Wednesday 19 August 2015

Comics or Bust, waiting for Poser

It is now August and I've still not produced anything this year. Bad bad bad ero! Don't worry though, I haven't been wasting time, in fact I've done a lot of extremely useful and valuable things, but nothing has been completed yet. I realized I've got too many balls in the air and decided to temporarily drop a few to get at least something done this year. One of them is Project E unfortunately, but not without reason. 

If any of you have Lali's Bits then you'll know that Project E will be crazy complex and very detailed, and to make such a figure I need a rock-solid platform that gives me total control over my figure. Poser is almost such a platform, with lots of extremely useful tools to get me 60% of the way. Unfortunately Poser also suffers from a lot of crippling bugs that have never been addressed, which make it near impossible to oversee and manage the complexity of Project E (or even to get it to work properly on your PC). And with all the attention it has been getting lately, I don't want to release a half-assed figure.








Waiting for Poser 11

The good news is that Poser has a new product manager (Nerd3D) that seems to have a better and more diligent grasp of what has to be done to get Poser fine-tuned. So far I can only rely on his words, those of some of the testers and other rumors, but most of them seem quite promising. In any case they seem more in contact with the reality of their user's experiences than before, and that should only prove beneficial, imo. Let's hope I'm right!

btw, concerning DS, no promises but I have a vendor closely affiliated with DAZ that has offered to help get Project E into DS once she's working. The tech theoretically works in DS but it just needs some small tweaks to read PE properly. But first I have to get the girl working properly in Poser, my platform of choice.


So I've decided to focus entirely on my comics until Poser 11 comes out. And even then, I've decided to delegate some development tasks to other people so that I can focus more on my comics, the entire reason why I got into 3DCG in the first place. Luckily I've now got some very competent people offering their help to me in running this project, and also they agree with me that it is best to wait for Poser 11. But not to worry, PE still gets developed as I make my comics, since that's what she was made for.
















Finally some comics!!

Now for comics, Poser is brilliant, so no excuses there. I've added a progress bar frame up top, so that you can see what's happening. Most of the progress would indicate the posing / rendering phase, because that's really what its all about. But if the progress is at 10% it would mean that everything is set up, but now has to be acted out and rendered. In actual fact it should be 50% because preparing the scenes is half the work, but usually preparation work is also in conjunction with other comics, and future comics related to that comic. Like with the Disco Dragon, once part 1 is done, parts 2 and 3 should be smooth sailing since everything is set up.



















Progress

And on that note, like I said I haven't been wasting time this year. The good news about my comics is that, despite having spent so much time on Project E, I've still managed to build up figures, props, clothing, materials, entire sets and locations for the stories I've been planning to do. All I really need to do is pose the characters and render. I've already started with the Disco Dragon part 1 a few weeks ago and its 74% done. I hope I can finish it by the end of this month, otherwise it will be beginning of September. 








Erogenesis' Madness streamlined

The Disco Dragon (DD) will by far be the most elaborate comic I've ever made, even crazier than the Gentleman's Club. The first part will be the introduction to the story, setting up the reason there will be so much sex in the second and third parts. I think by now I've firmly established that 'Lite' means: fun, light-hearted, no violence etc, as opposed to a short comic lol. I cannot do short comics! However I'm not going to make the same mistake as the Gentleman's Club to wait and release it in one go, but rather in three parts, both for entertainment reasons as for marketing and financial reasons. Most of all you won't have to wait so long for some prime Lali entertainment lol



For free???

Part 1 will be for free, and the other two will be for sale. I do this for two reasons: 1. so that you can see what the comic will be about. 2. shameless marketing. I've discovered that there are many people out there that hesitate to want to pay for 3DX comics, partly because of being disappointed. So like this people can see my quality and what they can expect the next time they pay their hard-earned $$$ for a comic of mine. Also, I've found out that a lot of folks out there don't exactly know that Lali comics are not your average 3D erotica. So hopefully this will also help folks see what Lali is all about and make them less hesitant to invest in my work. Of course, and I am not ashamed to admit that this will help my sales along a bit... which is necessary because I need to make a living hehe







And then...?

For the rest, as you know I have a load of other comics planned, but I hope to get Sen's first comic done this year!! I'm in the mood for something totally different!



Secret Projects

Yes I have one secret 'comic' coming up, and I'm also working on a simpler 3D model of something, something with the level of detail of Lali's Bits ;) I won't say more.










8 comments:

  1. It's a shame that the only holdup to PE's release is the future release of Poser 11, which may or may not fix those crippling bugs that you describe. I was so looking forward to seeing it become available before the end of the year.

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    1. Yeah tell me about it. I really wanted to help out by putting PE on the market a.s.a.p but I cannot achieve what I want with the state Poser is in now. its not like Poser is entirely fucked up, its still a great app, but all the little bugs put together make it so hard to work with. its just not worth it to spend another half a year on a figure that might be able to be worked out faster with P11... I hope...

      On the bright side I do have a group of very adamant developers very eager to get going so if Poser doesn't deliver we might find a way round. I don't hope we have to go down that road though, my comics do have priority. But well get there!

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    2. Seconded. I almost want to beg you to be an Alpha tester. Even though you said she has issues. I am more than willing to take that bullet...as it were. :) So if you are ever looking please keep me in mind.

      -DP

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  2. Glad you're moving ahead on the comics. It's been too long. Looking forward to them all!

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    1. yeah WAY too long. Sorry for that! I've missed the process and to be honest if Poser comes with a game changing figure (finally) I might suspend PE indefinitely and just push on with comics. its my first love!

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  3. This is going to sound conceited, as I know you'd make bank on a D|S version of PE, but with all of our constant shit-talking on that company's business model, why would you want to even try to make a version for them? You and a handful of other developers are the few remaining talented individuals using that software, and everyone seems to think SM and Poser are down for the count. I've watched (and talked to) my favorite content creators (Mindvision-GDS, Awful Soul/Aery Soul/AlfaseeD/whatever, Stonemason, et. al.) and some had really harsh things to say about Poser and seem to care not at all that they've alienated a good portion of their customer base. What really cemented Daz3D's cancerous approach to business in my mind was when they started converting prop sets to the inherent Daz Studio format. Props! I mean, why is it such a big deal that a simple mesh with no weight mapping or rigging need be in their proprietary format? They are clearly attempting to block Poser at every pass.

    It's a tough call, but I seriously think PE should remain Poser native and fuck Daz3D in their greedy asses. I mean, Genesis 4 will probably be out tomorrow, right? Genesis 5 in Q1 of 2016? Seriously, it's all about their sales margin. They don't even let a figure get cold before they're cramming a new one down your throat with a base price of over $40 and that's not including all of its add-ons.

    Also, have you considered that this mesh supports V4 clothing only? Are you concerned with Daz customers bitching because it's wearing "antiquated" clothing? Perhaps Daz3D will reject it based on this; I mean, do they really want to sell a figure that uses clothing it doesn't even showcase anymore?

    At the end of the day, it's your figure and you can do what you want, but you know how I feel about the cancer that is Daz3D.

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    1. yeah I think part of me just wants to give PE up altogether because this figure circus sometimes has nothing to do with art at all. Both companies don't really seem concerned about the artist: SM not clocking onto growing trends and not polishing their software up, and DAZ just recklessly milking their customers off their money with no regard for interoperability and basically just sidelining their long-standing Poser investors. Both companies can fuck miles of off, but I'm giving Nerd3D the benefit of the doubt. Bottom line: I wanna make comics, and I've made a figure to help me with making comics. If my fans want it, I'll do my best but I'm not going to come with something half-assed, thus I wait for Poser 11. As for a DS version, you're right, DAZ can eat a platter full of kiss-my-ass souffle (along with some of those ass-kissing vendors), but the problem is that I do have friends that use DS, and I'd hate to let them down. Poser will get priority off course, especially since its my platform of choice.

      I don't like DAZ the company. DS is not a bad app (albeit badly designed) and lots of DS artists are good with it. But the company is an extortionist money-grubbing piece of shit. And its not that I'm bitter at their success, but they are successfully fucking up the world of CGI with their lego-blocks method of 'making art'. Sure, Poser started it, but DAZ evolved it into a monster. DS was made for prefab art. Just try customizing something in DS, its not easy, almost purposefully so. If you make something unique, DAZ will not be able to make money off it when someone asks "hey where can I buy that?". Poser was made for customizing, and I hope the guys over at SM realize this, which is why I'm ok with making PE fit V4 stuff... learn to customize! be unique! make an effort. Anything less is just DAZ catalog art!

      But DAZ are fucking it up. So many people think that all of the stuff I show in my renders was just bought from DAZ, even Lali herself including her expressions. That is such a fucking insult! DAZ makes people think that artists cannot make shit themselves. DAZ don't care, its a money-making machine, keeping the market for themselves, extorting anything that isn't DAZ. Its capitalism at its finest. I know for a fact that even CG Society artists suffer from this, and thus it puts a tremendous pressure on us artists to stand out from the catalog art and try to convince art fans that there are actually artists out there that actually do make an effort and make their own content, instead of getting it all from DAZ. And with content I don't just mean props. We're talking everything from clothing, to lighting sets to pose sets... to entire fucking scenes. They buy it, download it, load it, render it, post it and get praise for rendering stuff that is fucking identical to the images in a DAZ newsletter. DAZ are actually quite smart, they get people to do the advertising for them...

      I was once asked (bless the guy's soul but eesh) what pose set I used to make 'The Gentleman's Club'??? What the entire fuck man! I emailed him asking: "what is a pose set"? For a lot of folks all communication stops when I tell them that I made things myself, as if that is a dead end? and there are seriously folks out there that will tell me to my face that they're not interested in learning how to pose a hand and would rather just put down money to buy pose sets. That is disgusting IMO and its one of the main reasons I'll never sell a pose set. Getting credit for something they didn't make or even bothered to customize is just wrong.

      Anyway, let me go pose 100 figures MANUALLY! :)

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    2. Speaking of customizing, three of the girls in the Disco Dragon have G2 and G3 hair, re-rigged in Poser, and the outside scene is a DS-exclusive prop pack I ported and tweaked into Poser. I customize, tweak, edit all the time, like I know you do. A lot of folks don't realize how much fun it is, it make the art even more special, and its really not that hard.

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Hey, because of a sudden influx of spam, I need to moderate comments from now on, unfortunately. I'll try find a work-around in the meanwhile. Cheers!