Update 42: I'm Gay
It's been about 4 years since I started on this journey to produce erotica, during that time my content has changed and evolved through many forms.
What started as solo male POV story driven adventure that's since evolved into a loose collection of stories, drop in's and small encounters within the world, I've always liked making this content, but over the years, something went missing along the way.
My passion and drive for this work came in drips and drabs, I had periods where I couldn't stop working, and I had times when I struggled to start, and I for the life of me for so long, could never figure out why that was.
I mean hell, I earn 10K plus a month for piddling about in blender and producing erotic stories, which are fun as hell to produce, why on earth shouldn't I be on top of the world, living my best life?
Why is it that, whilst working on a scene I can experience wild arousal, tinged with a sense of confusion and dissonance?
Why was I worried about showing particular parts of the models and angles that might be considered more gay than straight? Why was I petrified of including angles that could be seen as gay, and exploring situations that weren't straight? Why would It bug me when people would make comments on my work like 'this looks kind of like a man'
Well, a lifetime of living a lie under a homophobic father will do that to you, as it turns out.
I was afraid to explore everything my mind had to offer, because I was afraid of it changing things.
I was afraid of coming out, to my friends, family and indeed, to you guys, my supporters, for fear that it would ruin or otherwise change my life, that it would make people judge me for who I am, that it would cause vast swathes of you to all instantly abandon your support of me and my art, because being a gay man would be so wildly offensive.
And... I'm willing to accept that telling you all this might well do that to some people, this stuff runs deep, I'm a first hand account of how something like this, something as deep running as your sexual identity can powerfully influence your emotions in a way that is confusing, scary and perhaps worst of all, intangible.
But at the end of the day, I can live my life true to myself and with no regrets, or I can die a bitter, lonely old gay man, incapable of allowing himself to love or be loved, never knowing if he would ever be truly accepted for how he was born.
Is this going to change your content?
Yes, I think it's going to get better.
I've a passion for showing and displaying people enjoying pleasure, I love to see that in both men and women, the difference was finding out that I enjoy seeing women's bodies as an art piece, something I can admire, but just not something I want to have sex with.
It's like the sunset, nobody gets tired of looking at it, but I just don't want to bone it.
I still enjoyed making all the scenes I made, and in fact, later in this update I have a breakdown of a shot from my latest project that I think will illustrate my point well.
The difference is that now I can produce these with focus and determination, and not be offput by invasive, unknowable thoughts of discomfort that threaten to derail my ability to produce the best work I'm capable of making.
My view now is that, knowing this is just going to help me really drill down into what it is that has made my content work for so many people, it was, at it's core, an exploration and validation of sexual identity, and at the end of the day, it's just the most detailed possible rendition of characters enduring exquisite pleasure.
What I have found through this admission to myself is impeccable clarity, I now know why returning to A414 has been such an important thing to me, His story and arc explores a lot of these feelings I was leaving repressed.
It explains why I simply abandoned a basically complete Episode 5, it wasn't good enough, but I was also afraid of how it might be received.
It explains why, when working on a scene that looked like it was a dude would fill me with confusing feelings, making me excited to work on it but at the same time, alienated and distraught, being filled with emotions that I could not understand or explain.
There are other reasons why I put that project on the back burner, and a lot of it is stuff that I thought I couldn't really say for fear of spoiling some fairly major plot points further down the line.
We will get to that, but to say it's important to me to get it right is an understatement, that's my passion project, but I'm well aware of the fact that the majority of my audience enjoys futanari, luckily, I do too, there's enough for me to get excited about, and now I can make it without getting derailed by why it makes me feel funny feelings that I thought I shouldn't be having.
So about A414?
The above person is a huge character in the story moving forward.
At the time I made her, I invoked my very, very limited knowledge of blender and 3D at the time to hackfraud her into a scene.
But It was ham-fisted, badly rigged, and -terrible- to animate with.
And the subsurface sampling is way too frickin' high.
In these fully clothed, narrative driven scenes, it's not compelling enough to have 'good enough' animation, and despite my best efforts, I just wasn't getting there.
It became clear that it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, I didn't want to introduce her in this episode, only for her to appear in episode 6, 7 8 or 9 as a completely different model and cause a huge deal of confusion.
So I hired someone to work on a model of her, and that was a very confusing process, because I could never decide on how she should look, I was looking for some kind of validation, some rendition of her that would spark a presence of arousal in me, whilst being unaware of why that feeling was so elusive.
There's nothing worse than an artist taking directions from a client that can't make up their mind, in this case that client was me.
That WIP we've shown before with a few snaps, it was the aforementioned 'godmesh' that I poured many thousands of pounds into trying to develop a way overbuilt and overengineered 'do absolutely everything' model that was going to be the answer to all my concerns.
But, that turned out to be a huge waste of time and money, it was way more than I needed, given I'd gained experience in the mean time that allowed me to produce scenes that would bridge the gap of believability with traditionally made models.
So where this has been left at the moment is I'm taking some time to have a concept artist work through a rendition of her that's going to be suitable for the character as a whole, something based off of her writing as a character rather than my fuzzy, intangible vision of an appealing woman.
At the same time this will involve filling out the roster of OC's that will form my virtual harem of characters that I've had plans to introduce for the last 5 years.
Then a traditional sculpt and a rig later, I should have something I can actually get started on.
Once I'm past that episode, it opens up a realm of other content I can produce as small 1 shot standalone pieces which can serve as little palette cleansers for me, so that not every project I start up is a 10 minute epic scene.
And telling you what that content would entail be will be very spoilery, so I'm not gonna say right now, but it's basically POV male milking experiments/1 shots that I can produce quickly, and is probably more synonymous with the original A414 story content I started with.
But this image is a bit of a hint.
On to the update
As mentioned, I'm working on DVA in the high yield lab currently, it took me a long while to get started with this one, at the time of me beginning was just about as I was starting to pick apart my sexuality, so I've been very distracted and did not make a start on it as soon as I would have liked.
In the last week however, since I came to terms with who I am, I've made tremendous progress, and am on track to have this finished in time for my intended release date.
Which is that I want to get this out in time for Christmas 2024.
Since you all like to see some breakdowns I'm going to go through a shot I worked on the other day, this is a moment where DVA believes she is about to cum but is denied by the machine
I liked this rendition a lot, using a smooth twisting motion in the machine added a lot of 'coaxing' like feeling to the process. I didn't feel like the ramp of intensity was quite right though, and the ticker part didn't feel very 'teasy'
This episode is all about desperation, edging and denial, I needed to hone in on that sensation, give the impression the machine knew exactly -what- to do, just chose not to.
The main tweaks here were to have the ticker part respond more dynamically to her cock, I made the angling of the head a bit more subtle, added that gentle little accidental stroke at the beginning before it moves into the focused attempt, and adjusted the stroke lengths a little to be a bit more deliberate.
I wasn't happy still with the ticker motion, the dismount felt a little off, and there were some parts where it didn't feel like it was responding dynamically enough, and the final stroke/dismount wasn't lining up with the voice work.
The final version ended up cutting some of the camera transitions so we could capture the moment of disbelief on dva's face as she is left there staring over the edge, I made the accidental strokes a little more deliberate, and added some sliding to the ring that encloses her glans.
I also backed off the amount of 'twitches' her cock did, less is indeed more in some cases, and this was one of them.
I also, for this one, decided -not- to use face capture, I felt manual animation allowed the flexibility and stylisation necessary to give the scene, her reactions and such the presence it needed, the face cap has it's place, but not for this scene.
I feel like before this week past, I would have avoided shots like this, to avoid the confusing sensations it would evoke, I felt like I would just feel like I needed to 'get past it' and produce 'good enough'
But that would have resulted in a poorer quality product, and would not have been reflective of the passion I set out to pour into this universe to begin with.
If I had to summarise my feelings towards my work that I've come to in the last week it would be these 4 words:
I am fucking
back
Not that I ever went anywhere!
Bye for now.