Big plans for the future! Please at least read the conclusion if nothing else.

So this post will be super long so I will split it up into sections to make it easier to digest as well as include a tl:dr in each section for those of you who only want to get the brief idea. For those of you who wish to read the whole thing though, I will include a lot of material and insight into what I am doing. This post will be broken up into the following sections: Characters (lore), Characters (assets), Clothing/Backgrounds, Work Setup, MoCap Suit, and Conclusion.

The SUPER tl:dr of this whole post is that I plan to completely re-invent my art process from the ground up as well as commit a stupid amount of time and money to my equipment/setup in order to provide you all with better, more advanced content in the future. 

Characters (lore)

It might have made more sense to write the assets section first but I think this is fine. So until now my art has mostly just been with whichever characters I felt like using at a particular time. Also I have allowed the community polls I run to end up creating any random assortment of my characters in any scene but that will change going forward (after I finish this upcoming scene/character poll). For reasons I will explain in the assets section I am going to have to delete all of my characters from the lineup temporarily and maybe some permanently. 

Right now the only characters I have with a somewhat established lore (that I never respect) is Yui (my WoL), Nanako (Yui's old appearance/now Yui's little sister), Hiroko (Best friend IRL/Yui's wife), and Nezumi (Also my OC/Nanako's partner). The rest of my characters were created as just something to use for commissions and have no real "lore" or "story" behind them and I think it takes a lot of the fun away from my art not being able to convey any story. By "lore" I don't really mean I plan on writing out a full backstory or anything but more just defining and respecting the relationships between my characters in my art going forward. I will create some place to have a chart of how they are all related and who will be "willing" to be partnered with who. 

tl:dr my characters thus far have been included in scenes somewhat at random but I will be giving them fixed relationships going forward.

Characters (assets)

So this section should easily be the longest of the bunch. I want to talk about why I will be basically erasing the model version of all of my characters and remaking them. When I first installed blender about 16 months ago I had never touched 3D art (or any art) before in my life. I *still* can't draw AT ALL. I have never been to school for art, never taken any real art classes, never sat through online courses, nothing. So being someone who has never done any of that before then, I went ahead and made the characters that you see from scratch, by hand. I started with a blank mannequin model that I downloaded and I personally made the UV maps, textures, shaders, armature, weight paint, modeled the teeth and eyes, etc. As a result, all of my assets that I use for my art while impressive for someone who knows nothing, are (to my current self) an absolute mess. All of my art faces a ton of limitations because of the terrible hackjob that is holding everything together. I think a fitting comparison would be if you've seen the meme of Homer Simpson looking fit and healthy in the front but then the camera cuts to his back and all of his fat is pinned behind him with clips and looks like a disaster. My art looks good enough most of the time when I share it but behind the scenes it is a complete mess!!!

For example, the biggest issues with my assets are:

Making a new character is far more time consuming than it needs to be.

Facial expressions with the rig/weight paint that I have are a mess and I can basically do smiling or not as the only faces. Doing an O mouth or a sort of kissy face is near impossible. This is why so much of my stuff has licking the lips because it is just about the only thing that looks ok with my current rig.

Au'ra scales are not painted on the textures like the game but instead wrapped around the bodies like a magnetic strip and 99% of the time add a ton of time to production and end up with serious clipping issues at some point. 

The weight paint on the bodies I have done SUCKS and the poses and I can put the arms/legs into are very limited before they start to stretch or distort in weird ways.

The models that I ended up making have waaaaaaay more geometry than they need to and most of the issues that I have listed above are bandaged by adding a stupid amount of modifiers to my stuff that also adds to the lag.

There isn't enough space in this post to fit every single issue I have but just know that there are a lot.

So, what will the benefit of redoing all of this be?

Some of the benefits I can think of off of the top of my head without getting too into it:

Every problem listed above will be fixed. 

Every character will share a rig so I can use pose libraries (kinda like how you share poses with CMTool and click one button to make a pose) since I have been doing it by hand this entire time due to the fact that all of my characters' rigs have different bone names.

I will kind of cut this part short but basically it will let me make faster poses, better facial expressions, breast/butt physics that I don't need to do by hand, clean rigging, and even the ability to explore motion capture!!!! (More on that below)

So what does this mean for my characters?

All of my characters as well as the commissioned ones will be taking a nice trip into the trash bin and sit on a backup drive that I have somewhere for the rest of time and I will then remake them using the new resources. 

I will start off with my own personal characters Yui, Hiroko, Nanako, and Nezumi. After them I will be creating NPCs which I plan to do a lot more with including Y'shtola, Yotsuyu, and more. I will remake more of my current characters after that but I will not be remaking all of them just because I don't have time to consistently pump out quality art of 20+ characters and maintain a network of relationships for all of them in my head. I will, however, make sure to include some of the community voted characters that you have voted to design. I haven't decided which ones yet but I will keep but once I hold the final character poll (over by the time this gets posted) I will go through them all and choose my favorites to remake and keep around.

tl:dr I started doing this work when I didn't know as much as I do now and as a result my behind-the-scenes models/assets that I work with are kind of a disaster. I am going to delete all of my characters and remake them in a better way to provide better quality art down the road.

Clothing/Backgrounds and other props

This section will be brief but basically I don't plan on always having the locations, outfits, and props be lore friendly (not that they aren't already). I have been teaching myself (and will continue to teach myself) how to use software other than blender to make much better clothing, materials, and props. I used the patron money to purchase the software Substance Painter and using that in conjunction with blender will allow me to create all sorts of new outfits to use! Things like new shirts, coats, sweaters, pants, bra, underwear, socks, costumes, schoolgirl outfits, maid outfits, you name it! The possibilities are endless.

Work Setup (Hardware)

So all of this work that I am doing obviously requires a powerful computer, which I (thanks to your support) have. It is up to the task of handling most of whatever I have to do on it which begs the question, why do I need more? Well, it comes from the fact that a very large amount of time I spend with blender is either baking or rendering things.

 Baking is the process of having blender do some math ahead of time to calculate things like liquid and clothing physics simulations and rendering is the process of taking whatever I am working on and changing it from a blender project file into the images/videos that I upload. Now even on my current machine a render (for my short videos) can typically take 9 - 14 hours. Baking simulations can take anywhere from a few seconds to 2 hours depending on the simulation you are running, and if you don't like the way it turns out you have to tweak the settings and bake it all over again.

 Now during a render or a bake my machine (and blender) are running at 100% capacity and are basically unusable. The most taxing thing I can use the PC for is checking emails or writing patron posts like I am now. So despite the fact that I have a nice computer that lets me get my work done I plan to acquire a second machine that is just as powerful that I can use strictly for blender projects and rendering. This way, I could afford to let one project render for, say, two full days on the other machine while still completing other blender projects on my main computer that I am typing this message from. 

I am aware that online render farm services exist. However, in my experience they are not only a pain to use but I often work with project files that are way too big to practically render on their services and also the services are way too slow or way too expensive for what I am looking for. It would be much more cost and time efficient in the long run if I were to simply get a 2nd workstation for my home.

tl:dr my PC is nice (thanks to your support!), but rendering consumes it and makes it unusable for anywhere from 1 - 40 hours at a time so if I want to produce things as efficiently as possible I will need to upgrade my setup to have a 2nd workstation.

Motion Capture Suit

So the final thing I wanted to talk about is my plans to start incorporating motion capture into my work! SUPER exciting stuff. Obviously with me being alone and also not a professional I would only have niche uses for something like motion capture. However, I do think it is a super awesome way for me to get into making longer projects. MoCap isn't something I would likely use for my typical short videos, but it would allow me to make much longer, more complicated animations in a fraction of the time it would by hand. For example, I tried making a 3 minute animation recently of my character doing some simple things for a POV servicing video and it took 7 weeks of working on it all day and I still had to cut some of the content and alter the ending because of time constraints. Using a motion capture suit would allow me to not only have much more natural animation but it would allow me to VERY quickly lay out the basic motions for much longer animations and then I could go in by hand to edit that basic framework and skip 70% of the labor involved in creating something like that.

If you want to see the suit in question, you can see the company I plan to purchase it from at https://www.rokoko.com/ . I will likely buy their suit and glove combo which should be in the ballpark of ~$3700 USD after all is said and done.

tl:dr I want to buy a mocap suit to make it possible to produce long and complex animations in a  fraction of the time I typically would.

Conclusion

I am going all in on making my art and CG work in general something I can continue for the long term so I can not only teach myself new things and explore new ideas, but also provide all of you with content you can enjoy along the way. I will be going back to doing commissions as well as trying to gather funds through paypal tips and elsewhere to try and collect the ~$9000 USD it will take to completely redo my workspace to set myself up for the best future possible in regards to continuing to create.

Thanks to all of you for the support you have shown and any support you continue to provide in the future!