Sunday, February 24, 2013

What I'm Working on Today

There are two things I'm trying to accomplish today.

Strong and Stacked: Buxom Brawler Issue 2

First, I'm trying to finish the second issue of Buxom Brawler - an FMG comic.  Since I'd done a couple of BE updates in a row on strongandstacked.com earlier this month, I need to make sure I do some FMG updates to balance the amount of BE stuff I've done this month.

Buxom Brawler
I had posted the first issue of Buxom Brawler a week or so ago, and so I've decided to go ahead and try to post a second issue now to make sure there's enough FMG material on the site for this month.

The basic storyline I have going for this second issue involves some arena style fighting between the Buxom Brawler and some ultimate fighting opponents.

BEGiantess : Something

Once I get the Buxom Brawler issue finished I need to do an update for begiantess.com. I don't even know what that will be, but it will probably be another issue in the Big Decisions series.

Enough blogging - I've got to get back to work :)

Real Life vs. My Comics

Elizabeth Starr
In many of my comics, women with big boobs cause men to become weak in the knees and captivated by their huge assets.  In my stories, women with huge boobs end up living a rather charmed existence, where they can easily manipulate men who go gaga over them and bend to their will.  The men end up craving big boobs and are willing to do nearly anything that super busty women command them to do, just for the chance to possibly play with those huge boobs.

Real life is somewhat different.   I think what colors my version of reality - the one I often put into my comics - is the background I have watching tv growing up and my own personality and experience with girls. 

MY BACKGROUND AND TEMPERAMENT COLORS THE ATTITUDES OF THE MALE CHARACTERS IN MY COMICS

The tv shows I watched as a young kid included things like Gilligan's Island and Star Trek.  In many Gilligan's Island episodes, Ginger uses her sexy curves to get men to do exactly what she wants.  In Star Trek I remember one episode in particular - Mudd's Women - where some beautiful voluptuous women hypnotize men with their alluring curves and get them to do whatever they want.  With shows like that firmly stuck in my mind, its just natural for me to shape a comic reality where women use their massive tits to essentially hypnotize men into a captivated boob stunned trance where they'll do whatever the women want.

Growing up I was a fairly nerdy kid. I wore glasses and I wasn't very confident.  I had a very small number of girlfriends while in high school.  I was just too shy and not one of the good looking athletic crowd.  So in my daydreams and fantasies, if I contemplated a girl with huge boobs ever coming up to me, I knew I'd be putty in her hands.  In reality, the guys who ended up dating those girls were very confident, and weren't really putty in those girls' hands.  And that probably made them attractive to those girls.  But in my worldview, I knew I'd be just utterly enfatuated with a girl with massive boobs. And I guess I just project the way I thought back then onto the male characters in many of my comics.

Things definitely work differently in the real world.  Sure, there are guys who go gaga over big boobs. But huge busted women don't always live a charmed life where they command all the men around them.  As evidenced by some recent real life events involving women with big boobs or big butts.

REAL LIFE STORY ONE : ELIZABETH STARR

I follow Elizabeth Starr on twitter https://twitter.com/ElizabethStarrX.  She's a big boob model who got super huge implants back around 2000.  But she's had some problems with them.  For many years she'd appear in films or pictures where she'd only expose one of her breasts.  The other one remained covered.  Perhaps because she'd had some problems with the implant in that breast.  At any rate, I still considered her to be very hot because her boobs looked so humungous.  She looked great in clothes and out of them.

Elizabeth Starr started up a production company named Starr Productions which created several big boob films starring Echo Valley, Minka, Summer Cummings and many others.  In the past few years, Elizabeth would appear in various video snippets around the net showing her at adult film conventions.  And in those, invariably she'd have this guy at her side.  His stage name was Tommy Gunn.  I don't know how other people felt, but I really got sick of seeing him in every single picture with her.  It kind of ruined the magic for me. 

I was interested in seeing Elizabeth in photos solo, showing off her huge boobs in various outfits.  But every time I'd see a new photo of hers, on twitter or wherever else, or a new video clip snippet of her, there would be Tommy Gunn. Always forcing his way into view of the camera, next to her.

Super Stacked Elizabeth Starr


Hey, I guess they were a couple, and good for him, lucky SOB.  But did he have to force his way into every single picture and video clip of her?

I'm digressing a bit.  My main point is that within the past few weeks, it became clear on Elizabeth Starr's twitter account https://twitter.com/ElizabethStarrX from her tweets that a spat had developed between the two of them.  And it sounded like it had gotten quite nasty. You can go to her twitter account and look at the history there to see what I am talking about. I think the deal is that Tommy Gunn left her for another porn star, and Elizabeth wasn't happy about it.

I didn't jump for joy upon hearing this.  It's not like I hate this Tommy Gunn guy. And I wouldn't be overjoyed at hearing any couple had broken up.  I was rather annoyed that the guy seemed to have a need to insert himself into every single photo taken of Elizabeth - and video too - which kind of spoiled the magic of the photos for me.  But it seems sad that they'd had a very long relationship and it is coming crashing down now.

The reason I'm mentioning it is that this is real life, and its very different from how my comics would have gone for this.  In my comic, Tommy Gunn wouldn't have been able to leave Elizabeth.  She would have had him wrapped around her finger.  He would have been in thrall to her huge tits.  And the fact that he left her for another woman, a woman with smaller tits than Elizabeth Starr had, would never have happened.

But in real life, Tommy Gunn did leave her.  And Elizabeth seems to be distraught and flailing around trying to deal with it.  I'm sure she does feel abandoned and I hope she'll be ok.  But it just struck me that in my comics she'd be confident and if somehow a man had left her, she'd just easily have her pick of ANY other man she wanted.  I mean with those boobs, how couldn't she?  Real life is different and more complicated than that.

REAL LIFE STORY TWO : Pebbelz Da Model

If you haven't heard of Pebbelz Da Model, she's a woman with a massively enhanced booty.  In my comics, guys would just be fainting the sight of her gigantic silicone filled buns.  In real life, recently she's been embroiled in a bizarre legal case involving a woman's death.


The events in the case seem kind of convoluted, but as best I can tell, there is a woman who had a butt implant procudure done by an unscrupulous individual who put some material into her that ended up causing her to die.  Somehow, Pebbelz has been named as a target in the case, and I believe has been brought up on manslaughter charges.

I saw a short video showing Pebbelz in court, in an orange prison jumpsuit, looking rather dejected.  Even in the baggy jumpsuit, you could see that her ass was absolutely gigantic.  In the video, the judge is telling her what she's accused of and telling her when the trial will be.  In my comics, the scene would have been very, very different

In my comics, Pebbelz would have used her heavenly  huge ass to charm the judge and make him let her go.  Or she would have captivated the lawyers in the case, perhaps visiting the prosecuting attorney out of court in a private setting, and using her giant fake ass to make him her enraptured slave/puppet.

In real life, Pebbelz simply walked up to the judge in her prison jumpsuit, looking dejected, awaiting whatever is going to come as this court case moves forward.

MY COMICS

Sometimes I think I should inject a little more reality into my comics.  But as I explained above, I have a personality and background that makes me tend to adore/worship women with huge assets and be deferential to them.  And that ends up happening in my comics.

Anyway just thought it kind of interesting that in the two situations mentioned above in real life, involving giant boobed babe Elizabeth Starr and mega buns superstar Pebbelz, things aren't playing out according to any script that would have been in my comics.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Sustainability, Site Longevity, Some History

HOW THINGS GOT STARTED
As I've mentioned before, when I first started up strongandstacked.com, I exchanged some emails with the webmaster of http://www.amazonix.com - a website that featured rendered imagery of muscular women.  When I was contemplating starting up my own website, I asked him what his experience had been like doing that and how things were going.  I had no idea how to start up a website and I need some help and information.  Sure, I did know how to write html. And I knew how to create rendered imagery and animations for a site.  But how did one go about getting things hosted? Getting a domain name for the site?

I exchanged some emails with the Amazonix.com site creator, a guy who is named robtbo on deviant art.  He told me that the way he'd started his website was by contacting the webmaster of dianathevalkyrie.com.  If you've never heard of that site, it has a long history of hosting various types of muscular women content, as well as some big boob and giantess stuff.  He told me that dianathevalkyrie.com had agreed to host a website for him in return for him allowing them to keep half of the income of the site.  So dianathevalkyrie.com would pay for a yearly domain name for him - amazonix.com - and would take care of all the billing and provide a space for him to upload his content.  In turn he'd be responsible for populating the site with content, and he'd have to share half the income of the site with dianathevalkyrie.com.

I mulled this over for a while and finally decided to contact dianathevalkyrie to see if I could get the same deal.  They agreed and thus strongandstacked.com was born.  For my part, I first cranked out a bunch of html pages to create the skeleton of the site.  Stuff like a front door page, a comics page, animations page, etc.  And then I set to work cranking out content.  I set my price point at 10 dollars per month.  I did that because I thought it seemed a relatively modest monthly fee compared to some other sites which I thought had a lot more material (and higher quality material that what I was creating).  So that meant that for every monthly 10 dollar membership, I'd be getting five bucks per month, and dianathevalkyrie would be getting 5 bucks per month.  Yeah, they'd be getting half, but on the other hand I wouldn't have to hassle with figuring out how to get a domain name, and how to set up billing and hosting.  So I went for it.

One great thing about the arrangement was that dianathevalkyrie was, and has been, very hands off. Their attitude is that if I want the site to thrive, I'm on the hook for keeping it stocked with fresh stuff, promoting it through deviant art or whatever other publicity channels I can, and so on .  If it does very well - great.  They get half.  If I don't put much energy into it and it doesn't thrive, not much skin off their back I guess.  They still get half of whatever my monthly take is.




ECONOMICS
I'd had no idea about the economics of all this when I started out.  I wondered at first, naively, whether maybe over time I'd be able to quit my day job.  Yes go ahead and laugh :)  The reality I've experienced is much less lofty than that - more details on that below.  I don't intend to ever get rich doing this stuff.  But I am hoping to get a bit of money out of it.  I still dream of quitting my day job, but my websites aren't going to be the ticket to doing that.  I'm hoping though that they can be a small contributor to it.  For now they provide a little bit of spending money for me but they aren't exactly paying my mortgage :)

Here's a chart that shows how much income I've gotten from Strong and Stacked every month since I started it. 
Now this shows how much money I am getting each month.  The actual monthly income for the site would be twice that, but since dianathevalkyrie takes their 50% cut, this shows what I get after they do that.  And actually this chart also includes income from BEGiantess.com rolled into it starting around July 2012 or so.  That isn't a big percentage of things though.  I started begiantess.com and it has had a small member base and I do have fun working on it, but strongandstacked has many more members and makes more money.

So I've been getting roughly 400 dollars per month from it.  I end up spending some of that money on the site in the form of the occasional commission I pay for from guest artists or in the form of 3d rendering stuff I buy (mostly props and characters and stuff from daz3d.com and renderosity.com etc).  But largely I just keep that money.  So it is some nice spending money, but like I said, I'm not ready to quit my day job making $400 x 12 months = $4800 per year.

I did try to increase my income a bit when I started up begiantess.com. I could write a whole blog post on that some time, but the short version is that I wanted to see if I could start up a second website and figure out the hosting and billing on my own.  I thought, well dianathevalkyrie has been great, but they have been taking 50 percent of the income. What if I could start a second site, and have the overhead be a lot less?  So that maybe hosting and billing costs would be only 10%?  Like I said, I'll write a blog post on it some time, but my little experiment doing that didn't work.  I found a hosting company - 247host.com - that would allow adult material to be hosted.  And I did pay for a domain name - begiantess.com.  Where things really didn't work out for me was with billing.  Paypal will *not* deal with adult sites. *Ever*.  So I couldn't use them.  I went with a company called Verotel.  That worked for a while, but one day in April, 2012, they sent me an email informing me that since begiantess.com was a small income site - less than 100 dollars a month was coming in - they'd need to start charging me 500 dollars a year overhead.  Something like that.  And I had to cough up the money immediately or else they'd shut down my site.  That really, really sucked. I had to deal with that while on vacation away from my computer, and thankfully dianathevalkyrie came to the rescue and agreed to host begiantess.com in addition to strongandstacked.com.  Like I said, I'll detail it further in some future post.  But the bottom line takeaway for me was that I am just going to stick with dianathevalkyrie for my two sites.


I'll try to grow the income base a bit.  But really I think that just comes naturally if you do a good job on your site.  Right now I feel like I'm falling down on a number of fronts. I don't update frequently enough.  I need to create more varied material. I want to make cooler looking muscle women - if I could do anything approaching what Tigersan dos, that would be great.  For boobs I'd point to Ricky Java's work.  If I could create stuff that was even half as good as those guys in quality, I'd be happy. And I think the site would thrive more.  So there's definitely room for improvement.  And this blog is part of that - me brainstorming about ways to make the site better and listening to feedback and suggestions from people.

LONGEVITY, AVOIDING GOING UNDER
Now a quick bit on longevity. I'd mentioned that I asked the creator of Amazonix how he got started and got the idea of having dianathevalkyrie host strongandstacked.com from  him.  If you look at his http://robtbo.deviantart.com and the comments there and some comments on amazonix.com, you can see that he struggled greatly to create content in a timely manner.  And at some point his health suffered - lack of sleep, some sort of heart problem... And right now if you go to amazonix.com you will find that the site is currently stopped dead in the water.  No new content has been created in over a year, and there is a note on the site that says content isn't guaranteed to be updated regularly.

I can really empathize with that guy.  Trying to juggle a day job and various other responsibilities *and* create content on a schedule can grind a person down.  And from the looks of his site, it appears that he may be gone for good.  Another website that features rendered muscular women - http://www.mightyfemalemusclecomix.com/ - has had its fits and spurts as far as creating content goes. It started up with a blaze of content creation, and then just stopped. I think its starting again now.

Looking around at other sites I can point to a lot of examples where websites just slow down and stop.  I want to avoid that with strongandstacked.com.  Begiantess.com too.  Right now I feel like I'm creating content way too slowly.  It's not fair to members. And its not good for the long term potential of the sites.  But I have to also balance the need to go faster with the need to avoid burning out and hitting a brick wall.  I'm hoping the solution is to "work smarter not harder".

One thing I've decided this week is that I'm never doing commissions again.  I already have mentioned something like that in this blog, but its clear to me now that I just can't afford the time sink that commissions require.  I just can't do it and keep my head above water creating content for the site. I  do have one commission outstanding - the house sized boobs one - that I need to finish.  But that's it.  Can't do them any more.


I also need to update my Journal on my deviant art page saying that requests are gone too.  I'm happy to receive ideas, for my deviant art page and for the websites too. And I will try to use some of them.  But I just cannot respond to things like, "Dude, I have this killer idea for a woman who picks a car up and rips it apart then grows huge boobs and rips through her shirt.  Can  you have that done for the very next update of strongandstacked, or put it on your DA page. Thx." 

Instead what I need to do is focus on steady creation of material for my websites and the occasional animation or comic on the deviant art page. I need to carefully write down and record all incoming requests from members - I definitely want to keep getting those - and work steadily through those in a backlog.  I think the key for me will be to do this in a steady fashion and it will be slow and take time.  And there will be requests or ideas that are submitted which I'll choose not to do.  The ones that take way too much time or are too hard.

I want to take in ideas and suggestions.  And I want to try to use them. I just have to avoid getting bogged down in huge time sinks.  And I definitely have to avoid just having the site come to a halt.  I never asked the Amazonix guy what happened to him that made him just stop.  But I'm guessing he just got overwhelmed with his day job and having to crank out stuff and finally decided: screw it. I need to get a decent night's sleep.  I want to try to avoid getting to that point.  We'll see how it goes.

Experimenting On Speeding Up Content Creation

I've been trying to spend some time figuring out how to speed up creation of content for my websites.  I want to speed up the pace of updates, but I also don't want to torpedo the quality of what is getting created and uploaded. I know that a major part of having a website that thrives and does well is updating it on a frequent basis. And I'm trying to figure out ways to speed up those updates

TRYING TO EEK SOME MORE PERFORMANCE OUT OF MY QUADCORE 
I have two computers available for making content.  One is a quadcore and one is a six core machine.  The six core machine is one I use for a variety of things - doing some programming and playing games etc - in addition to content creation.  The quadcore is purely dedicated to making stuff for my websites Over time I will try to use the six core machine more and more but I'm gradually transitioning toward that, one reason being that a lot of the tools I use are installed and set up the way I want on the quadcore, but I haven't gotten the same environment totally set up on the six core machine yet.  It is a relatively new machine

So recently I've tried to figure out how I can get a bit more rapid creation out of the quadcore.  While the six core machine can handle raytracing a fairly complicated scene and take only 45 to 60 seconds per image, the quadcore struggles mightily and sometimes can take five minutes per image.  Sometimes the rendering software just crashes. The quadcore is running a 32 bit os and I have like 3 gig of memory so there's that bottleneck too.  The six core machine is running a 64 bit os with 16 gig of memory.  Like I said, long term I think the solution is to try to use the six core machine more of the time.  But I use it for other things too and haven't completely gotten the tools set up on it.  So in the short term I've tried a few things to speed up the quad core.

USE BACKGROUND IMAGE FOR SCENERY 
Rendered Character, Flat Image Background
The first thing I tried was to just render the characters themselves and use a photographic image as the background.  This meant that the computer only needed to grind away raytracing the characters - the woman with big boobs/muscles and any guy she is interacting with for example - but not the background scenery.  So in the past I'd used a lot of scenery props and sets, but when I made the move to rendering in a raytraced mode instead of a shadow map mode, my poor quadcore started grinding to a halt.

By just using a background image and rendering only the characters, things definitely sped up.  You may have noticed that I've been posting comics using this technique lately. On the plus side, it speeds rendering way up on the quadcore.  On the downside, no character shadows show up (other than shadowing on the characters themselves) and visually it can be rather obvious that the characters are just standing in front of a flat background image (like a green screen).


USE NERD3D BACKDROP FOR SCENERY 

Rendered Character, Textured Backdrop Prop
While using a background image did speed things up, it made the renders look noticeably less realistic than rendering background scenes as well as characters would have.  So with my latest comic on strongandstacked.com, Busty Brawler, I tried another technique.  Instead of just using a background image as wallpaper in front of which the characters are posed, I tried using a prop called The Backdrop by Nerd3D http://www.nerd3d.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=4   The way this prop works is that you put an image onto it as a texture.  And then you pose your characters onto the prop. 


She's standing on the Backdrop Prop

This looks a lot more realistic than just using a background wall paper image because the Backdrop does have a floor portion to it that you can make your characters stand on.  Shadows can thus fall from your characters onto the backdrop floor.

GOING FORWARD 
I'm going to try to use the Backdrop for the next few comics I create and see how that goes.  I will also try to start using the six core machine more often, and it can handle raytrace rendering of actual background scenes.
Rendered Character in Rendered Scene
Rendered Character in Rendered Scene

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

What I Got Done On The Weekend

Sindy Spheres is what I got done
If you look at the blog post just prior to this one, you'll see I had big plans for the weekend.  I was trying to accomplish the following this:

1. An FMG Comic
2. A Sindy Spheres BE Comic using the new big boob prop I made
3. A special comic where I'd add dialog to pre created renders
4. Possibly some begiantess work
5. Commission for massive BE animation with bigger than houses boobs

So that was the plan .  And what I got done by the end of Monday night was... a Sindy Spheres BE Comic.  And that's it.  It wasn't for lack of trying.  It just takes me a while to get this stuff done.

I found that when I was in the middle of the Sindy Spheres comic I didn't want to context switch. I was kind of in the zone and I wanted to roll with it and finish it.  It took me probably three hours on Saturday plus five hours on Sunday plus a couple hours Monday to finish it.  That's a lot of hours.  And its why I want to figure out some way to optimize my workflow to do this stuff quicker.

The good thing is that I finished it. The bad thing is that now I really am under the gun to crank out some FMG stuff for strongandstacked.  Because BE fans might be happy with this comic coming out, but FMG fans have been waiting quite a while for an update.

Well the purpose of the blog was to give a snapshot into what I'm doing and working on and the process I go through, so here's a snapshot of it.  Needless to say, the FMG comic is what I have to work on next.  I may try to sneak in some work on the special comic where I just need to add dialog.  But I have got to get that FMG comic done.  After I get some sleep that is and get back from my day job tomorrow. 

Friday, February 8, 2013

What I'm Working On This Weekend


I figured it might be of interest for me to occasionally post a snapshot of what I'm working on at a particular moment.  On this Friday night, heading into a weekend, here's what is on my plate.

BE Comic: Sindy Spheres
Sindy Spheres!
I've been working on a new BE comic where the main character is a woman named Sindy Spheres.  Ok, that's not her given name at birth.  But as she gets a pair of huge tits that's the name she decides to take on.  I was inspired to do this comic by a couple of things.  First off was a suggestion in a comment to a previous blog post by a reader of this blog and someone who has commissioned me to create comics before.

His suggestion had to do with a woman who initially gets huge implants because of her boyfriend telling an unscrupulous plastic surgeon to give her massive fake tits instead of just giving her a modest breast augmentation.  So the story definitely has that angle in it.

The other thing that inspired me to work on this was that I was playing around with creating my own breast props for Daz Studio and I did come up with some round big breasts.  So I want to use those for Sindy.  Lastly, those big round breast props were something I started working on because of a commission project (I know - I do those rarely but I am working on one on the back burner...) involving a woman with super sized (house sized and beyond) breasts. Sindy isn't going to have breasts that big, but her big round boobs are a direct result of me playing around with making the house sized tits for this commission.

Bigger Than Houses BE Commission
I've posted before that I really shy away from commisisons in general.  Especially ones that impede or slow down updates to the websites.  But when its a request that seems doable in not too much time AND one that I can go ahead and use on either strongandstacked.com or begiantess.com, then sometimes I'll go ahead and do it.  That's the case right now with a commission that I'm doing for BE growth involving boobs that grow to house sized and then beyond.  I am going to try to find some time to work on this during the weekend.  Given all the other stuff I'm working on, we'll see how that goes

Special Commission
As I said, I try to shy away from commissions.  But there is a special one that came in where I was approached by someone with rendered images already in hand, and for which they wanted me to just provide the dialog and give the resulting comic a stage on the strongandstacked.com website.  I agreed to try this out because I think it shouldn't take me too much time to try.  Again, I try not to do commissions very often, but this is another one that I can try to use on my site and for which I don't need to sink a massive amount of time
Special Commission

FMG Comic
Now in addition to all of the above, I know it is high time (past time actually) to put an FMG comic on strongandstacked.com.  It's been a few weeks since the last one.  So actually doing this might jump ahead in line to be my top priority for the weekend.  I have to get something FMG related up on the site very soon because its been too long

Begiantess.com
In addition to all that stuff, I need to do something for begiantess.com

Looking through all this I can already see that I may be biting off more than I can chew with those commissions.  And I think actually priority a number one has to be the FMG comic. 

This is one of the reasons I wanted to start blogging - so I can think through the set of stuff I'm working on, expose it to people so they know what I'm tinkering with, and brainstorm about priority order and what to do next.

Well its going to be a busy weekend :)


Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Animation

New Character Sindy Spheres I'm working on
Sindy's Spheres from below
Keyframe Based Animation
In this post I'm going to briefly describe the animation technique I use when creating animations, and give a bit of history on how my technique evolved over time.  I'm not going to dive into an incredible level of detail (this isn't an in depth tutorial of how to do animation) but rather just give an overview.  If people are more interested in having an actual tutorial on how to create animations using Daz Studio, I can definitely do a more detailed post in the future.

When I started out with my deviant art page, I asked myself: how can I set my page a bit apart from the pages of other BE or FMG art creators so that people will want to come visit my page.  I knew that there were far superior artists out there, both ones who draw and those who render.  And even then - back in 2007 or so - there were already a huge number of artists on DA doing FMG, BE, and Giantess stuff.  But what I noticed there wasn't a lot of were arists who were posting animations.

So I figured, ok, why don't I post animations to my newly created DA page?  Maybe that would be a differentiator that would get people to visit it.  And I figured, hey, how hard could it be?  Well as with many things, it turned out to be harder than I'd thought.  But not impossible.  And as with many things I've tried, if you just stick to it you can reach at least a certain level of ability with it that allows you to create things.

When I first started animating, I used what could be called keyframe based animation.  And I did it manually.  The results were ok, but ended up looking kind of mechanical and non fluid in the types of motions I created it.  For keyframe animation, the process works as follows:

First you take your figure, say the Victoria 4 model from daz3d, and put her in an initial pose.  Say she's standing there, hands on hips, with normal sized boobs.

Next you do the following step over and over and over: Skip about 10 frames ahead (at 30 frames per second, that means about 0.3 seconds of time). Then *slightly* alter her pose.  So move her arms a little, her legs a little, her head a little, etc.

What animation software will do for you in the process is automatically fill in the in between frames using interpolation.  So in my example above, you do have to manually pose your model once every 10 frames.  So you have posed on frames 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 51, etc etc etc.  But the software does the work of filling in frames 2-9, 12-20, 22-30, 32-40, 42-50 etc etc etc.  The software knows how to fill in those frames so that it looks like motion.

This whole process is a bit like stop motion photography.  And you can definitely use it to do BE or FMG.  For BE what I would normally do is first is go to some frame - like frame 90 (3 seconds into the animation) and lock the boob size to be something small. Then I'd zoom ahead maybe 4 seconds to frame 210 (remember, 30 seconds per frame) and make the boob size huge.  The magic of interpolation in the animation software would then just fill in frames 91 through 209 by making the boobs smoothly get bigger and bigger and bigger in a continuous way from the small size on frame 90 to the big size on frame 209.  Voila, simple BE.


Interpolated Frames Make Keyframed Tits Grow Smoothly
Aniblocks with mocapped motions
Mocap Aniblock Makes Sindy Move

I'd do a similar thing for FMG.  Start with a girl who has regular sized muscles on frame 90.  Crank her muscles up huge on frame 210.  Let the computer fill in the growing muscles from frames 91 to 209.  That wasn't too hard to do and worked pretty well.  But coupling the BE or FMG with a woman moving in some interesting way did take time.  That involved the laborious process of tweaking the model's pose once every 10 frames or so.  But that's how I did it early on.  The result would be animations that had motions that looked a bit robotic and non natural.  Akin to what you'd get if you took an action figure and did a stop motion film with her.

I did get feedback as time went on and suggestions from people on how to improve animations.  Some people mentioned doing pulsing growth, where a woman's tits first balloon outward to a big size, then retract a bit, then balloon to a bigger size.  Similar thing for female muscle growth.  And I was able to play with that using the keyframing technique described above.

I asked Leviathan once about how he did animation.  If you haven't seen his work, he makes animations of incredible explosive growth, both BE and FMG and sometimes giantess and even transformations into beast like creatures.  He told me that he uses keyframing but he updates poses every 5 frames or so.  And he does it at a very granular level, individually manipulating single body parts, and taking care to make the breasts look like they are bouncing and so on.  That is incredibly painstaking work.  If you look at some of the amazing animations he's done, I think you'll agree that the work pays off.  But for me there are a couple reasons that his approach would be tough for me to do.

First off, there's the time commitment per animation.  Huge.  Secondly, he really is a master at manipulating individual body parts through keyframing to achieve a look that is dynamic, not so robotic, and even explosive when he does growth sequences.  It takes a certain artistic eye to do that and I just don't really have it.  I could try to get better at keyframing, but as time went on I realized that I was going to need to do something different to make my animations improve.

That's when I discovered mocap.  Now motion capture  is used quite extensively in movies these days. Gollum from lord of the rings is animated using motion capture.  If you're not familiar with the technique, what is done is that a live human actor moves around while a computer captures and records the actual motions of that actor's various body parts.  That recorded motion information is then applied to a computer figure (like Gollum, or for me a model like Victoria 4 from Daz Studio).  The resulting motions look very lifelike and realistic because they are actual human motions.

Setting up a motion capture studio like Peter Jackson used is obviously prohibitively expensive for a small time creator like me.  But some technologies, such as the motion sensing controller used by the Wii, or even better, the Kinect for the Xbox 360, have been making it possible to do some motion capture at home on a much smaller budget.

The type of mocap I started using was in the form of some recorded motion capture sequences that were put on sale at daz3d.com in the form of "aniblocks".  An aniblock is a snippet of motion that you can use to move your character.  And you can combine aniblocks.  So for example, one of the sets of aniblocks I bought were for motion captured belly dancer movements.  So I could grab one of those aniblocks, which would make a woman start waving her arms side to side while moving her belly, and apply it to Victoria 4.  Then I could put a second aniblock in for making her smile and blink.  Those two aniblocks will work together to make her start belly dancing *and* at the same time smile and blink.  You can continue to layer on some more aniblocks that also have their motions superimposed.

There weren't any "make the girl have big boobies" aniblocks in the store, so I created a few of those on my own.  Same for muscle growth.

So I started making animations using motion capture aniblocks I had bought from daz3d.com combined with keyframe aniblocks for making boobs and muscles bigger that I created.  Put them together and you get a woman who at least is moving a lot more realistically (motion capture).  The boob growth / muscle growth are still essentially keyframed, but at least they are combined with realistic human motion.

That's essentially the technique I'm still using today.  Mocap aniblocks coupled with keyframed boob/muscle or giantess growth.  There are so many ways in which I still have a long way to go as far as making great animations goes.  In many of my animations, the boobs don't bounce.  So I'd like to get a lot better at that.  I struggle with making a woman's arms not collide with her humungous tits in animations.  Because if they do, the simple software I use - Daz Studio - doesn't really have collision detection built in for animations.  So the arm will go right on through a huge boob if I am not careful.

I want to create animations that are richer in detail, have much more realistic motion and so on.  And I will try to continue getting better.

That's enough for this post.  If people are more interested in specifics or tutorials on animation, I could do a post like that in the future.

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Big Fake Boobs

Now there are some people who definitely prefer natural boobs over fake boobs.  But there are also those who prefer women with implants.  I'm someone who actually likes both.  I love the girls who have outrageously massive implants, like Beshine, Chelsea Charms, Maxi Mounds and others.

Me with Chelsea Charms and Sable Holiday
Samantha's Big Fake Boobs
Samantha Sweetbuns and Friend
Samantha Sweetbuns
I'm actually also a fan of naturally endowed big boobers, like Milena Velba and Chaka T.  I'm even a fan of heavy women with massive tits - think Norma Stitz or Dawn Perignon.  While I am a fan of big boobs, be they natural or not, in this blog post I want to focus on big fake tits and the fascination some people find for them.

In a previous journal entry, I mentioned how I'd been into big boobs from really early on.  During the nineties, there was a wave of augmented big boob dancers who hit the magazine circuit.  It was a golden age for fans of big augmented boobs.  Busty Dusty, Traci Topps, Lulu Devine, Toppsy Curvey, Wendy Whoppers, Minka and many many more massively implanted women appeared on the covers of magazines such as Gent, Hustler Busty Beauties, Cheri and D Cup.  At the time I was just out of college and was a big fan of all those women.  It was pre world wide web in the early nineties, so I built up a collection of hard copy magazines. I'd go to comic conventions in Los Angeles where they'd sell not only back issues of many comics used (and I bought plenty of those, believe me) but also used copies of big boob magazines.

When I think about huge fake tits, I think the appeal for me is that they seem to me to make a bold statement.  Seeing a massive set of implants sends a message.  To me, that message says, "I know these are humungous, and I CHOSE to have them be this way.  And I know that you, the person staring at these, has no doubt that they are implants."  This ties into my fascination with women who derive power from huge breasts.  Huge fake tits seem to me to be totems of chosen appeal and power.

I've encountered people on the net who find great appeal in all facets of fake tits.  The scarring left behind from implant operations appeals to them.  The hardness and firmness of massive fake tits is preferable to them over the softness of big natural boobs.  Other people mainly love the fact that implanted tits jut straight out with absolutely no sag.

I've personally felt Chelsea Charms' tits on a few occasions.  They all took place when she was dancing at the Market Street Cinema in San Francisco back in 2001-2002.  The first time she was just doing short lapdances during her routine and she let people feel her boobs.  So I felt her tits for maybe twenty seconds on that occasion.  Pretty mind blowing!  Another time, she appeared at Market Street Cinema with Sable Holiday.  After their routines I went backstage to meet them.  And I had a polaroid taken with them where I did get to feel their boobs (I'll attach that polaroid to this blog post). The last time I got to feel Chelsea's boobs was when I paid her for a personal lapdance session, again at Market Street Cinema.  That time she sat on my lap for about 10 minutes and we just talked while I fondled her boobs (there's a polaroid picture of that time you can see in a previous blog post of mine).

That last time was the last time I've been to a strip club.  But that encounter - like every one with Chelsea - made a huge impression on me.  Big fake boobs are amazing. And they do hold a certain kind of allure and power that is markedly different from natural boobs.

I have heard stories of unscruplous promoters who in the past forced their girlfriends to get huge fake tits and then served as "managers" of their careers in big tit magazines.  I can't imagine forcing a woman to get implants like that.  But women who willingly choose to have big implants -- I just do find that incredibly fascinating and appealing.

When I first started up strongandstacked.com, I did a lot of BE comics where the mechanism of breast expansion was something fantastical or magical.  Maybe some sci fi super serum, or something like a spell.  I think I may have done one comic where the mechanism for BE was a woman getting implants.  Some time after that I was contacted by a member of teh website.  He told me he was a huge fan of fake tits, and that he was willing to commission me to do a comic where a woman got massive breast implants.  He was very specific i the types of words he found appealing in dialog involving big fake boobs.  He liked phrases like "big fake rack", "my new boobs", "fake tits" and so on.

I went ahead and did the commission with the understanding that I'd be delivering the comic to him and also posting it to strongandstacked.com.   Thus was born the Quest for 10,000 CC B.E. Comic.  Working on that comic was really fun for me and it made me want to do a lot more implant related comics.  I kept in my mind the lexicon of words and various phrases that the person who'd commissioned me to do that Quest for 10,000 cc comic had suggested that he enjoyed.  And I found myself using that kind of phrasing in subsequent implant comics I did.

"Big fake rack."  "Boob job".  "My big new boobs."  I just finished doing two issues of a comic for my deviant art page.  I just felt like doing a couple of comic issues related to BE through breast implants and posting them there. And working on them brought back memories of working on Quest for 10,000 CC.  It would be interesting to hear what people think about BE via breast implants versus other methods.  I do know there are some people out there who are big fake boob fans.  Do all of you have similar likes and preferences for phrasing and plotlines?

Do people like scenes with a doctor pumping saline into expandable implants?  Discussions about cup size and numbers of CCs in implants?  As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, a recent development for me is an attraction to huge fake butts.  Seeing photos of Pebbelz Da Model had a huge impact on me in this regard.  Seeing a huge fake butt like hers inspires in me a feeling similar to when I see huge fake boobs.  It's not a far stretch I guess to become attracted to another extreme size part of the feminine physique for me.  The comics I recently created on my deviant art page - Samantha Sweetbuns issues 1 and 2 - involve a woman who augments her boobs and her butt.

Do people find that interesting?  Would they rather just have the woman undergo BE and not butt expansion ?  I had one comment on a recent blog post from someone who said they loved big fake butts and big fake boobs, but would rather have only one or the other on a woman.  They explained that having a woman who looked like Pebbelz da Model combined with Chelsea Charms would actually dilute the impact of the huge butt and boobs.  They found a Chelsea Charms like figure (with a massive bust, normal butt) or a Pebbelz (massive butt, normal boobs) to be far more visually striking than a woman with a huge butt AND boobs.  I understand where they are coming from with that, and thought it was an interesting point.  But in the Samantha Sweetbuns comic, for example, I decided to have her get huge breast implants and a massive fake butt.

Not sure I have a big conclusion here - just mainly commenting on big fake boobs and the strong appeal they have for some people, including me.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Dominant, Confident Women

If you looked through the comics on my website, you'll notice that the majority of them feature female protagonists who are emboldened and made extremely confident by their huge boobs or muscles.  Some of them are more than emboldened - they actually use their strength and/or boobs to dominate men.  Sometimes I think that I've done too many comics in that vein, and that I should mix things up a bit by having tentative women who aren't so bold.  Perhaps submissive women.  One reason I haven't done that is just that I find super confident women fascinating - especially women who use their assets to get what they want.

But I don't want to fall into a rut as far as plot and storytelling goes.  That's why I am starting to wonder whether I should mix things up by not always having the women be supremely empowered and dominant in my comics .  I sometimes think about where I got the preference for such women.  Thinking back on things, I think the seeds were planted in tv shows and movies I saw when I was young.  There were a variety of shows I saw where women used their allure and sex appeal to get men to do what they wanted.  In Gilligan's Island, there are several episodes where bombshell Ginger uses her curves to get Gilligan or others to do what she wants.  Catwoman in the old time Batman tv show - the one from the 60s - tempts Batman repeatedly with her curves.  And both of those characters seemed to be supremely confident and in control.

There's a movie named Screwballs that I saw in the 80s which features a brunette cheerleader with huge tits.  In several scenes she proudly shows off her huge juggs and seems to delight in using them to tease men.  I could go on and on - basically seeing all these tv shows and movies over time somehow instilled in me a fascination and attraction to female characters who use their big boobs or physical prowess to generate confidence and to exert power over men.

Having said that, I know that I have gotten requests from people who want comics where huge boobed women are submissive.  And I might try doing some more of those comics just to mix things up a bit.  Or I could have a woman undergo BE and/or FMG but react in a confused way where she's not supremely confident.  She might even be embarassed.  Up until now I haven't done a lot of comics with that sort of vibe.  But if people were interested in that, I could give it a try.

There's a sort of spectrum of confidence and dominance to the characters in my comics.  At the shallow end, you'll find girls who are somewhat empowered by their big boobs or big muscles.  They aren't really dominating anyone - they're just experience a confidence boost.  Some of my other characters are dialed up a bit from that. They actually proactively use their big boobs or muscles to exert their will and dominate others - usually unwitting men.  For girls with big boobs, this usually means charming guys into doing what they want.  For girls with big muscles, this often means physically dominating men who aren't as strong as they are.

Early on in the history of the website, I tilted strongly toward stories where women with huge muscles beat up and domianted men.  Later I tried to mix things up a bit by having a greater variety of personality types for the women in the stories - where some of them are not so dominant.  And now I'm wondering whether I should try to change things up even more and feature stories with women who aren't quite so powerful and dominant.

It would be interesting to hear what people think.  For myself I really do like stories with women who achieve power and confidence - even dominance - through their big boobs and big muscles, and even big butts!  But I'm open to playing around with different plots and characters to have more variety on the site.

Super Tits, Tit Weapons, Boob Smothering

BoobBee Girl brings out... the Stingers!

Nipple Gun Big Booby Firepower!
I've mentioned before that I'm personally a fan of powerful women characters who derive confidence and strength from their huge boobs, huge muscles and even huge butts.  Focusing in on tits for a moment, I've been intrigued  with the concept of women who use their boobs not just as alluring charms which captivate men, but also as actual physical weapons.  There's a video of Chelsea Charms where some incredibly lucky guy gets to kiss and suck her boobs and then is bufetted around by her tits as she bumps them against his face over and over.  There's even a slow motion segment where the camera focuses on the guys head getting knocked left and right over and over as Chelsea twists her torso back and forth and bashes him with her big boobs.  Now when she did that, I'm sure she did it gently enough that the guy didn't get hurt, but seeing that video was fascinating to me in a fantasy way - the thought of a woman with massive tits like Chelsea's using them to pummel a guy into submission by slapping him in the face over and over with them is something I found very intriguing...

I've incorporated this concept into some of my comics.  Most particularly on begiantess.com, where the women often have tits literally as big as wrecking balls and can demolish houses with them.

So with that preamble, I wanted to share this some animated gifs from a kind of bizarre Japanese tv show that has an episode featuring a woman with some tit weapons.  Now it is kind of a strange show and strange episode I'll admit, but I found it really interesting to see what they did with the character who had these super tits.  She's kind of a bumblebee girl with giant tits, and the tits can sprout stinger needle nipples, can grasp and stop things like swords, and can even fire nipple bullets!  Ok it's all a bit out there, but the core element of having deadly boobs is something that's very interetsing to me.  I made a few animated gifs from the show that you can see here in this blog post.  The name of the show is "The Ancient Dogoo Girl".

I've occasionally seen artists on deviant art and elsewhere delve into this concept of boobs as weapons a bit.  Boob-Attack http://boob-attack.deviantart.com/ often creates renders of women with giant tits who end up crushing or smothering men with their humungous juggs.  GiantBoobzSupremacy http://giantb00bzsupremacy.deviantart.com/ creates artwork featuring women with super sized nipples and super boobs that I find to be fascinating.

And then there's the Chesty Morgan classic, Deadly Weapons.  It's a movie from the sixties where she uses her 73 inch super bust to smother men to death.

Again, not sure how much people out there are into the whole giant boobs as weapons thing, but it is something I'm a fan of!