Ask me anything

I don't really have any formal structure for established characters. It's all just kind of stuff I keep floating around in my head. I have been working on putting together a character-card system for original characters, though.

Might be something for me to consider putting together in the future, though, if there are people who have interest in that sort of thing.

I mean, the easy answer is probably the most obvious one: my favorite video is the most recent one. Doesn't really matter when you ask the question, that is almost always the case.

Getting a bit more nuanced, while I do have a deep fondness for To Breed And Bond, and am supremely proud of how it came out (even if it is only half of what the original idea was...), I honestly do think that Refuge is my personal favorite. So many things went right with it in terms of the construction. It had its hurdles during development to be sure, but the waves of release wash away all that grit. Once the video is out, the production problems don't matter anymore--only their impact on the final video. And, honestly, I don't think the production problems really marred it in any meaningful capacity. At least for me, when I watch it back, I don't see any real tell-tale signs of troubled development. I see flaws to be sure, but none that are solely a result of production problems.

I also really like Fraternization, and consider it one of my best works as well. People have criticized it for having "janky" motion, but I honestly don't see it. Maybe I'm biased because I know how the sausage is made, and so I know exactly what tell-tale quirks to look for when it comes to how I traditionally animate, but Fraternization to my eye is hands down the most fluid and organic animation I've ever released. And that's small wonder, because it is the only video where I extensively experimented with motion-capture for the dialogue scenes, where the fluid motion really shines. It was an extremely exciting project on a technical level, even if the ultimate conclusion was that my small living space makes motion-capture not viable. I spent more time fixing the motion-capture errors than if I had just hand-animated it all, but there is no denying that--to my eye at least--the final result looks far better than what I could ever do by hand.

Blue Star Episode 3 will always have a special place in my heart, of course. It was also marred with massive production issues, but I don't think the end result reflects them in any capacity.

As to the most fun to make, honestly, that was probably Taking Chances. I just love the Life is Strange dorks so much, and that video was one of the smoothest productions I've had, apart from the massive delays with the audio, which was entirely outside my control.

No, and no.

Mine. You can find her and a handful of other Life is Strange models on my Assets Auto-release page.

Careful lighting and a thoughtful application of phong can go a long way.

Same as all my other videos: here on my website.

You'll have to rely on other people to upload them elsewhere. Either the pirates who like the early-access videos, or the people who wait patiently for the public releases.

You hit it square on the money, on all points.

Artemis' internal model name is "Namus Naran", for "Not Samus Aran". She's even built on the same body that my Samus model used.

Getting away from the Metroid IP had its advantages though, beyond getting out from beneath the wrathful eye of Nintendo. One of the biggest problems I had with writing the Phazon hexology was that Samus is a lone wolf, and it's challenging writing compelling narrative with only one character - you can't really have compelling conversations with yourself.

By taking the Slutty Sassy Samus characterization and transplanting her into an original IP, I was able to free myself from that constraint and give her a companion, in Medusa. I personally find that my characters work best when they have someone to talk to, and I generally don't care about giving the male any meaningful role in the narrative - they're mostly just a cock designed to satisfy the ladies, with a body attached to it.

Corsair has expanded far beyond the original ideas for the Phazon hexology though, with an entirely new path paved toward Hiveship now in mind. Being able to write Artemis' lore myself has allowed for a lot more depth and complexity in my opinion - especially since Nintendo has gone on record as saying that they were really didn't put any thought at all in Samus' background. They, quote, "chose the job title of 'bounty hunter' because it sounds cool". They didn't even know what 'bounty hunter' meant when they chose it for her. They literally just rule-of-cool'd her occupation.

And don't get me wrong, I will never know the rule-of-cool. I am a strong adherent to it, as well as its pornographic cousin, the rule-of-hot. But I think it stands testament to how little care Nintendo put into Samus as a character when first making Metroid. I am absolutely a character-first kind of writer, I like writing a setting and a plot and then dropping defined characters into it and seeing how they would navigate it, making the story mold itself around the characters rather than molding the characters to fit the story. And so Samus being so poorly-thought-out as a character was a bit of a sticking point for my writing her. Which is why I largely just wrote her a new character anyways - it's not like Nintendo gave her much to replace.

But yes, Artemis is absolutely my interpretation of Samus, packaged into a new face but with the same body, same voice, and same mannerisms, dropped into a new world with a new plot.

Imminently, a Batgirl / Catwoman video, as part of a collaboration with InsideIncognita, whose been my voice for Elizabeth, Liara, Samus (and her not-Samus counterpart Artemis), Moxxi, and the aforementioned Catwoman. Innie wrote the project, and I am adapting it. Currently working through adapting her prose draft into a screenplay, hoping to have the first pass ready to share on Patreon next week, before I quickly storyboard it out, get a sense of its runtime, and Innie and I then proceed to take a butcher knife to it to cut it down to size.

Beyond that, I've been posting daily pinups over on Bluesky, to try and rebuild my following over there. I've dropped using Twitter on a daily basis, as the torrent of Nazi shit on the timeline was becoming exhausting to deal with. I don't follow anyone, like anything, or comment on anything on Twitter, so the Nazi floodgate is just the default on Twitter, and I frankly don't need that shit in my life.

I've also got a few other things cooking on the backburner, but I don't intend to share any details about those. The plan there is to drop the occasional opaque WIP on Bluesky, before just shadowdropping the finished result - and if it ends up falling through, it can just disappear from public consciousness with grace, as I hadn't made any formal promises, advertisements, or hyping for the projects.

Looking more broadly, once the upcoming Batgirl / Catwoman project is done and out the door, I plan to start putting together an actual production pipeline for Blender. I've got a whole set of reference images that I want to use Blender for (mainly because mirrors), and use that as my gateway in to Blender productions. I haven't quite cracked the magical settings for getting good soft-body sims working in Blender - I have the technical aspect figured out, but it's a matter of dialing in the settings so things behave right. It doesn't take any actual skill, but just infinite patience as chaos theory works it way into numbing my brain into mush as I change something like 20+ different parameters and rerun simulations to see how they behave.

In the upcoming months I also plan to finally get the Frozen video out the door in its half-finished state. And then beyond that, the next Overbreed stint will be focused on building out all of the narrative interstitials, now that the main Sombra sequence is done. With any luck, Overbreed Episode 1 will be ready for voice recording by the end of the year - which given that it's currently set up to be nearly 70 minutes long, I think is a feat in its own right.

I think that's about it. Keep an eye on Bluesky if you want to keep up with me on the day-to-day.

I would personally recommend you use the latest DazV5-5 versions. Not only are they the most recent version, but they are internally much easier to work with than DazV4. DazV4 uses a lot of hacky tricks to work correctly in SFM, but they are a nightmare to work with on a source-file level.

While there are currently only a handful of DazV5-5 DOAFantasy ladies built and released (I know for a fact Mila and Hitomi are released; I've also built Tina, Nyotengu, and Honoka, but I don't know if they've been released yet), you can use their bodies as a base and do SFM headhacks of the DazV4 versions onto them, to use the latest body shape, rigging improvements, and outfits (of which there are like 60 outfits made now, though again I don't remember how many of them have been released).

And, more importantly, the DazV5-5 DOAFantasy models are much easier to work with and build outfits for.

Let me know if you are interested in building outfits for the DazV5-5 models instead, and I will get you a dev kit to get you started. The particulars of how to actually do what you want will be up to you to figure out, but I will provide you the source files to work on.

If you insist on the DazV4 models, I will try to dig up the source files for them. No promises on that front, and I really cannot stress enough I don't recommend it. But if you are determined, I won't stop you.

I do indeed animate in the Graph Editor. I find it gives me more direct control over the keyframes. I explicitly animate in 24 frames per second, which is what I export out and what my final videos are rendered out into as well.

As to the approach I take for animating motions, there are a few things I keep in mind. The first and most important thing I always keep in mind is the kinematics, where is the energy driving the motion coming from. In general, the driver is the character's core, or the joint between the pelvis and the spine (on a traditional Valve Biped, this is rig_pelvis and rig_spine_0).

The next thing I keep in mind is the swing - most core-driven motion (such as sex) isn't linear, just sliding the pelvis back and forth. Instead, it's the pelvis swinging backward and forward. In this way, I think of the spine as a pendulum, with the shoulders being the anchor point. As I am animating the hip swing, then, I always try to keep the shoulders in the same place. This can be easier said than done.

Equally important to keep in mind, though, is that human bodies are not perfect machines. Our brains are pretty good at automatically compensating for spatial locking, but we aren't perfect at it. Try recording yourself moving your body around while trying to keep your head in one spot - you'll find that, while you're able to keep your head mostly in the same spot, it still gyrates around a bit. Compare this to, for example, chickens, who are notoriously able to keep their head in the exact same spot as you move their body around.

As such, while you want to keep your character's shoulders in the same general spot, you don't want to keep them in the exact same spot. I've actually managed to do this accidentally, animating the swing so perfectly that the head stays perfectly still. And it looks fucking weird. There is such a thing as too perfect, and you don't want that. Luckily, if you do manage to make your swing motion perfect, it's easy enough to add imperfections to it.

Something I find helpful when it comes to animating swing is to keep this abstract image in mind. It's what I mentally picture as I am building out my keyframes.

Finally, the last thing I keep in mind are the foundations of weighty animation: anticipation and follow-through. My animations are always at minimum 4 keyframes per cycle, often 5 keyframes. The first and last keyframes are the same, and by convention I always pose them to be at the aphelion of the motion, where the characters are the farthest apart. That's generally the full length of the penis. The second keyframe for me, then, is then anticipation - I generally build this by having the character's spine arching back even further, while at the same time moving them slightly in toward their partner while their partner pulls in toward them. The third keyframe is the moment of impact, and is where the deviation between 4- and 5-frame cycles comes in.

In a 4-frame cycle, the third keyframe is actually its own follow-through - I intentionally animate it as an overshoot, going farther than what I want the actual animation to be. When played back as a complete cycle, the Centripetal Catmull-Rom spline that Source uses for its "Spline" tangents won't actually touch the full keyframe, stopping just short of it before it moves to the next keyframe. While the raw keyframe is overextended, when played back as a fluid animation, it will be understated - and when you combine overextension and understatement, you get a perfectly placed keyframe!

In a 5-frame cycle, the third keyframe is just the impact. The fourth keyframe, then, is the follow-through. Both characters move behind the initial impact, before returning to their original positions in frame 5. In general, I find the 5-frame cycle is usually only necessary in slower animation, or very exaggerated animation. Most "reasonably" fast-paced animation, in my experience, can get away with a 4-frame cycle.

Since you brought up Corsair explicitly, here is a keyframe breakdown of one of the animations in it. I have added the little swing diagram shown above as an overlay, so you can more clearly see the thought process I had in mind when building the motion.

As you can tell, this is a 4-frame cycle. Frames 1 and 4 are the aphelion, with frame 2 being the anticipation where I have his spine arched back while both himself and Artemis move toward each other, and frame 3 being overextended and serving as both the impact and follow-through frames.

And then of course, when played back smoothly:

And then to cap off this response, since you also briefly asked about timings: as a matter of course, I have a few "preset" speeds that I work with. Again animating in 24 frames per second, I start off all "fast" animations with keyframes every 3 frames, "medium animations" every 6 frames, and "slow" animations every 12 frames. Once I have the keyframes made, I then move them around until I like the speed and motion - which is a major advantage the Graph Editor has over the Motion Editor, being able to easily move the keyframes around.

This is very much a play-by-eye thing, with a lot of trial and error. A good general rule of thumb, though, is that the distance between the last keyframe and the one before it will typically be the longest delay, because all of the previous keyframes - the anticipation, impact, and follow-through - all work toward move in for penetration, while the last keyframe is returning to the aphelion. Meaning that the last keyframe has to travel the same distance that the previous 3 keyframes covered, and as such, will typically need more time.

One last note to end this post. You didn't explicitly bring it up, but I see other animators - aspiring and otherwise - bring this up often: offset or staggered keyframes. This is something like having the pelvis move on frame 3, spine0 on frame 4, spine1 on frame 5, neck on frame 6, head on frame 7. That sort of motion. I don't do that. I find that not only does it complicate your motion massively (good luck keeping all of that synchronized if you decide to shave a frame off to speed things up), but the result usually isn't that noticeable. I find you can often get the same "dragging" inertia that staggering keyframes aims to generate by just being more smart with your keyframes. If you can get the same motion achieved in two ways, and one way involves half the keyframes of the other way, always opt for the simpler option.

I hope all this answered your questions sufficiently.