Forward to the Past!

See what I did there in the title? It's a Back to the Future reference. But different!

Anyway, hello everyone!

I've got some controversial news for you guys. Basically I want to change a couple of things. You can read a more detailed explanation below, but here's a quick summary:

• Commissions are cancelled.

• I'm going to take another break for an unknown amount of time.

• I'm going to ditch 3ds Max and learn Maya.

• I want to focus on creating non-erotic work, unrelated to this alias (ellowas). Porn won't be completely off the table, though.

• As far as WoW-porn is concerned, I will go back to the roots, ditch my new models and work with the original ones again. Will definitely wait for the new character models to be released, though.

• I will to go back to a more „softcore“ style. Explicit blowjob and penetration shots are what led me to make new models in the first place.

• I'm going to take another break for an unknown amount of time and commissions are cancelled!

So, what happened?

Basically, I was working away on a commission and was once again being confronted with the limits of my rig and 3ds Max' crappy skinning tools in general.

So I watched a crapload of tutorials about Maya and was convinced that in my case switching would be a good idea.

While watching all these videos, I also realized how much 3d design means to me and that my interest in it is actually genuine and not tied to making porn. I am pretty sure by now that I want to do 3d design for a living. But I have to start taking it more seriously, build a proper portfolio (porn doesn't count) and figure out in what field I want to specialize.

So I'm taking my switch to Maya as an opportunity to start working towards that goal. Initially I was toying with the idea of turning my back on porn for good, but who are we kidding >_>

I also looked back at my work so far and to be honest, I'm not happy with the direction it was heading. I'm glad I tried building my own wow-models from scratch, experiment with realistic lighting and whatnot, but ultimately I liked the original style better.

It worked pretty well for my Bioshock works though, so I may keep that style for some games.

A big SORRY to everyone who was waiting to commission me. I know this comes very unexpected to you, but I've been thinking about this for around two weeks now. Hopefully you guys understand that I had to make this cut somewhere, if I am to go through with my plans.

Have a nice Christmas everyone and enjoy your holidays!

Til we meet again.

Futa and me

Hi everyone,

here goes the next update! This was an image commission by someone who wants to remain anonymous. You may see more of these two some time in the future.

You can download these without the crappy Imgur-compression here.

Commissions and You

Hello!

I realize I'm a bit (read: very!) slow and vague on communicating more info about commissions.
The thing is, there are more people interested in commissions than I can handle ... first world problems, I know :X
Still, the fact remains that each commissions takes a long time to finish and with lots of people queuing up, it becomes harder to predict when I will be available again. On top of that, people already in the queue may have changed their mind about commissioning me by the time they're up, which is understandable, given the amount of time that passed.

This is a crappy situation for both me and the people waiting for their turn. The way I see it, there are only two options to fix this: either I have to try and be more productive and finish commissions faster or I have to start turning down commissions.
Well, I certainly could be more productive. I often catch myself spending an outrageous amount of time working on stuff, which probably no one even notices. But then again, those may be the things which make my stuff look like they do. Also I actually enjoy that tinkering a lot!
If I decided to start turning down commissions, how should I even go about that? How should I decide which ones to accept, without being unfair?

I am a bit at a loss here and would appreciate your suggestions. One thing I'm definitely taking away from the current batch of commissions is that I'll never accept more than two or three at once again.

Girls gone feral

Hello everyone!

Just finished another commission! Initially, this one was supposed to be private but the commissioner and I agreed to make an alternative version of his commission available to the public. And yeah, that is in fact beast-porn! Enjoy! =)

You can download it here or here!

Moving on!

Okay, so this one was probably the most complex scene I ever worked on. It took way much longer than anticipated, but on the brightside showed me some issues with my models, rigs and workflow, I need to work on. Anywho, it's finally finished and I can move on to the next commission. Unfortunately, that one's going to be private, so I can't share it once it's finished, sorry :|

Yamie - Commissioned by Faye

You can download it here or here!

What's to come

The preparations for the next commission are coming along pretty well and are almost finished.
Click the images below for what's to come and get a glimpse of how it took shape.

Finally another update ... of sorts :X
This one was a remix commission, which I squeezed in between regular commissions. Enjoy!

You can download it here or here.

Hey!

edit: updated the model and corrected some anatomical fails

Just a quick update on what I've been up to lately:

Please note that new commissions are on hold right now. Doesn't make any sense accepting more commissions when there are so many already.

Updated Commission guidelines

Hey,

I've updated the Limitations section of the Commissions FAQ.

Short version:
Because Money > Butthurt, futa and beast commissions are generally possible, if money is not an issue.

Long version:
Copy&pasted from my Darknest thread ...

Your concern is totally understandable and the reasons behind opening up to these two kinks are purely monetary. I didn't plan it originally, though. People just came to me, telling me how much they'd pay if I reconsidered. The offers were too tempting to refuse to be honest, simple as that.
Usually I value principle a lot, but we are just talking about porn here. I don't hold my work sacred or anything, so turning down these offers would have felt incredibly stupid to me. What I do hold sacred though, is delivering the best I can do. There's no way I would have accepted these commissions if I didn't intend to work on them with the same effort as I do with regular commissions.

I don't plan to name any fixed rate for futa and beast, cause I still want these to be the exception, not a regular thing to commission. What the latest addition is meant to say is: if you really want to see a beast or futa animation by me and money is not an issue, we can probably work something out. Also it serves as an explanation why occasionally some futa or whatever may pop up in the future.

Yeah, this makes me a sellout, I know. I may fall from grace with some people, yada yada. But I stick with it: turning down some big money because of principles, regarding porn, just would be ... I dunno.

One Commission down ...

... a lot more to go.

Thanks to Tyurru for this one!

Download it here or here!

Commissions open

Hi!

Commissions are open again.
Prices will be around 200€ for a new animation. More information can be found in the "Commissions" page above.

Regarding Commissions

Hey everyone,

let's talk Commissions!

First of all, I'm not a greedy person. Second of all, sorry for opening with a disclaimer like that, which probably may have raised some alarms now :X
I make my stuff available for free, try my best to pick the most convenient hosting services, don't beg for donations at every chance I get or advertise the donation buttons very much. I charged very little for commissions in the past (compared to the effort, put into them) and preferred to close commissions for quite some time to learn new stuff, when I could have just fired out one commission after the other.

Having said that, I don't make porn to make money. Although earning a few bucks through it sure is a nice thing ... everyone likes making money, who are we kidding?

With that in mind, I'm not really sure how commissions fit into that picture. Each commission took dozens of hours to make. As my animations are getting better, so increases the time I spend working on them. For that Elizabeth closeup shot for example the rendering time alone took 16 hours! Plus another 8 hours for the other angle and maybe 1-2h of post editing and video rendering. On top of that comes dozens of hours of building the models, the scene and actually animating.
So you see, unless I charge ridiculous prices, commissions will never be an attractive way of earning money for me. But doing so would basically make me a freelancer and I understand that this is not what commissions are about.

So, for a while I was seriously considering just closing commissions for good and be done with it. Or be really, really picky about what commissions I would accept.
Instead I decided to go with a middle ground solution: charging a relatively high price, which is still less than the work hours spent are worth, but more than you'd expect for a commission.
Naturally, this will keep the interest in commissioning me low, but if someone decides to spend the money regardless, I get compensated well enough to gladly work on someone else's idea.

I'm still trying to determine what the price range should be. For that I've been roaming through several artists profiles to see what they charge for commissions, but this is turning out to be causing even more confusion. From what I understand, setting one's prices is an iterative process ... that sure sounds like fun!

Anyway, just wanted to quickly share that with you guys.

Of happy faces and sad songs

Too tired ... to write ... stuff!

Must ... 

post ...

Download the whole thing in better quality here or here. Enjoy! =)

Thou shall be teased!

And teased thou hath been!

Btw, I know some Google Drive videos aren't working. I'll reupload them, but for now check my thread on Darknest for working alternative links.

Here be gifs

Good day everyone!

As frequent visitors may already now, I've been working on new rigs these last couple of months. If you don't know what a rig is, let me explain the whole deal real (not!) quick:
3d characters are typically animated with bones. As the name suggests, these are joints inside the character model. The model is then weighted to these bones, so that each bone moves a certain area of the character's model. This process is called skinning. Therefore when animating, you actually animate the bones, which then move the character.
But animating each bone individually is impractical, would take extremely long and often results in jittery motions. Therefore you build a rig, which is basically a system, build around the bones to help control multiple bones at once, in a way it makes sense. An integral part of a rig are the control objects ... these are what's actually being animated.

Imagine your character has a spine made up of five bones and you want him to turn his chest to the left. That rotation should affect the entire spine, so each bone in the chain would have to rotate a little bit to make it look realistic. Without a rig, that would mean you'd have to go in and animate five bones. If you built a rig, you would probably create at least one control object on top of the spine and one on the bottom. And you would set it up so that when you move either of these control objects, it affects all five bones in a way you'd expect from a spine. So when you want to rotate the character's chest, you'd just have to rotate the control object on the top and let the rig take care of rotating the bones. You see, rigs are very important and can quickly become really complex, but will make animating a lot easier.

The importance of rigs is not new to me ... even my first animation was animated with the help of a rudimentary rig. As the years have passed however, I now know what I need my rigs to be able to do and I've learned enough to make such a rig.

And that's what I've mostly been working on these last couple of months: building a new rig.
After lots of trial and erroring, it's finally finished. I can easily repurpose it and use it for new characters, rather than building it from scratch. It has lots of stuff that'll make animating easier for me - especially the hands and the face. And every animation I make from now on, I can apply to any character that uses this new rig.


To put this rig to the test, I made a quick animation and applied it to two different characters. As expected, I had to do some refining, but overall I'd call it a success =)
I don't want to open commissions just yet, though. Still need to figure out what to do with the male character models.

Anyway, enjoy!

Download the Bloodelf here or here

Download Elizabeth here or here

Futa be gone!

Good day!

I'm pretty much finished with my new rig and now started skinning the bloodelf model. It looks like I got the bone placement and model topology right, so things are coming together pretty well and fast so far.

Here's a quick look at the breast-setup and how it works. The jiggle amount isn't final though and probably will have to be adjusted for each scene individually.

Note the purple box right in the center of the screen, which is my reference spring. There are also purple arrows pointing in four directions - these are gravity helpers. Depending on the direction and distance the reference spring moves, it activates and controls the strength of various gravity helpers, which only affect the springs in the breasts. The entire thing is automated and that's how the breasts move a bit more naturally, rather then strictly following the character's direction of movement.

Don't pity the fool!

Hello everyone!

Thought I'd let you guys know about what I've been up to lately.
Well first of all, I've been watching and reading tons of stuff about 3D Studio Max and learned a great deal of new tricks. Had a few setbacks here and there, but overall I'm making good progress. While I'm at it, I'll also look into different ways of animating the face.

Aaanyway, while finishing up the bloodelf model, I spent some time thinking about how I could take my clips to the next level. Because why stop at overhauling my rigs? Long story short, I decided to let go of my no futa attitude. To reflect that change of attitude, I adjusted the model accordingly.

Still needs a bit more dicks, I think.

Commissions remain closed

I wrote this on Darknest a couple of days ago and forgot to post this here as well, so here goes:


Recently I put some thoughts into commissions and when I should open them. Long story short, they will remain closed for an unknown time.
I'm still in the middle of improving my knowledge on certain topics and there's still a couple of things left for me to do, before I want to focus on commissions. Of course there is always something new to learn and to do, but I have a pretty good idea of the things which I want to work on with top priority right now.
I want to take my time with this to get it right and I can't do that while knowing that there are already people waiting whom I told I'd be ready around March. I may need two months, maybe half a year, maybe longer ... I just can't say for sure right now. So please just consider commissions out of the picture until further notice.
Another thing to note is that when I open commissions again, there will be some changes. Mainly an increase in the prices and restrictions in the form of a one-scene-limit per person rule. Haven't really fleshed out the details yet.

The fourth's coming forth

Here's a quick reskin-commission of the previous scene. Commissions are still closed and will remain closed for some time (I'll post more about that in the next couple of days), but I made an exception for this one, since it was just a matter of swapping textures and making a few adjustments here and there.

The clips can be downloaded here and here.

Third time's the charm

Here goes the last one! Download it here or here.

I'm off to work on something new now, but don't expect another update in the immediate future :|

edit:
Just a quick c&p from the Darknest Board:


As I said, this will be the last update for a little while. Next I'll be focusing on getting the bloodelf model finished and see how that works out. Then I'll start looking into an alternative way of animating my models, as I mentioned a couple of pages ago. If all goes well, I should be able to produce better animations and be able to swap races more easily.
You need to understand that until now I was still using the same rigs I used when making my very first animations. I didn't do a very clean job back then and I'm beginning to feel it when animating ... with that Mass Effect animation, past-me already claimed its first victim :|
So yeah, I'll be working on a lot of technical stuff in the next few weeks, which means the next update will take some time and I don't expect there to be a whole lot of exciting WiP shots either.
There are already a few people waiting to commission me, so I'll be working on those right away when I'm done with the stuff mentioned above.

Aftermath

Didn't know there was a preview-/download-limit on Google Drive ... I did a quick search, but it's pretty hard to find any numbers of what that limit actually is. It also seems like each file has its individual limit. Weird. I'll post an alternative link to mediafire as well in the future.

Anyway ... surprise update!

Here's the Google Drive download link and here's the alternative download.

Video to come

Alrighty, a couple of things:
The Mass Effect animation sucks. I didn't do a clean job when preparing everything for animation and now I'm stuck with a mess of unnecessary layers, corrections, counter-animations and on top of that an incredibly slow viewport, which makes it hard to get an idea of the final animation. I may quickly wrap up what I have so far and release the unfinished clip some time, but right now I don't want to bother with it.
No reason to hold the Alexstrasza animation back then. Unfortunately, after everything was rendered, I noticed that the cum was acting all weird ... basically it was glittering ^^" So I made some tweaks and am re-rendering the last part. Once that's finished I'll post the whole clip.
Until then here's a blurry gif =)

Update: Download it here or here.

Been working on the bloodelf some more, made some adjustments to the nose and added realistic ears. I'm curious if your reactions will be the same as with the nose =)

Teh faec

Making some progress on the animations and found the time to work on the new bloodelf model some more. It's still far from finished, but I applied a quick texture today just to see where I'm going. In case you're wondering, I haven't made any changes to the hair and eyebrows and the body doesn't have a proper texture yet.

Although it's looking okay for a test-shot, a few of the concerns I had when I started, came true: She's not looking as much like the original character as I'd like her to and as expected, a simple face-swap doesn't work at all, so if I wanted to use a different character, I'd have to make adjustments to the model itself. Especially the latter could prove problematic when it comes to rigging and skinning ... I don't really want to redo those as well, each time I switch characters :|
Anyway, I'll continue and worry about this later.

Teh belf

The whole cumshot thing is starting to get really frustrating. I'm struggling to find settings that result in a cumshot that looks good, moves as you'd expect, is easily transferable to other scenes and doesn't take like 50+ hours to simulate. I'm making progress, but it's much harder than I thought :|

Anyway, while waiting for the preview-sims, I worked on overhauling my first model. Unlike previous improvements, where I would just work directly on the original model, I now made an entirely new model from scratch. My goal is to create a model that looks like the original one, but simply has more detail. After finishing the rough overall shape, I started with refining the breasts and slowly worked my way upwards. Right now I'm working on the nose ... the rest of the face is still work in progress.

From left to right: the original model - my new model - my new model smoothed out and stuff.
This is fun! =)

Cum's coming

I'm in the process of finishing the last step, before beginning the fine-tuning: the cumshot

This is just a test-shot for me to get an impression of the final look. The cum is looking a bit too watery right now, but it seems like I'm on the right way.

Keeping you posted

Hi,

I'll just drop a quick copy&paste of stuff, I posted in my thread at darknest:


Mediafire finally locked my account, which means pretty much all video-links should be dead now. I still have no idea why, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to take any chances and just dump my stuff on a new account only to find it deleted again. Shame really, I liked mediafire :|
4shared looks great, but it requires a registered account to download stuff, which is a dealbreaker.
One click filehosters usually have a download limit, which is also a no-go.
If anyone knows of a great filehoster, please let me know.

I've been looking at a bunch of tutorials to set up rigs, that ultimately should be easier to animate and, more importantly, be extremely flexible. For instance, applying an existing animation to a new character would be much easier and should look better. I could also create some animation presets to use as a base to work on for future animations, thus greatly increasing productivity. As a bonus, those rigs could easily be exported for use in various game-engines, should I ever feel like creating something interactive.
There's a big downside, though: that rig works very differently than what I'm used to, meaning that the animation-process will be very new to me and I'll need some time to adapt. In my experience, the saying "never touch a running system" usually holds true, but in this case I'm willing to take that risk, seeing how great the advantages are. Commissions will remain closed until I get the hang of those rigs.

I'm making great progress with the Alexstrasza-scene. Except for the faces, all animation is finished. When I'm done with the faces, I'll be working on the cumshot, background and lighting. After that I'll be wrapping up the Mass Effect animation. If by the time that's finished as well, I don't notice any major flaws in any of the scenes, I'll start rendering everything. No ETA at this point, but here's a little preview-shot:

Alexstrasza update

The basic animation-outline for the Alexstrasza scene is finished, I suppose. In order to keep me motivated, I don't usually work very long on one aspect of a scene. Instead I keep switching back and forth between animating, modeling, texturing etc ... that's a kind of a weird workflow, but it works for me =)
Anyway, yesterday I spent some time on getting a little more secondary motion into the scene. Basically I ended up with making squishy pillows! :D
Today I made some lighting-tests and finalized Alexstrasza's textures and maps. I mentioned in my previous posts, that I'm now using more advanced materials and I think it shows =) Behold, sweaty Alexstrasza! I also made a comparison shot of the original model.

You can download these as a video-file here in case you want a more detailed view. There's some weird flickering happening on the new hair ... I know what's causing it, but forgot to fix it until after the render was done. The hair isn't finished anyway ... I'm thinking of adding a couple more streaks, cause as it is right now, it doesn't work very well with physics.

That's it, I think. Just wanted to keep you guys updated.

First post

Starting off with two work in progress pictures of scenes I'm currently working on.

As far as the animation is concerned, both scenes are pretty far by now. What's missing are a couple of extra animation layers, facial expressions, background and lighting. Oh and the Alexstrasza-scene will hopefully feature a cumshot, yay!

I've been experimenting with lots of different stuff in the past few months, so these scenes will feature things like fancy skin and hair shaders, advanced lighting, more complex facial animations and more realistic breast physics. Also I think I'll be trying to make more non-WoW stuff, starting with Mass Effect.