Community Announcement! New mini comic, The state of things, Progress on other projects.

I've gotten page 1 of the mini comic finished and ready to post but for context reasons I really want to get page 2 done and release them together. otherwise people might get the wrong idea of what kink is being focused on.

Page 2 is for the most part already fully rendered and just requires some compositing so I might get both out tonight with any luck.

I haven't forgotten about beating the heat! it's definitely being continued I've just had some trouble getting banana's fur looking right. The technique I used isn't working great for her short, fine fur and I need to do some revisions. The environment is ready to go for the next page of beating the heat, along with all of the props, and even the posing. I Just have to get Banana looking her best <3

I made this mini comic because I was feeling really inspired to get back to actually making things that people get to see that aren't just works in progress. Plus it's a chance to branch out and explore some fun kinks :3

A lot of time has been eaten lately on redoing lots of things in order to heavily optimize. My environment LOOKED great but it was messing with rendering speeds and it was taking almost 35 minutes per frame to get things looking good. I went back and redid the whole scene and was able to get render times down to 7-10 minutes per frame. Not great but not terrible for a large outdoor scene. I might stick to more controlled scenes in the future or do things in a MUCH more optimized way next time. 

I finally swallowed my pride and moved to doing things with AOVs and Render layers properly like a good artist instead of just doing each shot as one big final render every time. This huge open scene in the mini comic kinda made it a necessity. 

Octane also cut several important features from their 2023.1 release and delayed them until 2024 so I'm having to work around not having some things I had started to depend on in the beta version 

Getting fur looking great but also performing in an acceptable fashion has been a huge challenge and I feel like I'm 90% of the way there. 

Octane's out of the box "hair master shader" isn't really working out for me in the way that I had hoped. It's making some fur patterns look really muted and killing the contrast and saturation on some things. It should be fixable using the layered material system but this is currently broken in the latest release of Octane. So for now I'm branching out into creating my own fur master shader for octane.

Working with Ornatrix also hasn't gone quite the way I expected, There is a lot that isn't really well documented about the software and it unfortunately has bitten me in the ass a few times. It is procedural and non-destructive to work with but if you want it to work when rendered you still have to bake it down into a final groom anyway so I'm a bit salty about that

In this time I also put together a new setup for handling squish that has proper volume conservation and doesn't rely on multiple layers of shrinkwrap. It works almost as well on cloth as it does on flesh and will be hugely useful moving forward. 

I also implemented this into my belly sim and I'm adapting it to work for boobs and other round bits too ^_^;

Since I managed to get my ADHD and mental health mostly sorted out things have been picking up speed a lot but I've also been taking the opportunity to really push the limits of the quality of content I can produce which is sadly bumping against the limits of my hardware now so I might not be able to go as crazy as I want with most projects unless I'm very careful to optimize.

The Main comic is coming together too. The main characters are in progress, the story line for the first 3 arcs is done, as are the long term plot points. I'm also working on setting up a page on Comic Fury to host the public version of the comic instead of relying on FA,E621,etc

I will also be adding images to the preview image set shortly

Thank you all so much for your patience and support, I hope I make the wait worth it <3