Hey everyone,

In what could only be referred to as a photo finish, the end of last month brought the release of the re-make of the next episode from the VC arc.I find myself in a headspace where I’m fixated on the episode. What worked, what didn’t and what’s next.

I would consider the feedback I received to have been… mixed. It’s clear that the majority of people favouring this content prefer the more ‘hard’ constraints and BDSM aspects of my work, stuff like the box, the harder side of AIMEE, and most of what goes on in Orogenix.

As ever, my work represents a mix of personal desires, and amongst that there will always be a spectrum: some people want to be strapped down and mercilessly milked whilst being told exactly what's going to happen and exactly how, some people just want to be cuddled and milked gently, some people want to have all aspects of control stripped from them, and everything in between. The intention is to show all sides of that.

Some of the challenges in this piece were ones I wasn't expecting, so I want to talk through a few of those and the lessons I've learned. Finally, I’ll give you a sneak peak at what’s (or who’s 👀) to come.

What worked

Technically, I feel that the standard of quality, simulations and workflow has reached a new baseline.

When I got my new machine I expected most of the problems to be solved forever, that never quite is how it works, as expected. Instead of doing the standard I'd achieved before faster, I pushed to exceed it. It exposed its share of issues, ones I've talked about recently here, but also no small amount of breakthroughs and improvements.

I managed to finally come across a solution to rendering (part of the reason I chose such a challenging-to-render low light scene) that satisfied my standards for fidelity, reproducibility, and technical definition.

I put all the new hardware to good use, finding a good balance between the 'should I render this in higher resolution vs more samples' question, which resulted in the improvement to the visual fidelity that, I hope, was evident.

I smoothed out aspects of my pipeline and workflow, tackled the issues that transitioning to a new operating system held (part of the reason for the encoding issues some people experienced when playing back the file).

I successfully implemented, refined and utilised my (in my opinion, best in class) render farm management software and turned rendering from an ear-splitting, sweat-inducing stress fest into a background operation that I didn't need to babysit anymore. This was such a relief after the constant monitoring, believe me.

Overall, I'm firmly placed in a workflow that works for me for getting all the final frames together, mastered and presented, and I'm personally delighted, maybe even giddy, with that accomplishment.

What didn’t work

The story element of why the piece existed was originally inserted as an idea to make a 'quick, easy, lightweight' animation that wouldn't be too stressful, re-use existing assets and environments, and plant some seeds that should bear fruit later in the storyline. No promises.

It's possible that was a mistake, maybe I should have trusted you, dear reader (watcher?), to put the pieces together without the additional context this episode provided. Maybe it was totally unnecessary, but I had committed to it, and because I am in the position to take risks and painfully stubborn, I decided I had to take the risk.

Naturally, what was intended to be a quick and simple animation I thought I could crank out in a month or two quickly turned into a hotbed of experimentation, elaboration and expansion of ideas.

I was determined to take something I'd previously been told was a bad idea, even warned away from it, and see if I could make it great. Ultimately that quickly led to a mad-scientist-esque montage of me getting carried away and the focus slipping to, perhaps, areas that didn't need the attention they commanded.

Did I manage it? Well, that's up to you guys. 

I personally feel some aspects of the storytelling could have been done better, but I’ll always be my biggest critic.

My sound designer experienced issues of their own which resulted in quite a delay that both of us weren't expecting (hardware failure, of all things) and I really should have requested more pick ups in the audio work (the final machine was touted as the favourite, but alas, its screen time was too short).

That came down mostly to me not wanting to extend and re-simulate some aspects (that blanket) and also my indecisiveness in how I wanted the scene to play out. Originally I was going to include the original machine setup in some way (which would have extended the runtime by about another 3 minutes), but was already way over schedule at that point and I decided to cut it.

The facial animation was something I'd found myself avoiding during the production, it's part of the reason for such low lighting and how some scenes outright hide the facial expression entirely. I put this down to the implementation of facial mocap, which is a technology I've had a bit of a back and forth with. 

My first use of it was during the Kiriko scene, which worked mostly amazingly, so I considered it a mainstay from that point onward. In the scenes with this Juno model, however, it became more of a burden than an assist in many cases. I spent a ridiculous amount of time combating issues the model was throwing at me, trying to get things to be acceptable rather than a travesty, which is far from being outstanding.

I felt during this I was getting better and quicker results with my old keyframe-based approach, which was the basis for many of the models in the box and edging lab series. Of course those also had masks which easily halved the effort involved (the mouth is by far the most time-consuming aspect to get right). 

By the time many of these issues became evident, it was too late to meaningfully change any of them, re-rigging a model you'd already put a month or two's animation work into obviously ain't gonna fly.

It wasn't the show-stopper I'd hoped for, but I still consider it necessary, which is easy for me to say since I know where this story goes. As ever I must ask for your trust that it will, hopefully, make sense as to why it was so important to me to get done.

Can I promise I won't make those same mistakes again? Absolutely not. Will I try to prevent them? I hope so. 

Am I going to stop making risky bets? 

Course not.

Who do you take me for?!

What’s next

After some extended discussions with members of the discord, mulling over the feedback, and considering how long the wait has become between productions, I feel sneaking in an episode returning to what many of you know me for is the right thing to do.

The next focus will be…

🥁

The box. 

Or more specifically, the edging lab.

I think I will continue with my next intended animation: Lara in the tentacle chair (remake of Mechanically Insistent Pleasure) next, and see about slotting this in just after, but I will see how it evolves as things progress and the piece comes together.

A full body, facially animated Lara in a tentacle chair is a delightfully challenging animation, and I have everything I need to start on her right now. The edging lab is a simpler production overall, but it would require a fair amount of model preparation, voice work and writing before I could get going on it.

So the plan, loosely, is this: start on Lara immediately, use the prep time for the edging lab to run in parallel, and flip back and forth between the two as each allows. It's something I've not done before (I typically tend to be fairly laser focused on a single project at a time) but the gaps in this last production, where I was quite literally sitting on my hands waiting for input, made it clear that having a couple on the go could work in my favour. And yours.

So that might mean a segment of each participant gets released as they're ready, or between that and Lara, we will see.

To that end, I would like you all to engage in a poll to determine who it is you'd like to see placed within its clutches. To my mind, a Marvel Rivals themed episode seems to be most on the money, so I have placed a few options below, and I'd like you all to vote for your favourite participant.

Votes will be locked in at the end of May and will be aggregated across my supporter platforms.

This isn't going to guarantee their appearance, but it will likely influence what happens to them (or not), so make your choices carefully. Naturally, you can also nominate different characters in the comments but the focus is on those in the poll.

Keep edging,

Max