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

 

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

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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?