Well, it wasn't too long before harsh reality set in, and I realized just how hard it is to update a website consistently on a timely basis. What I've come to realize is that I have a certain time budget and I am struggling to try to maximize the amount of content I create given the constraints of that time budget.
When I started strongandstacked, I was using a dual core laptop running a 32 bit version of Windows Vista. The animations I was creating then, and the comic too, I created using no shadow map at all. So that stuff looks a bit crude, but renders quickly. So even with that machine, I was able to at least render stuff and not have it take very long. But rendering time is not usually the biggest bottleneck on time anyway (although it is one thing to consider).
I have a day job. Strongandstacked isn't really my primary income source (which his probably not a big surprise - and in a future blog post I'll get into the economics of the website). Sometimes I come home from work and I'm just beat. So it is hard to create content every single day. Also I have a family. While my wife is supportive of the whole strongandstacked thing (thankfully), its something we don't really want to expose our kids to (obviously). So that means working on the website is something I only do at night when the kids are in bed. Further limiting the number of hours in the day when I can create content.
Given all that, it is hard to carve out enough time to update strongandstacked (and begiantess.com and my deviant art page and the many requests that I get to do things and the occasional commision - which I'm shying away from now as I mentioned in a previous blog post.....). But I do feel the pressure to create in a timely fashion. People are paying money to subscribe to the website. When I look at the calendar sometimes and realize oh shit, I haven't posted an update to strongandstacked for two weeks, I really start to feel the pressure.
So it is my aim to try and streamline my creation process this year and try to create more content in a more timely fashion. Part of the motiviation of me starting up this blog was for me to try to brainstorm about ways to do that.
Using time is like investing money in a way. I can spend time just purely creating stuff. But I feel there is a definite need to also invest time in technique experimentation and trying to get better at various aspects of animation and lighting etc. (More on all that in a future blog post as well). If I just continue to create content, I think it will seem like the same old thing every time and will get very stale. Sometimes I will need to do things like try to create my own custom breast injectors to get a new look for big boobs. Or try a new animation technique. Or try to create custom muscles using zbrush and other things (ala Tigersan - who is the absolute master of that stuff). All those things take a lot of time for me, so often I just resort to my tried old techniques when a deadline approaches, and I crank out a comic/animation using those rather than trying something new. Just because of the time pressure. But I think I will need to actually invest some time experimenting and improving techniques if I'm ever going to have my stuff look better/newer/fresher.
The trade off is that every day spent experimenting or learning zbrush or other techniques is a day where I'm not creating raw content. Which is another day delay in the update of content on the website...
It's something I struggle with a lot.
I was hoping hardware would help me out a lot and speed things up. But I still haven't quite come up with a strategy to properly leverage that. A year or so after starting strongandstacked, I got a quadcore desktop. Still running a 32 bit os - Windows XP. I thought ok that will speed my content creation up dramatically from when I just had the dual core laptop. However, once I got the desktop, I started rendering using shadow maps. So that is more CPU intensive, and made the rendering take roughly as much time as it had when wasn't using the shadow maps on the laptop. The images started to look better, but I didn't get a dramatic speedup in rendering time from the laptop.
More recently I got a six core machine, 64 bit Windows 7 OS with a monster graphics card. Finally I thought, I'll be able to crank stuff out quickly! And I kept my quadcore so I thought ok I'll have BOTH machines cranking stuff out. Content creation galore! Well, a couple problems emerged. One is that now I've started using raytracing when I render. So it is even more CPU intensive than the shadow maps were. The images look a lot better, but take more time to render. So when you average things out, the six core cpu takes about as long to render with raytracing on as the quadcore had with shadow maps as the laptop had with no shadowing. So quality got better, time didn't really drop.
Other problem is I haven't quite learned how to really get both the quadcore and the six core cranking out tons of stuff in parallel without me having to manually intervene to adjust a pose or move a camera or whatever.
If I could just figure out how to optimize all this, I think it would speed up content creation a lot. But I'm still working on figuring that all out :)
Another thing I struggle with a lot is keeping the two websites and my deviant art page and requests all updated frequently all the time. Actually for the deviantart page I've kind of given up on updating it frequently. I just can't do it. I get some requests there and they often just go unfilled because I can't carve out time to do them. So mainly I'm juggling time between strongandstacked.com and begiantess.com
Even within strongandstacked.com, I'm juggling time between creating BE stuff and FMG stuff. If I update strongandstacked.com with a BE update, and then I go update begiantess.com with a giantess update, and then I finally get back to strongandstacked.com and make an FMG update, it means the FMG fans had to wait a pretty long time to see what they wanted.
Same thing would go for BE stuff. Or giantess stuff. So its hard. If I could just speed things up it would be a lot better. Sometimes I wonder whether I bit off more than I could chew when I started up my second site - begiantess.com. Like I said before, if I could just figure out a strategy to create my content more efficiently and faster and not lose quality (and in fact, I'm striving to actually increase quality...) that would be ideal. Unfortunately I'm still working on figuring out the magic strategy.
For us fans that want weekly updates it is hard to realize that at times that can't happen, but still you ¿tried and try hard to give us as much updates as possible. You're a very nice person, maybe too nice for the internet...and for that, thanks
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