Full Color-quality (16-bit) version on Weasyl!
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Check out the Fave NSFW Shots Here!


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Let's just get the worst review set out of the way first, shall we? Even in the best outcome, this year was going to be very light on clean content. It's just the section of the comic I'm in. By its nature, this project is monolithic. It squeezes anything else I might do with my time, with the sole exception of little side animation which derive entirely from elements developed for the comic. Should I take time to do other things? Maybe. It might even be refreshing. But everything already takes *so much time* and I feel I increasingly have less and less of that.

January - This was mostly still VM testing work, but the testing was almost exclusively using lewd assets as they were more readily accessible. The month prior had some clean asset testing in the form of my apartment-space building and pool area zoning scripts, but those had wrapped up. Some participating medium testing (which really produced nice results tbh) but the apartment is the best setup for that so nsfw it was to be. The sole exception was this. :3

February - Not really much to choose from, though I'm usually a fan of my glow-ier stuff for fantasies and memories. I had a bit of a hard time reworking out how to get out what I wanted and I don't much like the colors exactly, but better this than another blank month.

March - No seriously, there wasn't even real nsfw stuff to choose for this month even.

April - I guess I *could* try to crop something, but it's still be pretty obviously cropped porn.

May - One thing I tried several times this year was a new lighting scheme for the apartment. The script doesn't call for it, but I just feel like I need to break up the monotony of the colors, especially with the dominant focus on Rederick and Yeltsin, who already kind of blend into the background because of it. The apartment lighting is geared towards a concept of "painting with light". The walls are all almost plain white-grey as is the bed. There are a few splashes of color from other objects but the predominate color of a shot is painted onto the walls by the lights' colors. There are a couple different types of lighting nodes driving them but what's important to know is I strictly adhere to the use of a color temperature node to drive those lights, in virtually every kind of light employed. The node is designed to realistically produce light color based on the temperature and an intensity modifier (which I always leave as 1 so as not to complicate the lighting node's normal calculations and multipliers parameters, keeping it easy to use.) The color temp follows fairly faithfully the scientific concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature check it out, it's really neat!) expressed in Kelvin just as you and I may vaguely recall from High School science classes. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to remember and predict what values will turn out like in the render of various materials, and especially what I can expect from mixing otherwise-identical lights of different color temps. This chart was developed to address that. Uses one of my old test environments, hastily applied to a cube that was instanced in fixed intervals and each light or combination of lights given a color temp driver. The wall texture include normal maps to give some view-dependent bumps and different the different triangle shapes variably combine different properties of reflectiveness, roughness, and shades of grey in regular standardized percentages. It's quite useful anytime I try tweaking lighting, though I was never able to come up with an apartment lighting scheme to transition to that I liked. The final attempt towards the end of the year led to a grave discovery regarding Maya's handling of certain Mental Ray properties. But hey, at least the giant chart is neat. When I need to do more asset development, I can pop one into this scene, instance it the same way and have one big render test of how it'll look in most any lighting scheme befitting my standard designs.

June - So awkward.

July - I couldn't resist that face, even if I had to crop it.

August - What a naughty year

September - IT COUNTS! IT COUNTS! They're just hugging! Rederick told a *really* bad pun! Ok, no really, I do like those faces and I *had* to have that moment.

October - Best I can do. Ain't even enough (good) choices from crops to choose ties to fill up the space left by this wide-shot. I could have split it and removed the space between the Yeltsin and the couple, but quite frankly that space is integral to the entire shot and the reason it was the chosen page shot to begin with. It needs that distance. That aside, I really liked how the lighting ultimately worked out and I was exceptionally pleased with the sculpts. Not long before this, I had come up with yet another new innovation in my workflow. Like most, it was an incremental step forward. I devised a way to get around the limitation of my sculpt workflow which prevented it from being used to sculpt multiple characters together at once. Previously, I had to make do with pulling in a version of the other character to two separate sculpt files and simply predicting and working around how they'd interact or otherwise avoiding sculpt work that complicated that. It was serviceable but limiting and I especially felt it was more time consuming. Through a simple, well-defined series of steps to manage predictable transformations of mesh objects, I was able to allow the relative (unchanging) character's sculpt to be correctly repositioned in Maya afterwards. Details are in the notes for the pages this and other months, but suffice it to say it enabled a real leap in the quality of sculpt outputs for deeply interacting characters (like hugging here). There are kinks to work out in the process, still, especially when it involved moving parts of the body being touched by parts of another character that can't reasonably move (that still requires a guess-and-check in Maya using a blend-in prior sculpt of similar changes). Here the primary challenge that reared its head is one I often have. That fundamental mathematical problem of rotation relative to an object and its impact on the transforms. In short, Rederick was facing the other way in his sculpt and that made it harder to get it back to where it needed to be, lol.

November - Even though his expression didn't work out as well as I hoped, I still like this fairly pivitol shot of Yeltsin. It's one of the few that could be considered clean, as well.

December - I had to. I love this expression. I toyed with doing a version further warped by a faux fish-eye lens, but it wasn't as good. I neglected to select her higher-res textures so there was quite a lot of little touch-ups done for this shot. I want to boop her nose.