TLDR: The Kiri episode is rendering as I type, by the numbers it will be doing so for the next 4 days, allowing me a couple days to do my post processing and final touches, this should drop sometime next week (I'm aiming for Thursday)
With that said, I wanted to talk today about where all your money ends up!
Believe it or not, I'm not actually buying a yacht with it!
This project represents the first true 'all hands on deck' situation for me, It's the first time that an entire production has started with, and been worked through by multiple members.
So along with paying the growing team of passionate individuals (all of which are equally as excited to see this vision rendered) a lot of it gets spent on hardware.
New computers, graphics cards, hard drives, that kind of thing, I'm going to explain why this is so helpful, by talking about cum!
Simulation for the nation
I spent about 2 weeks of this month running fluid simulations for this scene, When I said before that you should all expect a scene like Mercy X Aimee but messier, I meant it!
That sounds like a lot of time, and it is! But when you consider I was using a whole new system which I had to learn the ins and outs of... well.. it's still a lot of time!
But honestly, that's just simulation in general, it is a tedious, yet necessary part of productions.
And when I say tedious, I mean tedious, below is an example of a FLIP simulation baking in real time:
Just so you can understand the numbers here:
The simulation is running on a 13900K, the fastest possible processor for this job
That gif represents the time it takes to see the result of a single frame of calculation
The simulation -will- slow down the longer it goes on, due to the amount of particles in the simulation increasing.
This is for 234 frames of simulation with an extremely small amount of fluid.
This is a system I've been using for many years now, a lot of the fluid dynamics in a lot of my productions were made using it, so I'm pretty good at it at this point, I've had a lot of practice.
But even with that level of experience, a simulation will almost never turn out well on the first try, you almost always have something to tweak to get it to look right.
So suffice to say, considering some of the simulations in this scene go on for thousands of frames, this was not going to work.
I like to think I have an extremely patient supporter base, but I think even you guys would get upset if I told you all I'd be waiting another 2 months on this project! (I did not pull that number out of the air, it's literally how long it would have taken)
So, things had to change. Enter fluid particles. By comparison this is a much larger scale simulation running, with 10 times the particles, on 20x the scale:
Awesome right!? But this is simulation, Simulations still go wrong. They go wrong a lot So, you're always going to have to iterate, and at the length of time this sim goes on for, it was taking about an hour to an hour and a half to see the results of each sim.
The solution? run 3 iterations of the simulation with different values at the same time, across a networked set of computers:
You'll notice those move a lot slower, it got a bit more complex as time went on!
In the end, in a single week, I was able to complete something in the region of 150-200 iterations of the simulation until I found the settings that produced the result I wanted
Well, actually the result I wanted was Version 47, but I ran about another 20 after that just to see if it could be made any better.
Overall, the fluid particle system was a wonderful addition to my arsenal, and the time I've managed to turn this project around in is a reflection of the level of investment that's brought us this far
Without the support of you all, I would never have been able to afford all the devices that make this kind of stuff possible!
It is my hope that, if this continues, we can only continue to make better and greater things. As competent as this system is, I have made contacts that are going to enable me to start using Houdini for my simulation needs, and then we're going to see stuff on another level entirely!
With that said though, this production really is on another level from my previous works, we are finally starting to see the return of the investment that I've been building on for the past few years!
Light her up!
Another decision which, may not have been as popular is, This production could have actually been done and released by now, the timing was such that it did have an, albeit slim, possibility of coming in just under the wire.
What ended up costing us was the addition of volumetric lighting, It is a very good looking, but also very costly addition to the rendering process.
Just to put it in perspective, these are frames from different stages of the animation, all of them are to be considered WIP (even the one at the top of this post)
This was the first lighting setup I was going to go with for this production, at this stage this would render in about a minute per frame (17,175 frames, 3 computers = about 4 days)
I got some feedback that the light direction was a little boring, so I twisted it a little, messed with the range and added some cut-out sections of it, at this stage it's still taking about a minute per frame.
Then volumetrics came about, speak to any 3d artist and they will know that volume is an extremely costly, but also extremely beneficial addition to how real a scene feels. Just this level added 30 seconds of render time -minimum- to each frame (that makes the render take 6 days instead)
Nice right? But we can do better here at MJP.
This final adjustment, along with some additional tweaks pushed the final average frame render time to 2 minutes per frame (8 days rendering total)
Soooo yeah, that's why I missed my deadline at the end of last month, I think the results speak for themselves though.
But I said 4 days at the top? how come it's going to be done that soon if it was going to be rendering twice as long?
Well, I bought another GPU, another thing I was able to do, because I have so many of you supporting us.
If I'm being honest though, I made a lot of similar decisions during the production of this piece.
The whole, get content out fast VS realising your own vision of the scene debate is one that will run through the minds of any independent artist living upon the whim of thousands of generous strangers.
It is taking a measured approach, and spending the extra time that resulted in the production looking the way it does now, and I sincerely believe that, that's why you're all here, to see the finest quality pornography that exists.
Until I release my next piece of course!
I leave you with an image of some frames in motion from the animation.
Please bear in mind this is a screen recording/crop of a small section of the frame before any final post processing, it is also a GIF which are low frame rates, the final production moves as smoothly as any of my others do: Bye for now!
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)
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Goals
$2,990 of $3,000
per month
Yeah I know, it's a big one, but realistically this is what I'd need to quit my job and do this full time, it would no longer be a hobby and obviously bring a significant reduction in production times.
$550.0
THE GOAL REACHED!
This amount allows more robust outsourcing of jobs in the production cycle which will help bring timescales down, including things like sound engineering and editing.
$250.0
THE GOAL REACHED!
This covers my monthly costs for VA work, subscriptions, addons and outsourcing where required. It won't eat into the deficit but it will ensure I do not need to compromise when it comes to these facilities, meeting this should bring down production times.
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