Thursday, March 28, 2024

Purge the Urge: Google Crackdowns

It's an American Election Year, and you know what that means! Enjoyers of Culture can go fuck themselves, and not in the fun way! Censorship Crackdowns are coming down hard on the big platforms once again. Gumroad, for example, has already axed all their erotic content overnight, and Patreon and Amazon are doing another big push to suppress adult content.

Today, though, I've heard through the grapevine that erotica authors using Google Docs to share their content with beta readers are suddenly getting their accounts locked down and their files erased, due to Google deciding to update and actually bother to enforce some new policies in regards to the sharing of explicit content, as well as extreme violence content, regardless of the medium. Pictures, writing, spreadsheets, whatever.

So far, this seems to mainly apply to Google's "office suite" of programs, such as Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drive. So far, it is explicitly ruling against using these services to share content, even with just a handful of people, however, it can apparently be overlooked in the case of just using them for personal storage.

Where this effects me in this regard is that I have been using Google Drive to host my comic, game, video, and audio files. I'm not sure how many people were relying on my Drive to get such content, so I am sorry for anyone this inconveniences, but as a precaution, I have already deleted the content in my GDrive.

Now, most of the content will still be accessible. All of the Comics are still hosted here on my Caption Blog in full. The recent Animations are still hosted here in full. Unfortunately, you will just have to settle for the lower-quality versions. I'm sorry about that, but there are hard limits to file size for Blogspot to host things, and I don't know of any adult website where I could post the better quality files without behind-the-scenes problems occurring. My Games are still hosted on Itch.io.

So what we're mainly losing here is the Audio stuff, including story readings, script readings, and the commentary I made for my games. Unfortunately, Blogspot does not host audio files themselves, so if I want to use my blogs to host directly, I'll have to convert them to some kind of video format, probably. However, I will probably just hold off for now, just because I want to see how this all unfolds. There is a chance there might be another huge push back that resets things, and I can put stuff back on GDrive again. Unfortunately, at this point, I just don't trust any file hosting service to not be getting scoured for explicit content right now.

UPDATE: Having slept on it and talked with a few people, there is also a high chance this will turn out to be a false alarm, of sorts. It's quite likely the people who's accounts were banned were actually flagged for "particularly objectionable content", if you catch my meaning, and are now painting this as an attack on authors to obfuscate the situation. Just as likely, the people who got flagged were false-flagged by bots misreading the content, and will get their data back with an appeal. Also as likely, this is all legit, but Google's just going to push their rules in the short term as a PR stunt, and then go back to not caring.

The truth is, we never know the real story behind these things, and can't always predict where things are going to fall in the aftermath. But the truth is, all of us content creators are under the constant watch of the Eye of Temael Sauron, and Google, Meta, Amazon, Paypal, and the rest really could just go Scorched Earth on us at any time if they wanted to, so better safe than sorry.

I will wait it out for a bit to see how things unfold, and if it turns out to be a big scare that's a lot of hot air, I'll probably re-upload everything again.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Just A Little Scene: Late Night Bliss (A Mini-Movie)

Due to Google policies, I have had to remove the higher quality file link for now.


Went with Koikatsu again for this one. I complain about how "moe" the art style looks, but the fact is, the cartoon stylization is easier to work with, both in terms of model textures and getting more readable expressions. Likewise, the bright, poppy color scheme means lighting is less of a nightmare to work with than in Honey Select, as everything is generally evenly lit. Except, of course, that can also work against you, as it did here with trying to set up night scenes. I wanted the living room to look like a dim room lit with lamps, and it was just not possible. So I just had to dim the overall lighting a bit.

I also ran into limitations early on trying to find a stage that would cooperate with the Material Editor to make parts of the walls invisible. Most stages either can't be Mat Edited due to how they load in, and a lot of the ones that can can't be effectively piecemealed to, say, make one wall invisible, as opposed to making every wall invisible as one solid shell. The stage I used here had more separate parts to work with, but even still, there were a few shots where I couldn't hide certain elements, and had to just accept a few floating slats being in the shot. In hindsight, I suppose this is something I could try to erase manually in a photo-editor, but too late now.

On the plus side, I accidentally discovered the in-game camera's zoom/angle lens features, which turned out to be a huge boon here, as I don't think I could have set up the shots to look nearly as good otherwise.

Voice-wise, I had fully intended to use my own voice for the male character, but when it came time to do the audio editing, I could not get my normal voice tracks and the StS voices to balance out together. I just don't have the recording equipment or audio engineering chops to cobble it so the separate tracks go naturally together. So I ended up using another male voice from ElevenLabs. Thankfully, I didn't have to re-record much, and found a voice that worked well enough.

Unfortunately, another weakness of the program is that it is very difficult to get any kind of natural sounding moaning or grunting or breathy gasps to match what I'm looking for. Hence, I had to use some moaning clips from Freesound.

WHAT'S NEXT?
I have this bad habit of getting really into a medium for a brief period, making a few things, thinking I'm going to keep going and growing with it, and instead spinning my wheels until I fizzle out. See my RPG Maker games for a great example.

Also, I don't consider myself "back" for making erotic content, so much as I'm just having some kind of relapse. :V

Still, I would like to make more of these. I'm not sure of what yet. I'd still like to try to do something  in Honey Select 2, but there's a high chance I'll just keep using Koikatsu. Maybe something more overtly fantastical, given a lot of the sets and props available are very genre-inspired or ripped from various games and anime. We'll see what I can come up with.
 
EDIT: Might be a while before I can get another one made. Some stuff has come up that's gotten in the way, I've once again fallen into the pit of relentless indecision, and I have suddenly regained persisting tendinitis problems which is limiting what I can do/should be doing with my arm. It's always somethin'. :T
 
Script Added! Click "Read More" to read it.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Animations with Voices!

 




Utilizing ElevenLabs opens up some possibilities for voice work that I otherwise haven't been able to achieve on my own and cannot afford to hire voice actresses for. In combination with using Koikatsu and Honey Select, and sound effects and samples from places like Freesound, I could theoretically make some mini-movies with full voice acting and minor animations and cuts in the style of the last video. For the videos above, the first three are using text-to-speech, while the fourth uses speech-to-speech.

That said, it is still a very frustrating and clunky technology to use, and the whole use of AI for creative work is something I do have a lot of mixed feelings on. I had initially posted a big fat opine about it, but considering the resources I've used in the past to make my "transformative work" in the form of sniping images from across the web to write captions for, and using Illusion Studio's games to make machinima comics, well, I'm probably not a very good person to try and be a paragon over the morality of AI tech. That's a much bigger debate best had elsewhere.

I will say that I have no interest in using AI art or writing for my projects. I've tried out a few programs to see what they can do, and sure, it can make some interesting looking stuff sometimes, but I would never consider anything generated by it to be something I can take credit for or pride in making. I can already write for myself, and while I am an extreme amateur at art, drawing and painting are skills I want to build up doing with my own hands, something AI generation cannot replace. Even using 3D programs, there is still manual effort applied in doing the character posing, scene setting, lighting, and "camera" work, so you're doing a lot more than just clicking a few buttons and letting things auto-generate. Likewise, I also do not feel the need to use AI as a crutch for a lack of creativity, and would feel no sense of accomplishment just asking the computer to make up stories and art for me based on some simple prompts.

On the other hand, and I am willing to concede some hypocrisy on my part here, I kinda feel less bad about utilizing text-to-speech technology, at least in the case of something like this, where I'm just toodling around with personal projects that I have no intention of trying to profit from. TTS tech has existed for decades already, and unlike with art and writing, you aren't asking the computer to just make something up for you. You still have to write the whole story or script, you still need to do all the audio editing that follows. The computer is just reading off what you wrote. Moreover, with newer speech-to-speech technology, you're also still doing all the actual voice acting yourself, while the program is basically just putting a filter over your voice to adjust how it sounds. ElevenLabs claims to have sourced their voices from willing volunteers and from contracted and compensated voice actors, so they seem less sketchy than a lot of the AI art companies. So, yeah, fuck it, I'm willing to play around with the tech for little pocket projects like these.

Once again, sorry if the video quality isn't very good, Blogspot seems to really want to compress things. If I ever do actually go through with making a little movie, I will definitely host the video elsewhere, even if I just have to throw it on a Google Drive or something.

(Truthfully, not much is probably going to come of this stuff, so I wouldn't hold your breath. I'll probably burn out on doing a bunch little "proof of concept" clips over the weekend, and then not update again for a year. Still, one never knows when the muse will drop by again.)

Simple "Slide Show Edit" Movie


So, I wasn't going to show this off, but a while back, I decided to try my hand at a little video editing. It's a medium I've never had that much interest in, but I've tinkered with it here and there. I never really had the resources to go all-in on video projects, but as I am occasionally want to do, I decided to make a brief project of seeing what I could cobble together using the very limited means at my disposal.

I had once seen an old movie wherein a narration or dialogue was used over a series of cuts over still images, and the technique was done so well, I almost forgot I wasn't watching something "animated". I always thought that was cool. I've also seen this done with "video comics", where a video is a slide show of cutting between panels while people voice act the lines. Hell, anime does something similar to save budget in a lot of cases, voice acting over either still images or panning shots or very minimal animation. So I thought I would give that style a go, adding a touch of "special effects" with filters. Yes, it's all very sloppy and amateur, but just playing around with the editing was an interesting experiment.

This video was made using a set of images from some old Raven Riley galleries, used GIMP to do some very brief filter effects, used ElevenLabs (an AI-powered Text-to-Speech service) for the voicework, and got several free-to-use sound effects from Freesound and Youtube.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Illusion Animations?!

 






Despite tinkering with the programs for years now, I only just today figured out Koikatsu and Honey Select 2's modpacks have built in animation recorders! I'm not sure how to actually do custom animations, as such, but I can so far use the ones included in the games combined with some custom posing to try and fenangle some short scenes.

Well. I'm still "retired from smut", but I have dabbled a bit with some visual stuff here and there in the last year. Unfortunately, every time I sit down to try and make something, like another comic, I just lose all steam. I've never previously been interested in doing any animation work, but, I dunno, it's neat to realize I have the option to try and cobble something together with this stuff. So, who knows?

Saturday, December 24, 2022

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Benching Brother

 











Another case of having a nice opener, but nothing to really follow it up. Obviously, multiple women come to tease the guy, but I feel like I've done enough Bench scenes across several of my works to get the point across by now.

Despite my work with DAZ, Koikatsu can still be fun to use to just grind out panels on the quick.  I really wish I had more special effects options on the level of Honey Select, but I can't seem to find good mods for it. Otherwise, switching to more traditional word bubbles takes a little bit more set-up work than the caption-style, but it does look better!

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Dryad


I have discovered the fun of Shaders, which allow me covert any surface into various textures. Can get a lot of range out of basic objects and even the models with these!

Monday, February 7, 2022

DAZ Comic "Demo"

The past few days, I decided to script out and start working on a short comic with DAZ. Gritting my teeth through some program frustrations, I've managed to grind through ten panels. However, reading back over what I've got so far, I can't say I'm all that happy with it; I pushed past some obvious but persistent flubs so I wouldn't get stuck all day on one panel, but the end result is obvious sloppiness, and I already feel the need to start over from scratch visually. The script itself wasn't particularly good anyway, just a quickie to help me test the waters. So, I'm going to stop here.

That said, I've learned a few valuable things from this already, and have a better idea of what to do for a future attempt! In the interest of not wasting the pages, I shall go ahead and post what I got here, if only to give you an idea of what I can do so far.

(If you want to know the rest of the story, it's just the two girls walking around the Garden area, bantering  a bit as they play with the boys on various benches throughout the area. Nothing I haven't written a dozen times already.)










Saturday, January 8, 2022

A Magical Visit



These came out pretty good (although the light source somehow got shifted between panels). Unfortunately, this extremely simple set up took hours to render and my comp went through four crashes in the attempts to build the scene and a couple blue screens mid-render. I think at this point, its clear I need to find some better workarounds with DAZ, or switch to another program, or something.

This model was just a quick slap-together, but it gave me an idea for a comic. Unfortunately, I'm just not going to be able to make those with DAZ at this rate. I was going to add some dialogue and effects to these panels, but my hacky caption style clashed too much, and I couldn't figure out a good effect to make in Photoshop. So, here's the raws; I think they speak for themselves. :V

Working With DAZ Studio

Sneaking into your room for a visit.

A Sex Mage has fun with the boy next door.

Three Sex Mages training their powers on the neighborhood Test Boy.

After a year or so of flirting with the idea, and several brief attempts to try it only to drop it, I have finally taken the plunge to work with DAZ 3D Studio. These are my earliest results; as you can see, it allows me to create impressive 3D graphic scenes, with a variety of great-looking models and sets for purchase, and a robust lighting engine. The best part is, assets made in DAZ can be used for commercial projects, meaning that I could finally make 3D comics and Visual Novels with custom models and put them up in stores, unlike the stuff I make with Koikatsu and Honey Select.

Unfortunately, DAZ is also an enormously clunky, resource-hogging, laggy, extremely costly, and time-consuming program that will randomly crash or blue screen my computer multiple times in a single project. It's a trade off, of course. Koi and HS/2 come with a host of limitations, at the benefit of being pretty quick and easy to use. Learning DAZ is a skill that requires having an optimized computer, a lot of patience, more artistic pre-planning going in, and a fair chunk of money to throw down in order to do anything beyond the utmost basics, and even the utmost basics can give experienced users headaches. Beyond that, a lot of users of DAZ also supplement the images they generate with post-render work in Photoshop and other such programs, so even after you've finally gotten DAZ to spit out the image you want, you're not done working on it.

To compare, from loading the program to having a finished render, producing an image in Honey Select can take me anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, if I know exactly what I want, and I just need a little bit of fine-tuning to get it right. All of that time will be in constructing the image, and then hitting a button to take an instant screen shot. Replicating the same image in DAZ can take anywhere from three to five hours, with another hour or more on top of that just for the program to actually render the final image once everything is set up. That's just doing the scene with the three girls floating a guy in a yard, with minimal props, two basic light sources, and simple clothing.

And this is to say nothing of the costs. DAZ nickel-and-dimes the living shit out of you for every little thing. Even factoring in sales and the occasional freebie and DAZ being supposedly the best deal on the market, things add up very fast. Every set of clothing, sometimes even individual sets of clothing, every figure model, every wig, every pose pack (basically a must to cut down on the sheer headache of posing), every expression pack (same), every location prop, backgrounds, sometimes even alternative colors for hairsets and clothes you already have, all of it, is piecemealed out separately. You can very easily blow a thousand dollars and still not feel like you have enough to work with past a couple very specific shots you want to make. And not all of it works, not all of it is cross-compatible, and some of the assets by themselves will beat your CPU like it owes them money, even if the scene you were building up to that point had no problems. The shot of Lettie just floating there with no background? I wanted to have her standing on an outdoor set, but her outfit by itself floored the gas on my computer, to the point I blue screened twice trying to set up the scene, and finally had to just render her by herself.

A project can, of course, go a lot longer, and the more you want to do, the harder it is to get the program to cooperate, if you don't have a computer optimally specced to handle the load. I have a "gaming rig" computer, but it's already a few years old now and wasn't the beefiest to start even by those standards, and I'm not in position to plunk down money on a state of the art new computer, just to then spend several thousand more dollars for assets, all for a single program.

There are certain ways to work around the system, depending on what you want to do. It is clear I'm not going to be able to reliably make full-fledged comics like I've done with Koikatsu, but if I can at least do good renders of stand-alone models and just paste them on backgrounds in GIMP or PS, I can probably do more character art to supplement my websites, cover art and stills for ebooks, and maybe even be able to make custom sprites for future VN projects.

So, for all my bitching thus far, yes, I still want to keeping trying to work with DAZ, because the results certainly speak for themselves. Even my fledgling first steps I feel like an upgrade to some of the stuff I've posted so far with the Illusion programs. But from a practicality standpoint, I'm not going to be able to fully convert to DAZ. I may still make some more stuff with Koi and HS2, especially when it comes to comics. The same comic that takes me a weekend to make in Koi will literally take me a month in DAZ, assuming my computer didn't melt from the effort.

Big thanks to Jasmine VanCroft for pushing me to take the plunge, and guiding me through the program. Without her help, I don't think I'd have even made this much before giving up on it again. She's been making some fantastic stuff with DAZ on her own website, and you should definitely check it out: http://www.jasminevancroft.com/site/main.php

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Sore Loser

Finally, another 3D comic set in the Sex Mage World! This is a recreation/expansion of a crummy MSPaint slide-show "animation" of the same name that I made several years ago. With this comic, I've opted to add more special effects flare to show the Magic in action. Although in canon, Sex Magic Spells and Lust Energy aren't visible to the naked eye, a visual medium benefits a lot from that added optical spice!

Much thanks to ATwoTailedFox for tech support!

Due to Google policies, I have had to remove the CBZ file link.