September report (Patreon)

Hi guys, I apologize for the long silence. the last couple of months have been completely lost for me - the sudden international move itself took a lot of effort and time, but also led to a bunch of unpleasant situations overlapping one another. First of all, my Intel processor died for the 4th time. I've been keeping a spare one for a long time, and generation 13-14 processors live an average of 8-14 months (this one lived the longest, but it also suffered a natural fate). Intel changes them under warranty, they're great at that. But it seems to me that it would be cheaper for them to buy me a new computer with a new generation of processor than to change it so many times for free once it was sold. Always take the boxed version of the processor, it gives a 3-year warranty ;))

Another part of the problem is that you can't transport a lot of pills across the border, especially prescription drugs. and without them, all my illnesses worsened from nerves, stress and fatigue. It took a lot of time, effort and nerves to get the necessary prescriptions and papers (permission to buy them in a new place), but the lost time led to the fact that for some time I could not work fully and spend more than half an hour a day in an upright position. I could work lying on my side, completely lying on my back or on my stomach, but all these are not very comfortable positions if the workplace is not equipped for these poses. It took a lot of time and effort to adjust the workplace and cure the problem (I don't know what it's called in English, and I don't want to bore you with the biological problems of my body). In general, there's a lot of shitty fuss that's consumed 2+ months of time. I returned to full-time work only in early October, and was forced primarily to catch up on the backlog that had arisen in the main project with the most funding. Given the decline in funding in all cases, this is the only logical way to survive. Nevertheless, work on this project will continue. It's a shame that after all these years of tinkering and acquiring new skills, after all the work I've done, I'm treading a millimeter from the finish line and couldn't finish this video in any way. It's like some kind of curse.

Okay, I'll do it anyway. Whatever happens. Now for the good news.

While I was on all these adventures, the other part of the team, unaffected by this situation with my "flickering participation", moved a little further. New technologies and new solutions have been released. One of them solves our main problem - mass scenes. Our hardware did not allow us to make more than 2 characters with high-quality fur in the frame. It was possible to make 4 characters, but only if 1's fur was slightly simplified, and 3's fur was greatly simplified. This situation bothered us and buying professional video cards would have solved this problem, but we did not have the extra 11k dollars for this, and besides, such video cards are not delivered to our country from Amazon. That is, buying them on the black market would cost several thousand more, which we cannot afford. Cloud solutions... It's unreliable and scary. And it's also expensive, it's just that the amount is stretched over a long period of time. Nevertheless, two technologies have recently appeared that seem to be able to eliminate this problem completely. And one of them should simplify lipsinc even more. the second problem that we stumbled and stalled on for a long time. Several neural networks have appeared that can do this quite efficiently. But in the case of anthro faces, it still doesn't work as well as with human faces. But it can be a great template for exactly what it should look like and will greatly facilitate manual labor by making it possible to create a library of matching phonetic sounds and lip positions. Due to the fact that many subscribers have lost their patience and put their payments on pause, now we cannot devote more than a week a month to this project and have to spend more time on what allows us to survive. But we are working and moving forward. I'm NOT sure if we'll be able to finish everything this month, but the first video will definitely be released next month. Unless I get hit by a meteorite or there is a Doomsday flood in this mountainous area. There are literally 10 days of work left and a week of rendering. We will do the rendering on several computers at once, we have written software for the collaboration of our mini-render farm.

And one more piece of news - at first we wanted to pick up where the comic left off. But we thought it was bad to miss the vore scene that happened a little earlier. Therefore, the video will start with her. There were several arguments in this decision, firstly, so as not to make the audience wait even longer for the most important moments. secondly, to make sure that all our developments will definitely work at an important moment. I would not like to run into additional pauses, feverish crunches with reworking everything from scratch, if something does not work properly at the last moment. So yes, we've expanded this animation a bit by adding a beginning to it. It turned out to be really difficult and I had to invent a lot of "crutches" for such difficult situations as in this scene. Standard rigs are not designed for this. Perhaps I mentioned this a little earlier, we started this mess a long time ago and almost finished it at the time of the move. In general, I survived, the team is in place. We are working. And once again, my apologies for the long silence and my immense gratitude to everyone who remains with us — despite all these pauses and endless problems. I hope all of this is finally behind us. Definitely the worst. Working.