Cuddle Pile (rough) (Patreon)

I could consider this one 'done', and move on to ink & color... but it would be a shame to leave Monique out, even if she's just off to the side. Plus someone had suggested Alice, and now I'm picturing her on the left, behind Lily & Mercy, with a "what am I looking at?" expression. Then the question will be if she's also nude, or would it be funnier if she's the only one wearing clothes?

Once this is finished, I feel like I may need a break from drawing and focus more on some 3D things, next month. With a horrible anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks... I'm feeling the weight of the past year, more & more, as it approaches.

One of the 3D projects I've had on my mind, lately, is a recreation of Fort Myers Beach from before Hurricane Ian. A lot was quite literally washed away by the storm, and I've been thinking it would be neat to bring it back in VR. Some of the houses I've even found old real estate listings for, with interior photos! But to start with I'd mostly be focusing on the Times Square area, and the pier.

A short contract I'd had last month also lit a tiny spark... despite initial frustrations with getting Maya back up and running, I felt a sense of purpose that I'd been missing for the past couple or years or more. I started to think about the state of Daisy's rig, how I'd put so much work into it and never animated it, while also acknowledging that I would probably hate it if I had animated it. For instance, the few animation ideas I'd had don't really work with her being nude, and I hadn't rigged her clothing because that would need to be separate from the nude rig. The breast rig I'd spent too much time on was also too convoluted, and broke too easily. Not to mention, her boobs made it difficult just to manipulate her spine.

While Daisy's rig may need to be rebuilt, I do feel like I should animate the current one, first. I'd had a list of potential ideas that are escaping me, at the moment.

One odd bit of inspiration, was a set of AI-generated videos a friend had shared with me, recently. He'd fed a couple of my older Daisy images into whichever motion generator, and the results had me thinking a number of things. "Why would you do this?" was the first, since he knows I don't like AI. The details that the generator got wrong made it somewhat amusing, but the fact that it took my flat-colored images and made Pixar-like renderings of them, combined with the amount that it made her move... at first I felt a sense of "fuck, I'm cooked". Everything that it did, took the generator about 10 seconds. So the challenge for me, is to come up with some ideas that it can't do.

Realistically, everything I have in mind is too much to accomplish in a month, or even a year. Aside from going over Daisy's rig and making notes for later, I might focus on block in parts of Fort Myers Beach or even Disney World. At the very least, those blocked-in models could serve as background reference for illustrations or comics, so I have more locations to put my characters in.