Sleep Tease

 

 
A mischievous young woman casts a little playful magic on her defenseless, sleeping boyfriend! Come morning, he'll be absolutely desperate to please her in any way she wishes, just for the chance at relief!

This was the first idea I had for a bedroom tease scene, before I diverted to do "Naughty Night" first. I admittedly phoned it in some with this one; between work and other distractions, I didn't find much time or energy to work on it, and as I worked on it, it wasn't really coming together for me.

I'd intended to be more elaborate with the magic, and initially have the people animated more, maybe even have the woman masturbate as her boyfriend writhed next to her, but the angle of the shot made the perspective/foreshortening a nightmare for me to work with. I was also going to color in this one in, but decided I couldn't be bothered. I wanted to put a little more set up for the scene to add a little more story to it, but couldn't decide what mood I wanted to set, and I also realized it would be adding substantially more work, probably doubling the video length before we get to the fun part.

So, I guess with this one, you can at least see how, although Sex Mages may make hand gestures and speak phrases when casting their spells, mostly this is just a psychological focus trick used by younger Mages still grasping how to spellcast. Sex Magic Spells can simply be cast with a concentrated thought, which can make it even more maddening for guys who are being teased, as they can't always tell which woman is doing the spellcasting! That said, you do want some kind of visual clue to the magic when using a visual medium, so having her blink while cycling through different colors to indicate the spell types was a fun, simple way to do it.

On the technical front, I am trying out other programs with more robust animation tools than Adobe Fresco allows for, programs where I can make whole scenes at a time. I made this animation using Toonsquid, an indy developed animation program that is really solid, and streamlined for editing on iPad. While it has a lot of good features, it does have its own quibbles. This was my first serious crack at the program, so I'm not fully used to it yet, and am undecided if I want to keep using it.

Naughty Night!

I was starting to map out a different bed-time animation, when this idea hit me instead! I thought it would be fun, and make for a striking visual to play with silhouettes, and add a little color to the scene. I decided to tackle this idea first, since I thought it would also be easier to animate compared to what I initially had in mind. Well, I'm not necessarily sure that it was, in fact, any easier to do than the first idea, but I was able to complete it quicker than the previous.

There was a lot of bits and pieces I had to juggle across various files. One thing I am definitely trying to fine-tune is judging how much speed to give any given action. Frames-per-second can be tricky to measure when things need to happen faster or slower; you don't want make the animation too choppy, but you also don't want it to whip by too fast to follow. Hopefully I balanced it alright here.

Another lesson learned is there one big flaw that I didn't really catch until I was two-thirds of the way in; I opted to go ahead and finish the piece anyway, as I was too far in to either scrap it or start over. In this case, I realized that there are two separate tracks of action a little too far apart, thus splitting the viewers attention between what the man and woman are doing on either side of the image. There also isn't much "back and forth" for the eye to follow between them. Watching one character can cause you to miss the other. I'm not sure how I could have better positioned the characters in this case; the image of the silhouette as-is was what stood out to me. But this is definitely something I must bear in mind to plan better for in future animations.

 As the content of the video itself, there are a few fundamental, very basic scenarios my Sex Mage fantasies tend to branch from. One is night time settings in which one is awakened by horniness in the middle of the night and just has to do something about it! If its a woman, she'll seek out some helpless boys to enact sexy mischief upon, while if its a man, he risks inviting mischief upon himself if he can't get his needs under control! In this animation, it's the latter. He awakens the girl in the other room with his desperate stroking, and she makes sure to punish him for it!

Another thing I tried to demonstrate was the whole phenomenon of "arousal signals". As the man gets hard, his penis broadcasts a psychic alert to any woman in range. If the signal is strong enough, it'll spark the magical reactions from a Sex Mage, even in her sleep. If he just lets it throb, she'll probably sleep through it; men's Lust Energy creates a euphoric effect for a woman. But if he starts stroking it, he'll rev his motor too high and jolt her awake, making her jittery with built up Sex Magic Energy! This is why she punishes him with ball squeezing for stroking himself, but then re-pumps his cock back up to give her more pleasant vibes to lull herself back to sleep with.

Tease-O-Gram!

Took me about two and half days straight to get this done! My process here was to break up the animation into a bunch of different project files, animate and render each segment separately, then combine them in a video editor.

Overall, this was a pretty ambitious attempt for me, compared to what I've practiced up to this point. I ended up doing more with the animation than I initially planned. That said, in the interest of not tripling my workload and overtaxing my ability to keep track of every element in the project, I did limit how many elements I ended up animating. If I had a lot more time, physical endurance, and any patience whatsoever, I might have attempted more full-body movements; the guy struggling more, the woman making occasional taps of her foot, etc. But ultimately, better not to bloat the project so much I crash and burn before I'm even a quarter finished. So, better to keep the movements simple and more focused.

Likewise, I know there are line flubs at certain points; just as with typos in a story, some of these you don't catch until you're way further into a project than you'd think. I had to do a lot of going back and correcting errors; at some points, it got to where I would have to redo entire segments to fix something. Ultimately I just had to compromise and accept a few of the flubs and move on.

If I had one complaint about Abode Fresco, other than how it loves to crash and lose your progress on whim (always be saving!), it's that it doesn't have a built-in light pen or glow pen of any sort. Procreate's light pen is perfect for drawing magical effects, and a few other programs have similar, if not as good, glow pens. Not Fresco! Now, you can, of course, try to make a glowline effect through layering and blending modes, but it's a much bigger pain in the ass than just having a good light pen, especially if I was trying to animate it in motion! Ah, well. Fresco does have some funky multi-color brushes, which I used here instead.

Animation seems to be the demon that's got me by the balls right now, but as always, I cannot say with certainty how much more I will do. Truth be told, just this project was a lot, and I can't imagine making a whole mini-movie hand drawn.

As for the video, the idea of a "Tease-o-Gram" didn't occur to me until I was basically done with the animation, and trying to think of some really simple phrases to open and close the scene. Obviously, in the Sex Mage World, almost any woman could just do this sort of thing with a thought, so she'd hardly need to hire another woman to teleport in and do it for it. Maybe in this Sex Mage World, there's more restrictions on the Magic, or maybe only a small percentage of women get it. Or maybe this is just a sexy witch or genie in a different world entirely! Either way, I thought it was a funny idea, a surprise tease-and-edge version of a kiss-o-gram or something.

Magic Fun Practice Animation

 

Well, here's some "actual" animation for once. A young woman pumps up her boy's cock with magic, stimulates him, then halts and reverses his quick-fire ejaculation!

This was drawn and animated using Adobe Fresco. While it has some kinks and klunks, for making small animations, it seems like a pretty solid program. I was initially starting to do some tiny animations in Procreate, but Fresco has a more robust system for it. I'm not sure how it compares to other programs, but for short bits like this, it does the job well. It's also free, outside of a few extra pay-for-features, which is frankly astonishing, considering this is Adobe we're talking about.

The base image is traced from a photo. Tracing is not something I normally do for art, but I specifically wanted to practice the animation process, and just needed something to work from as a base. In fact, I was initially wanting to do some rotoscoping (an animation technique of tracing over frames of live footage), but Fresco wouldn't let me import either a video format, nor even a .png sequence. So, I just opted to build off a still photo.

This was made with a lot of shortcuts. The bodies of the two people are a static background image, while the penis, her hand, and the energy effect are all animated on their own individual layers. I drew a handful of poses for the hand and penis, then strategically duplicated and paced the frames in synch to match the motions. It was much easier to fix mistakes an adjust pacing by keeping the parts separated in this way. The energy effect I just redrew fully each time, in order to get that "boiling line" look. All in all, a crude, slapdash effort, but a fun exercise in the basics.

It's fun to play around with this stuff, but obviously, a dedicated, full-throated animation, even remaking the above clip in a polished and more smoothly animated fashion, would probably take me weeks of on-off picking at it, and considering my art level, probably wouldn't look much better than it does now. While I attempted to do some absolutely minuscule animations in the past, I never took serious interest in the medium before. Suddenly, though, I've felt the urge to dip my toe in the water; it's kinda nice to see my ideas in literal action, however crudely put together.

Jenny's Power

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite getting back into art, even with an ostensible interest in learning to draw beautiful fantasy women, I have actually had less than zero desire to draw anything pornographic in quite a long time. However, I guess I had a relapse last week, as one random sketch turned into a little series of sketches featuring the same character having magical fun with a helpless boy! As often happens with my art, especially these days, I didn't plan anything out ahead of time, I just started laying down lines until eventually an image took shape, and the idea tickled me enough to keep going until I got it out of my system.

I don't have further plans for this "Jenny" character, but she'd have fit right in with the likes of Magic Lina or one of the more wicked Omny's Empowered or Created. I was going to have her be a Sex Archmage with a size-changing specialty, then decided to make her a witch specializing in polymorphing, who fused with a Dominali instead, because you know me, I love building on my lore and remixing concepts so as to repeat the exact same Sex Mage ideas from nominally different angles. :V

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 might have been false-flagged by bots or a reader 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 adult content creators are operating within gaze-range of the Eye of Temael Sauron Big Tech, 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.

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.

Just A Little Scene: A Neighborly Hand (A Mini-Movie)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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.

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?