Progress Report, possible future Patreon currency change, 11/04 - 25

Hello everyone and welcome to another progress report!

EDI's comic has seen a Chapter 2 rewrite, putting it more in line with the feedback I got from Chapter 1, so it's gotten to a point where posing will begin next Tuesday. I realized somewhere along the point of this comic that it's become a bit of an "origin" story for a lot of my silly animations and the likes, so I decided to lean into it and write the ensuing chapters to establish, for instance, why Samara's broken her vow, the establishment of the relationship between Liara and her Yahg, and similar things. Chapter 1 kind of set up Miranda's proclivities for vorcha in particular, but I might still dip in or give her a cameo in future chapters to flesh out her character a bit more given how Chapter 2 is significantly longer (and has way more shots of the sex scenes) than the first chapter is. Fair's fair, and all that. Either way, the point is to establish more of a foundation for my work in the Mass Effect universe - rather than have the "reasoning" behind my animations just be a vibe or otherwise vague, context-free motivation - hopefully elevating the rest of my work somewhat in turn.

Ivy's project has also seen a good step forward, with the lip sync for Scene 4 having been completed. Come next week I'll be sorting through as much as I can of the core animation structure, or at least one of them given how there are two different paces at play (going from slow to a faster over the course of the scene), and then continue on from there. Things are shaping up pretty nicely all in all, and I think this is honestly one of the better butt sculpts I've done, so I'll be trying to do it justice when I finally put it in motion.

I spent a lot of the weekend with Cycles, testing out the sweet-spot for my setup to do tiling in order to shrink VRAM usage, and believe I've found the point where diminishing returns begin to grow out of proportion, so I'm looking forward to employing this understanding to larger scenes in the future. The comic especially will have this come in handy, but I might just use it to test my hand at animating a massive gang bang scene in the future as well, something Eevee and Cycles at immediate, full-scale render settings have issues with.

I went ahead and bought FLIP Fluids as well this week, ensuring I have the full retail variant instead of the old github fork I utilized before. The old version served me well, but given how much quicker the mainline is updated alongside new Blender updates I ended up getting it instead. I really want to minimize the chances that the add-on breaks at crucial moments, like they did with the Gemma Scenario, and at least with this I can say with a clear consciences to you all that I've done my best, even if it does break at some inconvenient juncture. In this sense we should have fluid dynamics back for this month's Scenario, and though I am yet to find the time to test this version out yet, I'll be sure to test it before committing to something that'll remand it work for the Scenario's creampie scene.

LPL vote is ending tomorrow Saturday over on the Discord, for eligible tiers ($5 and $10), so check that out if you've part of those tiers and got your Discord account linked to your Patreon account.

As a final note I'd like to point to the distinct possibility that I might be shifting away from the US dollar towards the Euro instead, or even outright into the SEK, depending on world developments. The USD has presently taken quite a few hits and with the strengthening of the SEK on top of that I've seen quite a drop in my Patreon payouts, so I might opt to shift to a more stable currency all in all. I'll be sure to warn everyone well ahead of time before I make this shift, where I intend to monitor the way things go very closely, though from my understanding not much would change for backers since the pricing is set at the same rate as before. The absolute earliest this could occur would probably be in May, so in about a month, but again, we'll see how things go. Time will tell, as they say.

TL:DR:

EDI comic progress, Chapter 2 script done
Ivy project progress, Chapter 4 lip sync done
FLIP Fluids add-on purchased
LPL Discord vote final day
Possibly changing Patreon currency from USD to EUR (or SEK) in the future

And that's it for this week! Thank you everyone, so much, for your continued support and for all of your kind words! Weather here is the usual dank grey of spring, but we've had a few nice, sunny days so fingers crossed we'll see some flowers bloom real soon. While I am looking forward to summer, I am not looking forward to the heat it'll bring. I best test and make sure the fans I bought last year actually work ahead of time, this year.

Take care of yourselves, as well as each other!
/DH