I suppose I should give an update on the status of Age of Consent, and why I'm not actively working on it at the moment.
This was supposed to be a short post, but I have a few things to cover so bear with me.
As a few of my may know, I'm currently working on a few characters (such as the gal immediately above), that I'm currently fine tuning. The plan is to offer a few of the characters that I've designed for sale on Renderosity. There are WAAAAAY better character artists than myself, but nonetheless I want to see if I can offer a few compelling characters, and maybe get a small amount of income from this hobby rolling.
In the short term, I'm not too concerned about my personal financial situation, but it would be nice to get some supplemental income rolling from this hobby.
With the Patreon drama that's going on right now, I feel that Patreon would not be the right platform for my projects, as I like rendering nekkid people having sex. Yeah I do more tame renders too, but I like to explore more 'risque' themes, such as dragon on gal sex, consentual incest, Minotaur sex of course, Duckie sex, yeah...
Patreon seems to be about one step away from banning adult content creators completely, and has been tightening the screws on said content over the last 9 months or so.
So I don't want that drama (i.e. watching my Patreon page get suddenly suspended, and wondering if I'll get my money), plus I'm hoping to find a more 'anonymous' way to receive pledges/donations, something that doesn't involve my bank account directly - and I'm not sure I'll ever find that short of cryptocurrency, which is something I'm not interested in.
Thanks to FOSTA and other things coming down the pike in the US, yeah the last thing you want is a big red arrow pointing at you when you are generating 'questionable' content. Sure, I'm not planning on pre-teen content or anything that extreme, but I just want to do my art, and not have to keep looking over my shoulder when I'm doing it.
Some of the characters I work with are supposed to older teenagers, and while I can claim they are 18, others may not agree... Personally, I think that 16 should be the age of adulthood at this point, as teenagers are pretty savvy at 16 these days (thanks to the internet), but that's not gonna happen anytime soon.
So, In the meantime I do occasionally share renders here while I'm plugging away with Daz. F-95 seems to be a fortress of it's own. Not sure how the admins have managed to keep F-95 out of the reach of folks that would like to see it go away (seeing that it allows 'bucaneer' related content), but it seems like as good a place as any for my stuff, and some of the 'crowd' seems to appreciate it.
At least with Renderosity, I have the potential to get a small income stream rolling, and since I rather enjoy dialing in characters, and working with the associated textures, i guess we shall see how that goes... Of course, I'll need to continue to come up with new content to keep that stream rolling (if it takes off), which will take a bit of time away from storytelling...
Such character design (and similar projects) does take some time away from my other projects, and I like to 'live' with the characters for a bit to become familiar with their flaws so that I can improve upon them before I'm ready to share them. Plus, 'putting them away' for a bit and then coming back to them later is a good way to spot things you didn't notice before. Currently I have 6-8 characters that are in this 'state'. A few of them are 'celebrity' related, so the 'bar' for them is a bit higher than just some character I like. I don't want exact likenesses, but do I want them 'close enough' that people can 'fine tune' them to get them the rest of the way if they want.
Renderosity has several 'spitting images' characters, so I'm reasonably sure that my own 'inspired by' characters should be able to find homes on Renderosity. Sure, there are a handful of 'lookalike' characters on Daz3D too, but Daz QC is slower, and they have a nasty habit of not responding for a bit (or not responding at all) if they aren't impressed with your stuff. My experiences so far with the Renderosity staff have been positive, so I have good feelings about doing the Renderosity thing...
Nicole I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, I think she's a character that others might be interested in buying, but she's integral to the Consent storyline, so I'm not sure if I want to 'share' her via Renderosity at this time...
:noexpression:
The 'good' news is that most of the characters I'm working on at the moment have a place in the Consent storyline, once I get back to that.
Also, there is another story I'm involved with at the moment (when the mood strikes) that I want to get out the way first as well.
Then comes Underboobgirl (a Consent related story), but I want to go back and re-work/fine tune the Underboobgirl model at this point, and then of course I will need to re-render a bunch of stuff and of course do some other renders to finish that short story.
Then, after these other projects, I'm planning to tackle the 'full' Consent story.
I'm also patiently awaiting a few new new hardware releases before building a dedicated rendering machine. My 18.4" laptop is actually rather good for this (dual GTX 1080s), but renders still take time, and at this point I need to look into re-applying thermal paste to my GTX 1080s as they are starting to heat a bit higher than before. So a dedicated rendering machine seems like a good plan once I start focusing on cranking out renders again, so that I don't fry this laptop prematurely.
I do have an 'external GPU' option for this laptop via my Thunderbolt 3 port, but if I go that route, well I'm waiting for the 7nm graphics cards to start dropping, as they will probably have more VRAM and of course better performance than the current cards. That's still a few months away though...
So this 'waiting on new hardware' situation is also delaying Consent in a way.
While my Daz skill has improved, let me get this out of the way now. There are WAAAAAAAY better Daz Studio artists than myself, and I'm more interested in telling my stories than in making perfect renders. So I'm sure that some people will be turned off by my 'Daz style'. The only thing I can say to them is, well there ARE better Daz Studio artists out there, support them if that's an issue for you. I just want to share the stories I have in mind, and Daz Studio is the tool I'm using.
I'm not interested in things like D-Force (seems like too much work to just tell a story), or the 'cutting edge' of rendering techniques. And there will always be better artists out there, and I'm not looking to join that pantheon. I just like to amuse people occasionally, and maybe titillate them here and there with a few of my renders.
Finally, and this is something I had to learn the hard way, I HATE the stress of deadlines. I'd rather take the time to do the renders the way I want, when I want, rather than just cranking out renders back to back just to meet some deadline. I left another project because of this (and for other personal reasons that I won't share). And if I'm not happy with where a story is headed, well that just adds to the stress.
This may not bode well for those looking for a story that is receiving significant updates every 3-4 weeks with lots of renders in each update, but that's how it is with me. I want to enjoy this hobby, not get burned out by it (and I did burn out a few months back). So Consent may have fewer renders than you may see in other games/stories. I very much enjoyed games like Dreams of Desire, but they had a team to crank out all of that content. I'm not looking to build a team, and am no longer interested in being a member of anyone else's team.
Consent Day 1 does have a bunch of planned forks/paths to follow (you have several options r.e. which characters to spend the day with), and that's not going to change. But things like animated sex scenes, etc., yeah probably not gonna happen with me. Fortunately, I have no obligations to any 'donors' at the moment, but I do appreciate having a 'fan base' of sorts and am asking humbly for their continued patience for now.
In the meantime, I hope that a few people are appreciating the other render pieces I'm sharing every now and then. Each of these probably does help with my skillset a bit, but mainly I do them just for fun as the mood strikes.
I'm still working on stuff regularly (hence the 'and my other projects' addition to the title of this thread), just not the main Consent storyline at the moment.
Anyways, that's what's on my mind at the moment. I apologize for the continued delay with Consent, but I'll get there eventually...
Edit: Just adding a couple of my fun renders that I posted up in another thread..
Archiving another pic: