FMG Animation Travails

SOMETIMES THINGS JUST COME TOGETHER. BUT SOMETIMES...

End Result Animation

Over the past few days I've been working on an FMG animation.  My plan initially was that I would be posting this on my Deviant Art Page .  But as the animation started to take more and more time, I figured it would be better to just post it at Strong and Stacked because it had been a while since I'd posted content there and it would be good to get something posted there.

I'm going to be posting the animation a little bit later today at Strong and Stacked, and you can see some excerpts of it as animated gifs here.

Basically I wanted to make an FMG animation where, unlike in some previous animations I've done, I'd have hyper muscled growth occurring *without* an accompanying "fattening" of the girl's head. If you look at a lot of the FMG animations I've done in the past, when there is gigantic muscle growth you will also see some fattening and growth of the woman's head.

This time out my plan was to avoid that side effect by using two Victoria 4 models together.  One would provide the body, and the other the head.  That ended up working pretty well.  But its about the only thing that turned out to work out easy and well with this animation...

Slow slow slow progress on rendering...

RENDERING TOOK FOREVER

For this animation I decided to use my most powerful rendering computer.  It's an Alienware R4.  Its got a 6 core cpu and is running Windows 7 64 bit and has 16 gig of memory.

I thought, ok, this time I won't use the quadcore and instead will throw the big guns at this and hopefully the animation will render pretty quickly.

The screen shot at right shows the view I had for much of the past couple days as this thing rendered.  A slow progress bar creeping along as the machine grinded out one frame every four minutes.  That is slow slow slow.

The problem is that rendering performance is a fickle and finicky thing, because there are so many variables that can affect it.  One trick I learned early on when doing raytracing renders like this is that you can set the ambient occlusion to off for a model's hair - that speeds things up because otherwise raytracing takes a really long time for hair.  I did that for this animation and it was still pretty slow.

Nearing Full Size

Other factors have to do with the number and types of geometries and textures in the scene.
I tried playing with those and still wasn't able to get the time down much for this scene.  I'm sure there is something in my scene that is @#$%ing things up, but I wasn't able to find what was causing things to be so slow.

So I decided to just let it rip and spit and grind away for two days at creating frames.  The end result was ok but I'm not totally thrilled with it.

The bang for the buck wasn't great at all for this animation, given that it took so damned long to render and the end result isn't dramatically different from some other FMG animations I have done in the past.

STUFF I TRIED TO SPEED THINGS UP

Initial Draft Still Frame With No Background

You can see here an initial draft frame of the woman with muscles and super boobs, no background scenery yet.  When I tried a quick draft test render of an animation like this, things went fairly quickly.

But things quickly got awfully slow as soon as I tried putting her in a scene.  The first scene I tried was one that was in a mountainous area - an environment I bought recently that is called WorldBase Extreme 2.

With her in that scene, things really just crawled.

So after that, I tried another strategy. I used a prop I bought recently from renderosity.com called The Backdrop.  It is similar to backdrop props I've used in the past, and blogged about, but its a newer version.  So I gave that a try, and used a beach background for her.

First Background I tried

To my surprise, that rendered pretty slowly.  And you can see in the images of her here at the beach that there were other kinks I had to iron out.  For starters, when I first set it up, I neglected to have her feet be on the ground.  So she's levitating.  That's the kind of problem that if you don't catch early, you can waste hours on your machine rendering an animation and then realize oh @#$, her feet aren't on the ground.



BEACH BLUES

I thought the beach scene looked pretty cool for a background - love seeing a big boobed muscle babe at the beach.  But it was rendering slowly.  I figured, well I will find the cause of the slowness eventually, so let me just proceed with the rest of the things that have to be done for the animation and then I'll fix the slowness problem .

Second Background - Oops, she's Levitating

So I brainstormed on what I could do to make the scene a little more interesting than just an ordinary beach.  I have a prop that looks kind of like a Stargate that I thought would be cool to try using.

So I went ahead and put that into the beach scene. I even painstakingly tried to have the stargate pulsate with a green glowing color on and off and had it rotate.  The rotation part turned out ok, so it looks like the stargate is spinning.  The glowing color - its so faint you can barely see it.

This happens sometimes with these animations.  You try and experiment with various things and sometimes they come out looking great, but sometimes they don't work out.

Beach Background - Feet On Ground

As I continued to work on the animation, no matter what I seemed to try, the render time was slow.  I ended up getting rid of the beach background and went with a simpler background.  A bit faster but still fairly slow.

That's when I finally decided, ok screw it, I just have to get this thing done. And I hit the render button and let my machine grind away for a couple of days.

END RESULT

The end result is an animation of a woman experiencing muscle growth but it doesn't look a whole lot different from ones I've done in the past.

There isn't a lot of uniqueness or spark to it, and that does disappoint me.  In spite of that, I still may be able to salvage some value out of it.

Beach plus "Stargate"

First of all I'm going to post it to Strong and Stacked.  Might as well do that since I spent so much time creating it.

More promisingly, I'm going to use frames from the animation as a launching point for an FMG comic.  And I'm hoping to barnstorm and get that comic created in a single day (that's what I'll be spending the rest of the day doing...)

FUTURE PLANS

First off, I have to figure out why the rendering was so damned slow.  Maybe it was the stargate prop.  I'm not sure.  But I just don't have the luxury of having an animation take four minutes per frame. its too long.

Beach plus "Stargate" = Long Render Time

Secondly, I need to expand the repertoire of animation motions I have. I've used these sort of belly dancing motions to death.

I am making some progress on that front. I looked into a few cheap mocap solutions, like IPISoft and IClone 5 and some others, where you use one or two Kinect Xbox 360 cameras connected to your computer to achieve mocap.

But I think rather than trying to create mocap animations myself I am going to try to find some more that are already done out there that I can grab and use.

What I need are some basic motions, and then I can overlay those with BE and or FMG and or Giantess Growth.

One promising repository of these motions is the CMU BVH Mocap Library which is a set of motions that are free to use

So some time burned, a mediocre animation created, gotta move on at this point and try to salvage a comic out of it and do better in the future

Working on FMG Comic and animation

I know that I've got to get an FMG comic up onto http://www.strongandstacked.com very soon.  Actually should have had it done like days ago.

But I've spent the last few days playing around with a few things in preparation - some of which have worked out and some of which haven't.

SPHERE TITS + FMG DOESNT WORK

If you read the past few blog posts I wrote, you'll see that I used the spherical tit props I made to create gigantic BE that seemed to work pretty well.  There were a few problems with dynamic clothes fits, but all in all I think it worked.

The first thing I tried early this week when I started work on an FMG comic was to try to put those spherical tits on a woman model and then crank up her muscles.  I really tried to make that work but it just didn't.  The muscles kept meshing through the boobs.  The dynamic clothes would not properly fit .

It just didn't work, and I burned a good day or so trying to get it to work.

DYNAMIC CLOTHES + FMG ISN'T WORKING GREAT FOR ANIMATION

After punting on the spherical tits fmg idea, I thought ok I'll just do a standard fmg type animation (and springboard off the animation to use still images from it to make a comic) and I'll try using dynamic clothes in it.  You can see in the picture above how that turned out.  With Daz 4 for some reason with some of the dynamic clothing it's having poke through problems.  You can see that in the image.

There are some promising aspects to how it turned out because I think I can get some still frames out of it that I will use for a comic.

HERES MY PLAN FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS

First, I'm going to create an FMG animation without dynamic clothing.  One technique I'm using - and I described this in detail in a recent blog post I did on the history and evolution of Ms. Muscles - is to actually use two Victoria 4 models.  One for the body, and a separate one for the head.  That way when I bulk up the model I'm using for the body, it doesn't have an unintended side effect of bulking up the head.

In the image above you can see that as she grows and muscles up, her head stays constant size.  That's because of the technique I just described.  So I'm going to go ahead and make an FMG animation without dynamic clothes using the girl you see in the image above.

Then I plan to use the animation to create a comic - I'll pull still frames from the animation with different camera angles and different background props etc and I will make a comic out of that.  I'll post some preview frames here over the next couple of days as that comes into shape and finishes up.

BE Comic The Dairy Queen Finished

The Dairy Queen Issue 1

Dairy Queen Issue 2 Sneak Peak

 I'm posting the new BE comic The Dairy Queen to Strong and Stacked tonight.  It took a lot longer than I had hoped to finish

I based the comic on a BE animation I did recently for my DeviantArt Page .  I had hoped that grabbing that animation, tweaking it, and turning into a comic would be quick.

Turned out not to be.  One reason was that, as happens from time to time and has been chronicled before in my blog, my !@#$ day job got in the way and took a lot of time.  Another reason was just that dynamic clothing can be kind of fiddly, again as has been chronicled before in my blog.

Now that the comic is done, I've got to get right to work on the next thing.  Which I think needs to be an FMG comic for Strong and Stacked .  Then after that a BEGiantess comic...

This is the constant drumbeat of "must create content".  I can tell its already been too long since I updated Strong and Stacked and BEGiantess .

But I'm creating stuff as fast as I can.  This also is why I just can't do commissions any more.  I struggle as it is to have enough time to create content for the two websites.

One thing that definitely took a while was creating the BE animation for my deviant art page recently.  And I'd hoped I'd kind of get that time investment back because I was going to use that model / dynamic clothing setup for this comic

Dairy Queen Issue 2 Sneak Peak

But somehow the time savings there didn't materialize.  Anyway the comic's done, gotta get on to working on the next thing.  Once I get an FMG comic finished and another BEgiantess update, I plan to return to finish part 2 of the Dairy Queen.  I'll put a couple of sneak peek images here to show what part 2 is shaping up to look like

Dairy Queen Issue 2 Sneak Peak

Working on BE Comic

The comic is coming along but as usual my day job is getting in the way.  It's been a busy week at work and I've only had limited time to work on creating content.  But the comic is slowly coming along and this weekend I should have a lot more time to work on it.

I'll put a couple of panels from the in progress comic here to show how its coming along

Working on Dairy Queen BE Comic now

 With the deviant art BE animation finished and having cleared the decks of all commission work, I'm diving into just creating content for my websites.

It's been a while since I updated strongandstacked.com and begiantess.com so I'm feeling time pressure to get something up on both sites.  Like yesterday if you know what I mean.

So the first thing I'm doing is working on a BE comic for strongandstacked.  I'm trying to leverage the BE animation I recently did for my deviant art page to speed up the comic creation process.

I've got that animation and some dynamic clothing fits for it, so I'm using those to create some still images for the comic.

The basic theme is going to be BE, but this time around I'm going to try having some milk/lactation in it.  I haven't done a comic with milk in it in a long time. One reason being that some of the BE via breast implants fans really want things to center around the implants and big fake tits and anything vaguely suggestive of mothering (including milk) can be a turn off for those fans.

But there are another set of people who really love stories with milk in them, and its for those people that I want to try having a story with milk.

My vague idea is that there's a woman who somehow experiences a surge of tit growth - maybe after she's had a child.

My thought is that maybe she's a stripper who had moderate size breast implants, and she needed money so she agreed to carry someone else's child to term in exchange for money (an implanted egg from a donor who didn't want to go through pregnancy and paid this woman to do that).

In the wake of the pregnancy, her tits were bigger. And full of milk. And they kept growing.

Another twist may be that she realizes there is something weird about her body chemistry. The milk she produces can induce a suggestive state in anyone who drinks it.  Mind control milk.

At least those are the ideas I have been kind of mulling over.  I'm going to start cranking out images for the comic and see how things come together.

It may deviate a bit from the storyline I outlined above, but the basic ingredients are going to be the woman from the deviant art animation I did with the huge growing spherical tits and some dynamic clothing stretched over them for the images.

Hoping to get this finished over the course of the next two days, then move on to begiantess to do a comic and then come back to strongandstacked to do an FMG comic.

One step at a time though.  But I do feel liberated not having to worry about commissions/requests right now so that I can just focus on creating stuff for the sites.  Will try to post updates here on how things are progressing

Big BE Animation Will Be Posted Today

Segment from BE Animation for Deviantart

Another Segment from Deviantart Animation

Dynamic Clothing on Sphere Tits

Dynamic Clothing on Sphere Tits, Different Texture

Dynamic Clothing on Sphere Tits, Blue

Ok Screw Dynamic Clothing, Naked Sphere Tits!

 Dynamic Clothing Over Sphere Tits is Dicey
In the past few blog posts, I mentioned how I'd been playing with the use of Dynamic Clothing over the spherical tit props that I created .  At first the results seemed promising.  But I ran into some roadblocks.

I'll go into the road blocks I hit in more detail below, but the punchline of the story is that for now I've decided to just create a BE animation using the spherical tits WITHOUT any dynamic clothing and post it up on DeviantArt later today.

So the animated gifs you see in this post are snippets from that BE animation, and you'll be able to get it in its entirety from my Deviant Art Page starting later today.

And now, here's why the deviant art animation I am posting later today will have huge growing tits but will not have dynamic clothing ...

Dynamic Clothing + Sphere Tits in Daz 3
Initially I took a crack at having dynamic clothing on top of the spherical tits in Daz Studio 3.  When I did that, it actually looked pretty good (see earlier posts).  But there were some problems.

The biggest roadblock was that for some reason when I'd have the software go ahead and fit the clothing over the tits, it would grind away at doing that and would look great.  But once it was finished, if I moved the animation slider to let me see how it looked on each individual frame, the software would forget the fitting it had done and the shirt would slump down as though the tits weren't there.

This was incredibly frustrating because I run Daz 3 on a quadcore machine which is running a 32 bit version of WindowsXP and has only 3 gig of memory or so.  So running the calculations to fit the shirt over the tits takes a fair amount of time, and seeing it just evaporate and knock me back to square one over and over sucked.

The second problem with the set up I had going for Daz 3 was that rendering time is very long.  Like I said, its only a quadcore machine, and so with raytracing it really struggles.  As important is that its running with a 32 bit os as described above and so the amount of ram available is not fantastic

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and just start the project over again on my other machine - a 6 core machine running Windows 7 64 bit with 16 gig of ram and Daz Studio 4.

Dynamic Clothing + Sphere Tits in Daz 4

On the plus side, render times were way faster.  And computation of the fit of the dynamic clothing over the tits was way faster.  And the problem of losing the saved fitting computations was gone - it seemed to remember the fit perfectly even when I was moving the animation slider around

On the minus side, I don't know what changed in the fitting algorithm for dynamic clothes between Daz Studio 3 and Daz Studio 4,  but the fit seemed to have lots of problems.  I haven't posted all the screenshots here, but all sorts of weird things were happening

There was a lot of poke through, where you'd see small parts of the tits playing peekaboo through the cloth.  Sometimes the cloth just kind of slumped and bunched up

After burning a few days playing with it, I finally decided, ok. I can't waste any more time playing with this.  The clock is ticking for updating my sites.

That's when I decided to abandon the dynamic clothing over tits for now and just go with a naked BE animation and then get my sites updated.
 
Possible Next Steps

There is some promise in this idea.  I think it may be that for animations it is very tough to get dynamic clothing in Daz Studio that will reliably create a good looking BE sequence without poke through or bunching up or other headaches.

I may just start using dynamic clothing for still pictures.  Its a bit more controllable than to make it look good through an entire animation

I may dig more into the dynamic clothing controls documentation to see if there is something I am missing

And one other possibility would be for me to try using Poser for this stuff instead of Daz Studio.  Maybe dynamic clothing in Poser behaves better

But for now I'm under a time crunch and I just have to shelve this and get some stuff cranked out for my sites.

So step 1 is going to be getting this deviant art BE animation with the sphere tits (but without dynamic clothes) finished and posted to deviant art. That will happen today.

Next will be updating my strongandstacked.com and begiantess.com sites with new comics.  Had wanted to have that happen today, but that is looking like a long shot.

At any rate, that's where I'm at.  Ok gotta get back to work now.

A Slow Week

As I write this I'm getting ready to bolt out the door and head off to my !@#$ day job.  A few days ago I'd posted I was working on the spherical tits covered by dynamic clothing animation.

I was doing that on my quadcore machine using a version of Daz Studio 3 and it was intermittently losing the clothes fit as I changed frames and then crashing and having problems and finally I punted on that and decided to bite the bullet and transfer the project over to my 6 core machine on which I run a version of Daz Studio 4

Got busy with work stuff for my day job, had other crap going on etc etc but today finally got it transferred to my more powerful machine and will work on it there.  I've hit one of those crunch time situations where I realize it has been too long since I have updated both strongandstacked.com and begiantess.com and and I have to update them like NOW.

So my plan is this.  Today there are friends coming over to hang out with us this evening, so that blows that time for me to work on big boobies and big muscle women .  I will have time this weekend to do that, and that's what I need to do .

So I anticipate a weekend with a lot of work on this stuff:
1. get this animation finished, post it to deviant art
2. use the animation to springboard into a comic, get that posted to strongandstacked
3. come up with something for begiantess.com this weekend and post that.

Enough talk , back to work

Dynamic Clothing, Spherical Tits, some headaches

 I wanted to get a lot done this weekend for my websites. And the weekend is not over yet.  But I'm off to a bit of a rocky start.  I'm trying to create an animation using the spherical tits I created recently for the Sindy Spheres comic on strongandstacked.com

And while it has been promsing, I've been having some problems.  I am shooting for a BE animation that I'll post on my deviant art page - hopefully today or tomorrow - and as a side effect I'd like to create some still images I will use for a comic on strongandstacked.

You can see here some animated gifs that show the draft animation.  The basics look pretty good.  She's walking.  Her tits are growing huge.  For the most part her dynamic tshirt is stretching and working well as the tits grow.

As usual, the devil is in the details.  First off, Daz Studio is acting kind of weird in that sometimes after the dynamic clothing has been fit for all the frames, if I then move the time line slider around, the memory of the dynamic fit gets lost and the shirt just reverts to an unfit state.  This is happening intermittently to me and it is SO annoying.  Because the fit process actually takes a fair amount of time.  So I'm struggling with that.

The next problem I'm dealing with are some minor poke through issues. You probably can't see this in the animated gifs, but near her armpits her skin is kind of poking through from time to time.  So I need to fix that

Then there's the material for her shirt. I had wanted to have her wear a shirt that said B OO BS on it.  And in the two screenshots below, you can see the problem I'm having with that. In the left hand screenshot, you can see what she looks like in draft state, without shadowing and raytracing.  The shirt looks pretty good there.  But in the right hand screenshot, there's a big glare off of her shirt.

 I played around some with the lighting and the properties of the shirt but eventually ran out of patience with that. So I tried a different color for her shirt.  Kind of an olive type thing. you can see this in the screenshot to the right .  This looked ok, but for some reason I wasn't totally thrilled with the color.

So I moved on to try her in red and then in blue, which you can see in screenshots below. I think I'm going to go with blue.  All this fiddling around, and Daz having issues with the fit, and the poke through, and the lighting...  It's making this take a lot longer than I had wanted .

On top of that, yesterday a friend came over to hang out for the day.  That's fine, but it burned much of my Saturday and used up some time that I'd hoped to use in working on this animation and getting it finished.

Today's Sunday, and I am going to try to get this animation finished. Ugh. Need more hours in the day.  Or need to be able to stop having to go to my pesky day job during the work week so I can have more time to create these big tit animations every day :)

World of Big Fake Boobs

Custom Video I bought from Mindblowing Maxi Mounds!

 I've blogged before about how in the very late 1990's / early 2000's time frame I purchased a number of custom videos from big boob models and posted them - with permission of those models - to the website I had at the time.

I'd gotten a video capture card with my brand new Pentium 2 computer back then, and used it to capture the custom videos I purchased from these models and posted them as movie files to my website back then

One of the models I contacted about custom videos back then was Maxi Mounds.  I ended up buying three videos from her.  For the first one, I requested that for some of the video she'd be in a tight white shirt, and for the rest of the video she would be topless.  I remember getting the VHS tape in the mail from her, popping it into my VCR, and then watching in jawdropped stunned awe as she danced with her basketball sized tits straining her white tshirt to its absolute limit.

Around that time period, bearchive.com was a lot more active than it is now.  The forums were buzzing with activity and there were a number of people like me posting video clips and sharing them.  I remember one guy who went by the name WillG who posted many clips of hugely augmented boobqueens to the delight and gratitude of legions of BEA forum members

I'd never seen one of the huge tit queens in person yet back then.  Later I would end up seeing Chelsea Charms on a number of occasions in a strip club and also Echo Valley .  But I hadn't done that at this point, and women like Maxi seemed like otherworldly super boobed goddesses that I'd worship from afar.

There was a woman who posted occasionally on the bearchive forums back then who went by the name Joi West.  I ended up IM'ing with her several times, and we chatted about some of the big boobed heavy hitters of the time

Good God, Maxi is HUGE

Another Custom Video I purchased from Maxi

Joi seemed to be really plugged in to the big fake boob scene, and was in contact with women like Mistress Rhiannon and Melonie Charm.  Big titted women who I found to be incredible.

Joi related some stories about these women, and Deena Duos and others, which made me feel that in some small way I was a part of this world of big fake boobs.

She talked about a talent agent named Eleanor who represented some of the biggest boobed features.

I haven't IMd with Joi in a very, very long time. But I do remember our chats.  They somehow made me feel like in some remote way that I did have a personal connection to Rhiannon, Melonie Charm and the others.  Of course I didn't really have any kind of personal connection to them.  I mean I'd corresponded briefly with those boob stars when I purchased custom videos from them

But chatting with Joi always made me feel like I had a more personal bond with the boob queens.  Because Joi seemed to have that.

Recently I was remembering those times and did a quick google search for Maxi Mounds and Eleanor. I knew that Joi had mentioned Eleanor was a big boob talent agent back then.  And what came up from my search was really interesting.

It turns out there is a book that's all about big boobs, and that mentions Eleanor, Maxi, and many other names from the big fake boob universe.  The book is called Stacked: A 32DDD Report from the Front and was written by Susan Seligson.  Of particular interest to big fake boob fans will be the chapter that is titled "In Search of Maxi Mounds".  You can actually read that chapter in its entirety through Google Books for free at this link .

"Eleanor" is revealed to be Eleanor Bucci, and the chapter talks about a number of the big boob super stars and about Gerald Johnson - the plastic surgeon who came up with the "silly string" implants that Maxi had and which Chelsea Charms and Minka still have today

Reading the chapter was fascinating to me, but also sad in a way because it mentioned that the big boob features were kind of a vanishing breed.  That they were a sort of sideshow act that people had lost interest in.

I know that in general there has been a move away from big fake boob models.  In the 90's there were waves of massive fake tit models who appeared in magazines like Score, Gent, Hustler Busty Beauties, Cheri and DCup.   But as time went on, magazines like Score featured more and more naturally endowed women, and less big fake boob queens

While I'm a fan of both natural and fake big boobs, I do find it sad that there are less and less of the big fake boob models around, and that interest in them has waned.  I still find myself in utter awe of Minka, Chelsea Charms, Teddi Barrett and Deena Duos (Brooklyn Lace).  And though Maxi and Melonie have left the big boob scene, I still have awe and respect for them, and cherish their former big boobed glory.

At any rate, finding the Stacked: A 32DDD Report from the Front book brought back memories of chats with Joi West, of custom videos bought from big fake boob queens, and of the connection - however small - I had to the big fake boob world

The Evolution of Ms. Muscles

BE Animation Screenshot from DeviantArt

Screenshot from 2nd Animation: She Gets Muscles!

 Ms. Muscles has been one of the most popular characters that I've created.  She's gone through a number of changes over the years, and I thought it might be worth walking through her history and development to chronicle her journey so far

DEVIANT ART

The genesis of Ms. Muscles lies with a Breast Expansion animation that I created for my deviant art page .  For this animation I made a character with blonde hair who looked sort of like Supergirl.  She wasn't muscular, but had huge growing tits and a red cape.

After I posted a BE Animation of this character to my deviant art page, I received a request to do a similar animation, but involving FMG on top of Breast Expansion .  So I created a second animation, this time tweaking the character so that on top of growing huge tits, she also grew huge muscles.  This really was the birth of Ms. Muscles, although she wasn't named that yet

I was busily creating comics for my strongandstacked.com website when a request came in asking for a comic featuring the character I'd had in my deviant art FMG animation.  A woman who would be a super hero with massive muscles and boobs

 MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 01

I took the deviant art character I'd created and came up with a back story for her.  She was a Mammazon, from the planet Mammazonia.  The females on her home planet could fly and had super strength.  They also had the ability to transform into a fairly normal (but very busty) form that didn't have huge muscles.  But at will they could hulk out into a super boobed hypermuscled form.

In that first comic, Ms. Muscles had the look of the deviant art character.  She had long blonde hair (Super Kyra hair for Poser).  Her boobs were created using injectors from Will Dial (they are freebies in the renderosity free section) .  And her muscles were a combination of some hypermuscled morphs that Stone3D had created coupled with Victoria 4 morphs.

Things came together pretty well for her look except that when she was hulked out, her face looked somewhat like an overweight person's face.  The reason for that is that the Victoria 4 morphs I was using to hulk her up were full body morphs that not only bulked up her torso and muscles but had the somewhat undesired side effect of bulking up her face

MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 02: CAPE PROBLEMS. HAIR PROBLEMS.

While working on the second issue of Ms. Muscles, I realized that her long hair was causing me many headaches.  When she muscled up, the hair would crash through her huge muscles into her body.  The hair crashed into her cape even when she wasn't muscled up.

And speaking of her cape... that was crashing into her muscles too.  So a pattern I started following for many subsequent Ms. Muscles comics was to come up with something that destroyed her cape during each issue.  Sometimes it caught fire and burned off.  Sometimes an explosion blew it off.  Basically whatever I could do to get that damned cape off so I didn't have to deal with posing it in a way that didn't crash into her muscles and through her body

The hair was something that I kept long for this issue.  But next issue...

MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 03: BLONDE AFRO

I was so tired of dealing with her long hair that in Issue 03 I gave Ms. Muscles a new hair style.  I guess you could describe it as a blonde afro.  It's a product that's called Helios Hair for Poser and Daz Studio.  It had the virtue of being short and not colliding with Ms. Muscles huge muscles.

I did get some feedback that people didn't like the new hair.  And people liked the cape :)  But for a while I had Ms. Muscles sport this new do and I had her go sans cape as much as possible

MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 09 : LEAVING EARTH

Ms. Muscles continued to have a similar look from issue 3 onward - the short hair, often no cape.  But the storylines did change and evolve over time.

I did a number of stories where Ms. Muscles was doing various things on her adopted planet of Earth.  But eventually I wanted to kick off a storyline that would take her into space and would ultimately lead at some point to a showdown between her and the Queen of her home planet Mammazonia

In Issue 9 I took the plunge and got Ms. Muscles off world.  I had her taking on some warships in space.  This brings up a problem that I've had with Ms. Muscles, and which I think has been a problem for Superman writers for years.  You can get to a power level point with a character where nothing ends up being a challenge for them.

In Issue 9 I had Ms. Muscles tossing around huge starships that weigh thousands of tons.  If she can do that, its starting to get to the point where the sky is the limit for her.  What could possibly be a challenge?


MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 10 : GIVING HER A CHALLENGE

I decided to give Ms. Muscles a challenge by having her chained up with chains made from some hyper dense material and then having an antagonist use a super powered menacing drill/sextoy on her.

I'm not sure how much peole liked this story - in issue 10.  It involved essentially a rape of Ms. Muscles with the aforementioned sextoy.  And eventually it involved Ms. Muscles killing her tormentor using that sextoy.  It departed a bit from the previous stuff I'd done with Ms. Muscles where she didn't usually kill people - at least not in a close up and personal way like this

But I wanted to experiment around with her doing different things than she'd done before and so I tried this

MS. MUSCLES ISSUE 11 : A NEW LOOK ACHIEVED WITH TWO BODIES

After issue 10, I wanted to give Ms. Muscles' look an overhaul. I knew people liked the long hair.  So I wanted to bring that back.  And I'd always wanted to solve the problem of having Ms. Muscles face kind of bulk up when her body hulked out

I'm amazed at Tigersan's ability to create hypermuscled hulking women who manage to have a normal sized non bulked out beautiful face .  He's a virtuoso of digital sculpting.  I'm not.  But I wanted to at least solve the problem of Ms. Muscles' face being big and bulked out.  The solution I came up with, which I put into place in issue 11, was crude but effective

I ended up using two Victoria 4 models for every shot.  I had to pose both models in lock step.  Both models had the same textures on them for skin etc.  But one model was hypermuscled and bulked up while the other model was normal sized and non muscular .  I used visibility settings to make the head of the hypermuscled model invisible, and everything EXCEPT the head on the regular sized model invisible.

So from issue 11 onward. Ms. Muscles' head is coming from a normal sized model where I hide the rest of the body.  And her hypermuscled body is coming from a second model where I make the head invisible.  Two models kind of merged together.

It makes it kind of a pain in the ass to pose her.  Because I have to pose each model separately and make sure they stay in sync.  But it achieves a regular sized beautiful non hulked out face coupled with a hypermuscled body.

For issue 11 to explain her hair being long all of a sudden again, I decided to make it a kind of prequel story showing Ms. Muscles landing on Earth for the first time.  When I resumed the normal storyline in issue 12, I stuck with the long hair and didn't really explain how it got long.   But I made the decision to just use the long hair from now on for her, and the new face.

ISSUE 13 : BIG ARMS

I'd gotten some feedback that Ms. Muscles had the perfect body... ALMOST.  Massive tits - hell yes.  Huge hulking muscles - mostly.  The one area that I received some complaints about were her arms.  They just didn't look buff enough

So in issue 13 I took a crack at making them bigger. MUCH bigger.  And I think it worked out pretty well for her whole look.  All I did was just increase the scale of her arms.  And the bulked up very nicely

And this is the look I've had so far from Issue 13 onward.  Long hair.  Normal sized beautiful face (achieved by using one model for her body, a second model for her normal sized head).  And huge scaled up arms.

WHITHER MS. MUSCLES?

I try to get back to the Ms. Muscles storyline from time to time among the other stuff I am working on for my websites.  My rough plan for her is to have her move toward a big showdown with the Mammazonian Queen.  After that - I'm not sure.   But she definitely is one of the anchor characters on strongandstacked.com.

I'm always happy to hear brainstorming ideas for what to do with her