Progress Report, 18/03 - 22

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another in the line of progress reports.

This week has been another relatively high-intensity one, both in terms of technical learning as well as some weird legal kerfuffles.

SFM to Blender porting lessons are continuing, where I'm gathering a list of old models that aren't too dated and which I'd like to see ported and subsequently polished up. Alexstrasza above is one such example of work in progress, Lulu is definitely on the list along with Cassie, as are a couple others. The greatest obstacle at the moment is getting a grasp on how to sort shaders properly, running model textures through an AI upscaling program to get them up to more modern standards, and figuring out why the UV maps for eyes inevitably are ported misaligned or even inside-out (and fix that) so I don't have to manually create eyeballs for every darn character I port.

Regardless, the process seems painless enough otherwise, meaning if I can pinpoint the issues in question I might to be able to streamline the process of porting, meaning we can see some old favorites return but in significantly higher quality. I've considered making a poll to see what characters to prioritize in this process, so if you have any old favorites you'd like to see make a return, feel free to tell me in the comments below :)

The weird legal kerfuffle in question stems from an exchange with Xhamster where I realized one of my own videos had gotten copyright struck and removed on their page. Needless to say, this is frustrating and weird on its own, but when I got a hold of their support it turned out that, bizarrely, it was none other than P0rnhub that had filed a DMCA claim against it, citing some clause of "exclusive rights" to my content that I had supposedly granted them. Needless to say, I contacted them in turn, and it seems that my videos existed in a weird state of pseudo-limbo, pending review and verification (as my account isn't verified on there, and never has been since their verification changes) whilst simultaneously somehow encompassed by their Model Program (which requires verification), which includes such a clause. This might explain why I've had such a hard time uploading my older videos on various platforms, with them being rejected, removed or otherwise denied for seemingly no reason what so ever.

Thankfully, the matter should be resolved seeing as I've now deleted all my videos over there. The goal in the immediate on this topic is to increase my reach by expanding to Xvide0s by somehow managing to satisfy their verification process, as well as sticking to the usual r34 pages. All these administrative matters are, on the whole, very draining - I rather just focus on creating stuff, but several day-long email interactions with copyright departments while trying to suss out who is doing what and why are sadly sometimes necessary, making it all too obvious that I'm part of an "industry" and that these matters are required to continue to do what I do - not to mention expand in the hopes that I might actually make something out of this one day.

Some news on the topic of project progression - I am still struggling with the Convict script, though I believe I've found a theme this time that will sustain the project adequately. It'll require another proper reform of the script and a handful of props ported, but I think the project will be better for it. We've at least got all our actors prepped and ready, meaning it's just the overall structure and presentation that needs to be nailed properly. It is, on the whole, significantly more difficult to create something internally consistent when projects grow organically from just posing a few scene ideas without its own growth threatening to discard a bunch of the scenes and poses that sparked the ideas for the project in the first place, particularly when dealing with the sensitive themes of Jack banging a bunch of Blue Suns. Suffice to say, there's a requirement for tact and care when writing something like that, which I previously came up short of, repeatedly, but now hope to have found a way forward for that is conducive with what we do here normally.

It certainly doesn't help that whenever I struggle with getting a script together I have to fight to not get distracted by other, shinier projects - the curse of creativity, as it is :)

Regardless, we soldier on. Thank you, as always, for your continued support and for all of your kind words! Hope you're all doing well out there, all things considered.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH