Progress Report, 13/08 - 21

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

Primary focus this week has been the Wonder Woman comic where I have, for the first time, managed to arrange test-renders from three separate sessions into a somewhat comprehensive comic lineup. The introduction sequence is still missing and requires posing etc, but the script runs from start to finish of what has already been done, meaning we're well on our way to get this whole ordeal sorted. What needs be done now is to sort out the intro in question, then go through that and all the scenes above, giving them their final lighting, camera and posing touches, render them all out in high quality (which, oh boy, will take its sweet time), ordering them in a similar fashion to those above, and then diving into GIMP or its equivalent to try to comic-ify them as much as possible with speech, narration and sound effects.

So far I am pretty happy with how it's turning out, and though I can't share the script here owing to its structure relying entirely on the images and containing no descriptive text of its own (thereby making no sense to read on its own), the themes are the usual DH mixture of prostitution, size-queenery, and undercover work coupled with a manner of social naivete that leads to all parties enjoying themselves even though they perhaps shouldn't.

Depending on how this is received I might consider doing more comics of a similar character, as they are effectively a perfect medium for me to get my larger "project" size ambitions sorted even when I have little time left over from my day job to work on animating. I don't know how much sense this makes to others, but I find that if I try to work on a long animation by briefly diving into it once per day or every second day, stressing back and forth between work and other commitments, it's easy to lose track of what exactly was being done to a scene, and lo and behold, in the final render I'll see some clipping or a body part I forgot to animate, driving me insane and bald. Keeping meticulous notes is in itself a time-consuming venture, and the slow crawl by which an animation then takes form is then additionally threatened by my propensity to lose interest in a given idea, and I can find myself drifting to other things. Comics, conversely, means I can arrive home, look at a pose I was working on and simply decide to jump to the next scene, posing that instead, thereby dislodging myself from the threat of feeling "stuck" and can easily steam ahead by giving myself as rough an outline of the full thing as I feel is necessary. If it turns out to not work well, it can then be significantly easier discarded, having cost me way less time than taking a crowbar to the same animation over and over before finally giving up on it.

This isn't to say that I don't want to do large animation projects, far from it - rather that comics would be a nice fallback for when my schedule turns hectic, ensuring my backers a steady content output for more long-term ventures that goes beyond my regular update schedule. It's been very enjoyable to work on and, on the whole, has done wonders to keep my creativity alive even through all the stress, so I sincerely hope people will enjoy it :)

In other news, we've managed to hit a milestone over on Twitter with 10.000+ followers, an absolutely insane amount which I never thought would be a thing when I started off doing this stuff. Thank you everyone, so much, for your support! I will readily admit that I am entirely at a loss of what to do to celebrate the matter in question, but I'll try to think of something that incorporates both the twitter and the patreon crowd in the end, so as to not leave anyone by the wayside owing to how deeply connected these two ventures are. Suggestions are, of course, welcome!

I believe that's it for this week! Thank you so much for your continued support, and for all of your kind words! I'm coming up on my second dosage of the vaccine by the end of this month, where I'll set aside a few days of rest just to be on the safe side, but until then I'll be working on just as usual.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH