So... I finally put together a set
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than the pin-up work I normally share here.
Doing work like this has always been part of the plan for me. The biggest obstacle was trying to think through presentations I'd be happy with. To be candid there's a good number of things about porn in general I'm not a fan of. Maybe at some point I'll write about them. So trying to present images in a way I'd enjoy it as an outsider was a big thing. Also trying to figure out a narrative that fits into that does take quite a bit of planning and work.
The original idea for presenting Ely this way was actually supposed to be a part of An Audience of One. Slightly to play into the "No sex in the Champagne Room" joke. While the environment for that does conveiniently have a bed available (it's behind the curtain) the space there was way to small to be workable for cameras or lighting. I could possibly used the rest of the space somehow but I wasn't feeling it.
When the outfit you see here came out I thought it had some potential. I originally tried it on a few different characters but I didn't feel like it fit their personalities. Once I tried it on this version of Ely I was like "Oh wait, this might be workable." I just needed to figure out an idea around it. I went back to my pin-up roots and started from there. As I was working on the first images I thought "Hmmm, maybe there is where I can bring in some of the ideas from Audience of One." And I think it did pair well.
Some Technical Notes:
1: The Flower Night outfit certainly has a cute design. But really need more movement capabilities. For one the skirt has some movement morphs but they very simple. And since it has two layers it was easy to run into surface poke through problems. Some parts had no movement controls at all. Normally the outfit has armbands but there was no way to fix any possible clipping issues. So I removed them. There's also a ribbon that normally hangs off the top. But since there were no movement bones it would just float off of the surface. Thankfully I was able to use Cutout Opacity to get rid of the thing entirely. I've run into similar issues with an outfit the same designer also offers. They really need to offer more control morphs, rigging, or dForce capabilities to their clothing assets.
2: I do wish the hair had better controls. It certainly was not designed to be used for any characters laying down. Probably not a big deal since the one image I was most concerned about is really early in the set. But still annoying all the same.
3: I wish the person behind the Director's Cut Poses realized that men and women are quite commonly not the same height. For some reason their poses were created with this in mind. While Ely is an elf she is on the short side. Some poses required tweaking while others just ended up being straight up unusable.
4: Jesus fuckin' Christ do the Cum Pro packs fucking suck. I went with those at first since they weren't as "annoyingly extra" like other similar assets. But God damn did the designer make some super dumb fuck choices. Like for Pack One all of the assets show up at some place somewhere above world origin. Two, they're all angled in a weird way so you have to fix that. Three, the placement join is with the asset itself but the control joint is at world origin. So you have to use the Joint Editor to line them both up to help with placement. Four, because of point number three the main "bone" starts at one end of the asset it's much more difficult for placing on a curved body. Five, the individual assets don't even show you what is what in the preview pics in Content Library. So you kinda have to guess.
I tried Packs Two and Three... but there's no rigging at all. Just dForce only. So if you're trying to apply these assets to a possibly somewhat vertical surface it just slides right off. And with no rigging means you can't shape it to any curves. A terrible set of assets all around.
I didn't mean for this section to be a bunch of complaining. But I wanted to illustrate the things I had to work through for putting this together. Hopefully it might help others.
Final Thoughts:
I'm glad I was finally able to put a set like this together. I want to do more work like this in the future. But presentation and how it makes sense to the characters is important to me. I have a lot of ideas in this vein I want to work on. It's just figuring out the best way to show them off.
