This Is The End. :(
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Heh. Did I get you with that clickbait? No? :(
I'm not doing a New Years render this year. Not really in the space to celebrate it right now mentally or emotionally. The last half of December, to put it as eloquently as possible, has fucking drained me. Some of which I get into below, some not as I'd like to keep that bit personal. But I do believe in being as transparent as possible.
So, rather than doing a render to celebrate the new year, or rather the eve of it, I'm just going to do a bit of reflection on this year. Starting with how it's ending for me (not so good) and just some general thoughts. With all that said, I hope you all had a good Christmas (or whatever you may celebrate.). At the very least, better than my own.
So, a bit of a life update...
(Trigger Warning: Lots of rambling, long, first world problems, etc.)
Christmas Lockout:
I already had a decently long talk with EchoFoxtrot about this (Check out his VN, Little Regina.), and having had a chance to vent about it, I think I'm calm enough about it now to talk about it.
So, about a week before Christmas, I (or we, since I'm living with a friend of mine) had a property manager come over and do a preventative maintenance check. They were in and out in under three minutes. Said nothing. We come back home a couple days later to another worker leaving a 24 hour notice to come check something. We let him and he checks the shower roof and pops off a tile on the shower, says there's mold, and then gives us a few minutes to grab everything. Pops a deadbolt onto the bathroom door and locks it. On the day we were both bringing family over for kind of a pre-Christmas dinner thing.
We got an email on Christmas day saying they're charging us for the bathroom repairs (the tile, vinyl floors, etc.), which is around $2,400 due to 'lack of maintenance'. This is despite us calling them more than once to come fix the pink mold that had been sprouting up every few months more aggressively after cleaning it each time. Despite having picture evidence of it existing the day we moved in. We've spoken to multiple legal entities who don't want to touch it, and with the property manager refusing to let us bring in a neutral party, we don't really have much of a choice. Had some guys come in yesterday and tear it apart, and even they seemed surprised that we were being charged with it, and that we should call the state. Issue is that we're obviously going to have to move, and pissing them off is going to make it hard for us to find another.
Neither of us have nearly three months rent just laying around (I mean, we're broke college students.) and I'm not going to call my parents for this. So, we're leaning toward footing the bill, moving, and then filing for bankruptcy (would probably help my roommate some anyways, tbh.). Either way, it's just a completely, massively shit way to close out the year.
We Were Just Kids:
Unfortunately, I didn't progress as much this year as I thought I would with this. Part of it was me assuming the reworking of 0.1 would move a lot quicker than it ended up moving. While it's coming to a finish now, it's still something that shouldn't've taken this long to begin with. Now, as to the why? It's probably a number of things. Both likely conscious and subconscious. All of which likely come off as excuses, but are simply the truth. Work has been hectic, to say the least, as the flow tends to increase during the holidays. I'm also on-call/emergency, so that makes it a bit more unpredictable.
For those who don't know what I do outside of this and care to know, I'm trying to finish up my PsyD (which is fairly obvious by the name.). I already have work post-school more or less lined up, but just have to get through all the hoops first. Almost there, though. As I said above, the holidays tend to be far busier than any other point of the year.
I think another part of the slowing down of reworking 0.1 was more of the mundaneness of working on stuff I'd already worked on before. It was new in a lot of ways, but also the same. Mix that in with a certain scene taking an obnoxious amount of time to render to a point where I could cleanly denoise it, and it started taking adding up a bit. I suppose you could ask "Why do it, then?" Because I felt it needed it.
As I'm sure those of you who support are aware, We Were Just Kids is not much more then a passion project driven by nothing more than self-interest on my part. It's massively niche, and obviously isn't entirely clicking within a larger crowd for that reason. Being as nihilistic and fatalistic as it is doesn't help, either. As I've said before, I'm not really in this for the money (though, I'm not gonna lie, having a supplemental income for above would be nice.). I was fairly sure We Were Just Kids would be considered a failure by a metric of monetary success, and that's fine. But it'd be a lie to say that that wasn't what drove my decision to work on Move The Chains on the side. If you look at Move The Chains, it was clearly built to be more mainstream in a number of ways. From the college setting (that I hope to make a bit more unique than others of its variety.), to the male protagonist, to the harem, to the general aesthetic of the VN. It's not really something I'd deny, either.
Move The Chains:
That said, Move The Chains is a bit more than just a blatant moneygrab, if that's the vibe I was giving off. It's more of a collection of everything I've learned so far. From the beginning of We Were Just Kids to now, from lighting to coding to writing. Well, that and Genesis 8 and 8.1 are in very different leagues quality-wise.
For lack of better word, it's certainly more of a total package (that isn't to say WWJK isn't, but I won't call it perfect, either.). I've put quite a lot of effort into coding, learning how things work. And with that came a winder scope of control, interactivity, and uniqueness.
Back on the topics of 8 and 8.1, it's crazy what a difference those PBR skin textures made to figures in Daz. It seems like even the best available Daz figures for G8 kind of pale to most of what 8.1 has to offer, which is why most of the characters in Move The Chains are 8.1.
Anyway, I'll save feature ramblings for another post. I say all that to segue into kind of the larger general theme of this post.
Improvement:
I found that there was a lot of growth in multiple ways for me this year, even if it's not ending on the best note (more on that below). I'm finally seeing a finish line with my degree and can finally start earning a decent paycheck. But staying on topic (because that's what we're all here for), I feel like my render quality took a massive step forward this year, especially in the latter project. I'm not sure if it's the models doing the heavy lifting, my lighting/texturing, or a bit of both, but it's been quite significant. Especially when I look back on the early We Were Just Kids stuff to the latest Move The Chains stuff. It doesn't feel like the same person rendered it, I really question some of my decisions on some renders, to be completely honest. It's tough trying to make sense of choices that didn't make sense.
I don't think I'm done, though. Not even close. I think there's still a lot of room for me to get better. Which, again, segues nicely into goals for 2023.
Goals:
- First is obviously going to be getting the WWJK rework done and out. Then finalizing Move The Chains and putting that out.
- I think this one has to be reserved for getting renders out faster. Objectively speaking, I think I do spend too long on a lot of my renders. Specifically on the lighting.
- Animations. As you'll see in the upcoming WWJK update, new sex scenes will have animations. I've been experimenting with the speed of the animations in regard to keyframe timings, so they might feel a bit off. But I feel like my animations are pretty predictable in that way. Slow, back and forth. But using the quicker keyframe timings, I can fit more in. Hopefully they'll get better and better with more practice with them.
- Kind of in line with the last three, but I need to promote a bit harder. It just feels like the options to do so are pretty limited, at least in an NSFW sense.
- Probably more of a hopeful here, and less of a goal I can achieve on my own, is at least starting to break even on Daz assets, but we'll see.
Videos:
This is more of a side note, but I'm sure many are at least aware of the videos I've been putting up. As Patreons, or even visitors, is there stuff you'd like to see beyond what I'm already doing? Stuff you're curious about how I do? Let me know. My inboxes are open to anyone (whether I actually receive/see them is heavily dependent on the platform, though.
So, that's about it. I just wanted to ramble a bit and reflect on the year, kind of put things into perspective. And if you managed to read this far, hopefully it was worth it lol.
Thanks.