@The Anax Btw, correct me if I'm wrong about my assumption I made in my review that the images will eventually be changed. Something to do with you branching out to more markets (android, apple)?
There are actually a number of reasons that I am switching from my 'old school' picture manips to 3D models. The biggest is, of course, copyright issues. I paid the US government s couple of thousand dollars to trademark my intellectual properties, just in case my copyrights were not enough. So, I don't want to use anything but my own, personal creations. The models I create and buy I can use all I want- I paid for them- and even customize them. In fact, so far I have invested around 10k in top-of-the-line CGI models, thanks to my Patrons. (I should add my investors are on board with the CGI, over 90% voted in favor of this change, and they are happy with my abilities, even though I only started using Daz in Jan/Feb).
Second, I wanted consistency. I am not sure how long you have followed my work, but believe it or not, these novels as big as they are, are only the beginning of long-term plans. I will be releasing huge games over the years, with different play styles and on different mediums, and as such, I need to ensure the characters stay the same on all the games/platforms regardless of the genre of game I release. Speaking of that, as you said, when releasing things and selling them for money, like on the phone markets, one must own 100% of everything. To put that into perspective, I must own all these models- and even the music rights- in order to sell. The commercial music rights have cost me two thousand dollars so far on Faction and will likely grow higher as I work on each faction of the game. So, there is no way I can afford to by 'real' women the amount of money it would require for photoshoots, only to have to manip the pics, and so forth. Trust me, 3D is the way to go.
Finally, time is the last issue. I can get more work done in a smaller amount of time. Picture manipulation is far more time consuming than using 3D models. When I was making my projects with picture manips, I remember how I was making huge games/interactive novels (tomato/tomahto), but others in the community released much slower than I did, with much smaller projects- and they were using CGI. This made me think 'Using 3D models must be so hard! Updates take forever and the projects contain so much less story!', so I feared it would increase my workload vastly... but the opposite is true. I have tested it (you know how thorough I am) and I can do four times as much work in an hour over picture manips. That's why I have to say how shocked I am about other projects making so much money on Patreon and such, when, as a creator using the same tools they do, I can make bigger titles with faster updates. Very strange. Anyway, time was the final issue.
So, I did not mean for the giant story there, but this way people definitely understand the reason for me switching.