal world, I would have started work 1-2 weeks earlier, but that was time I had used to make further progress on the animation front. I'd been having trouble with some rigging issues and used that time to more or less work them out with the intention of picking them back up after set production was done.

I don't want to use these explanations as excuses. I could've worked around this had I gone about my time management differently. And that's part of what irks me. I know I don't have to justify myself like this, not necessarily in any case. But I do want to. I think it's important to you guys that if you looked at this set and thought "honestly, The Dude can do better", I want you to know that I agree.

Thankfully, Part 2 is where I can make up for all of this. After that, I intend to slightly wind down production for a month or two so that I can go full steam ahead with animation.