thedude3dx

The animation update!

Added 2018-09-27 23:34:14 +0000 UTC

So, I promised you guys I'd have some more information for you soon regarding how close I am to animation. So here it is! I'm gonna give you a bit of a look into my decision making process here first, so that you get the full picture and why I chose to approach things the way I did.

When I started creating still renders in 2015, I had no real idea how long it would take me to get to the point of animation. I knew I wanted to do it soon, because Miro was doing it and I felt like that's where the action was. But then, as I started releasing sets, I noticed I was really good at doing still frames and, more importantly, that I really enjoyed making them.

Framing, posing, expressions, these are all things you can really focus on with a static shot. You can finetune body language, etc. If you're doing an animation, then that means a few bits of unrepeated movement and then sex loops beyond that. Anything more isn't really feasible for a single artist to do. You'd need a bigger team to manage something that's most unrepeatable information.

Moreover, animating would require me to learn new software. Not the greatest challenge, but the software in question would be Maya and that's so broad that usually, artists specialise in a specific field within Maya as part of a larger team. Again, being a solo artist, the reality was that I would need to learn basically all of it. Skinning and texturing, skeleton rigging, animating, clothing/hair/fluid dynamics, etc. And then rendering too, because I was working with a different render engine in Maya.

So I invested a lot of money into all these tools but because the bills need to be paid, what I was doing was constantly bringing out sets in Daz Studio, software I knew, to keep my income going. That's part of why I started this Patreon: to help me bridge that gap.

Your support has already made a huge difference, but I've had another stroke of luck align with it: Daz 3D has not been sitting still either, and now Daz Studio supports many features that I originally purchased a Maya license for.

In Daz, I can now do clothing and hair dynamics, as well as fluid system. I am at home in the Iray render engine, and I know how to animate on the timeline. I've already been practicing. The only big downside of Daz still at this point is that it is not supported by any renderfarm that I can think of, so whatever I animate in it will have to be a fairly simple scene that I can reduce to minutes of rendertime per frame. Something outdoors, something not featuring too many moving parts.

In other words, solo scenes or duo scenes that consist of simple loops.

It's not a lot, but it's a good point to get started. After all, Girlfriends 4 Ever wasn't much more than that, and it proved a great launching point for Miro.

Because make no mistake, Maya is my endgoal. I'm keeing my subscription running for a reason. Proficiency in Maya is such an incredible plus that I cannot ignore it. But for now, I'm going to make do with what I have.

So my first animated scene, which I can't give you an ETA for yet because I am currently working with a colleague from A3D on putting the final pieces of the technical puzzle together, will be a solo scene. In true The Dude tradition, it will be about selfsucking. Because after all, what else would a futa girl on her own do? :D

So we have options! Who do you guys think the first girl to be animated should be? This is going to be an advisory poll. I'm going to mainly be following my own instincts on this but if you guys have a wildly different idea from my own, I'm going to take that into account and see how I can make that work.