AnnoAD

Every once in a while I make one of these wall of text posts to collect my thoughts. Today I'm sitting here with this Qhala model just one or two work sessions away from being upload ready and I feel....conflicted. Partially because I've been feeling absolutely drained from a completely insane situation I just had to deal with in my life, and partially because that situation has put me in a position where I'm going to have to change how I approach my work in this community. So this is an attempt to take a deep breath, collect those thoughts, and share them with you guys before I start making some major shifts in my output going forward.

So first....the chaos.

The short version is, I just had to deal with a situation where a tenant of mine, who had relapsed into a drug habit, basically tried to take over my house. We're talking finding heroin needles in your toilet after coming home from a root canal and having to move your valuables to a friend's house because you don't know what kind of fucked up situation you're in. There were junkie girlfriends, police raids, smashed furniture, and all kinds of messed up shit. Add on top of that me trying to recover from a pinched nerve and being on disability leave from work, and the fact that all of the residency laws in my state are thoroughly stacked towards tenants, and you get a complete clusterfuck that basically sideswiped my entire life from about early April through the middle of June. And I'm actually incredibly lucky I was able to get him out when I did, because if he had dug his heels in I would still be working on getting rid of him right now.

Now I'm back in the house, locks are changed, I've had some time to decompress and recover mentally, and I'm in the process of rebuilding the strength I lost healing from the cervical impingement. I'm fortunate enough to have a stellar group of people looking out for me and helping me through situations like this, so I'm in very good shape all things considered. But all of this leaves me with another problem which is the reason why I've felt so art blocked the last few weeks.

Keeping this house relies on me making consistent side income alongside my day job. I live in a very expensive part of a country doing everything in it's power to make things even more expensive, and I work in a dish room in a college kitchen. Not exactly making big boy money over here. I was able to keep things in the black last year with the renters income, but being that I'm renting rooms out of a house I'm living in, it made for a somewhat uncomfortable living situation. And this year, both tenants turned out to be major problems; the first tenant had to be asked to leave earlier this year, and now this.

At this point, I am completely over the idea of renting out my living space to anybody that I haven't THOROUGHLY vetted, and have a third party involved who is able to remove them when things get problematic. And honestly, I'm just done with the idea of being a landlord. Because of this, I have two options, as far as I can see it;

1) Sell the house, get a smaller living situation (Condo or apartment), and give up on the one chance I probably have at home ownership.

2) Keep the house, and find some way to make consistent side income.

I really like this house. It's a bit much for me to handle with on my own, but there are ways to deal with that. The problem is I'm going to have to make about an extra $10k-$15 in order to comfortably keep it. I can soften the blow with some belt tightening, but to make this work, I'm going to have to both take more shifts at work, AND find some way to make income with my 3d skill set.

And the latter part is the part that has me unable to pull the trigger on wrapping up Qhala. Because to be honest....I'm not really happy with how that model came out. Neither back in the SFM days, nor now. She badly needs a remesh/retopo/repaint, and my intention was to use this minor update to figure out what I had to do for that process. But if I'm going to commit to what I need to do to grow my audience and start treating this like a profession instead of a hobby, then I'm going to need to put that plan on potentially indefinite hold.

There are other things I'll need to put on hold too that I'm not happy about. Vega and Nika both could use new rigs and some adjustments. Vega I'm particularly frustrated about because I made an entire set of armor for her that I've been keeping in my back pocket, and I still haven't gotten around to figuring out how to properly rig it. Nika also needs more clothing options than just a sports outfit and swimsuit. And my plan for the last few years has been "learn high quality Blender production, update some of my old models, then start figuring out production strategies". Effectively, I'm now cornered into punting on that middle phase of updating Nika/Qhala/Vega and skipping straight to the production grind.

That fucking sucks, and I hate it. I took some time to chew on it and run the numbers, and I keep coming to the same conclusion every time. So I guess....consider this journal me making peace with that and moving forward. At the very least I managed to get Qhala a reasonably functional blender rig, and perhaps I'll find someone to commission to get that Vega armor rigged. And Nika has someone actively maintaining an IK rig for her, so I think she'll be in good hands until I can finally get back to her.

All that said, on to the future. I have some problems to solve and a house to hang on to. lets talk about ways to work out solutions.

First off, the prospects for making consistent income creating these characters is.....not great. 3d character modeling and rigging in this community has a bit of a value perception problem. To provide a point of reference, here's one of the more consistent Blender tutorial youtubers out there (RoyalSkies) talking about his prices and commission practices;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Tm_7UgOWfY

A few key points from the video;

- Industry standard rate for 3d art is 35$ an hour in 2024
- For a set of armor, RoyalSkies charges about $250 per part
- For a rigging commission, Royalskies charges about $2000-$4000 for a basic realtime Maya/UE5 rig
- RoyalSkies avoids working on faces entirely; They are time consuming to produce and eat lots of resources

So, I'm not RoyalSkies, and I can't just go out and charge his prices. That's not the point here. The point is this; take those bits of info and look at the kind of commission prices people in our community charge for complex 3d character work. RoyalSkies is charging $2k-$4k for just a rig that would be considered basic for what we do with our characters. Many of us are charging a fraction of that for a FULL model/texture/remesh/rig job for characters with expression and genital functionality. Compared to other 3d niches, we charge comparatively bargain basement rates for highly technical work.

If you've ever wondered why it's impossible to find consistent 3d character artists in the furry community with open commissions, this is the problem in a nutshell. Most of the ones that know what it really takes to make these characters avoid commissions like the plague, and the ones that dip their toe in the water get snapped up by a feeding frenzy of starved commissioners. And in that case, it's rare to see someone able to settle into a pricing rate that respects the hours they're putting in.

It's not that I don't want to offer commissions to make characters like Shani for people, it's that right now, I can't. She's the equivalent of a fully custom Rolls Royce built by hand; 9 months of straight R&D on hand rigging with an advanced expression control system. I'm going to need to find a way to take that feature set and mass produce it. Take the handcraft Rolls Royce method and cut it down to a production line Honda Civic method. I'll probably have to charge commission prices that are slightly uncomfortable for people in this community to pay, and I'll need to develop a high quality base body to bring the workload per-character down to something reasonable. I need to output consistently high quality results to make it work. But whatever I do, if I do commission work, I NEED to make sure I'm not cornering myself into a spot where I'm making considerably less money than my $24/hr kitchen work day job. Because at that point I'm probably better off just taking overtime shifts.

So that's the core problem I'll need to adapt my workflows to solve. That said, there are alternative paths that I'll be exploring as well;

- Storefronts like itch.io and Jinxxy seem to be potential alternatives to Gumroad these days, so selling "delux" versions of character models I release for free as well as a few exclusives is a possibility. I would need to figure out what features would be gated to the delux version without gimping the model, but I could probably start with alternate skins, extra clothing, and extra expression controls and branch out from there.

- VRChat seems to have a very healthy marketplace for character content as well. It's tricky for me because being in VRChat kind of gives me the heebie jeebies; the social anxiety goes into overdrive when I realize people are reading my virtual body language. But I could probably find a way to get over that, and I know some people doing solid work in that community, so I have some inroads.

- Render commissions are something I could do almost immediately. I tend to focus on the lighter end of the NSFW stuff, but I do try to provide quality lighting and results. So I might start by offering some pinup commission slots, and branching out from there.

- Down the line, if I develop a stable modeling pipeline that can put out a character or so a month, it might be worth setting up a patreon for it. This is one of the options I'm least enthusiastic about, but if I find a way to do it that delivers consistent results without cornering me into timesink productions, it's an option.

- More piecemeal commission services; rig doctoring, texturing, modeling parts or props, etc.

All of those are ways I could start to dip my toe into making this a side hustle. My hope is to maybe start figuring out what services to offer by September, do a trial run for a couple of months, all while working towards the first character pipeline by early next year.

I'm also going to need to start focusing more on properly building up an audience through consistent render work and more social media posting (the horror). Up until now I occasionally post some renders in short bursts when I'm really in the mood, but I don't have a consistent output or focus and generally stick to my own OCs (or ones I've worked on). That inconsistency needs to change, and I'm going to need to start branching out more and interacting with other people's characters as well. The strategy for that will be leaning harder into Mia and Shani, and trying to flesh those two out a bit more as my own characters instead of letting them exist as blank slates for the general public. Maybe start doing some light worldbuilding around them as I add more characters to the roster and network with other OC owners.

As for something like a Discord server; I don't have a plan to do an "AnnoAD's Discord Server" arrangement just yet, but there is something I have in the works that might eventually evolve into something more interesting. I've got a small R&D server I run for a handful of other artists where I'm figuring out how to teach people Blender. Not just character stuff, but the full package. We're hoping that once we've built up more training material and resources, we'll have enough material in the tank to build a public facing server designed around collaborative learning. I feel like for me, my audience has always been other 3d artists, and there are a lot of people who want to get proficient enough at blender to work with their characters. So actually training people to use the models we make for them seems like a unique way to build that.

So...that's that. Everything off the chest. The next year is going to be a make or break year due to this shaky financial scenario. Until I know whether I'm able to keep the house or not, my blender efforts are going to be focused on improving output for my audience and streamlining my modeling workflow. Once we're in the clear, I'll get to do my Qhala, Nika, and Vega rebuilds in peace. But for now, it's time to get this Qhala update out the door and get down to the real grind.

Alright.....not really sure how this will go, but I'm gonna do this off the cuff and let it rip. Been a while since I dropped a wall of text here, but you guys are about a year and a half overdue for an update, so lets get schwifty with it.

I'm going to try something I haven't done before and just.....try to write in the voice I speak in. I had a conversation with Warfare and the crew the other day about written voice versus spoken voice, and how I kinda write in a COMPLETELY different style than I speak, and I hate it. Long story short, my internal editor is too powerful. Gets me triple proofreading and quadruple guessing every word that goes on the page. So I got the editor tied to a chair this time. Maybe spellcheck tho. Don't wanna be too much of a mess you know?

So here we go....the last two years, where I've been, and where I'm at.

Last time I wrote a journal I was dealing with a big loss. One of the most important people in my life, and one of my strongest advocates when my jacked up neurology shits the bed. Fortunately, my mother had her shit together, and left me with a roof over my head, enough funds to get me through the dark times and keep the house afloat, and a strong support network to help me through the transition. It sucked, and I'm a different person because of it, but I was able to get to the light at the end of the tunnel and escape the abyss. Unfortunately....it took a while.

2022 was an absolute disaster of a year. While I was picking up the pieces, the job I work at full time had allowed conditions to completely deteriorate during Covid, and made every effort to avoid fixing shit when the world got back at it. Thankfully it's a union gig, so I had some manner of support and agency, but it was a long year of conflict, anger, insane situations, and lies from management and administration. Things came to a head at the end of the year when we made some big, BIG pushes to force considerable changes, and as part of the push, I manage to get myself moved to another spot on the crew that involved less socialization and multitasking, and more single minded focus and physical activity.

Physically and mentally, I had a lot of health issues and psychological work to do to pull myself back together. I was effectively unable to sleep, socialize, and function. I ended up having to face my over reliance on THC as something of an antidepressant, busted my ass to get myself back on an exercise grind, and did lots of tinkering on my diet. The work situation kept me in something of a perma-trauma state, so it was a rough grind, but we got there. Ended up sussing out a gluten sensititivity through the whole ordeal, so there was a silver lining in that now I don't feel the low level of fatigue, itchiness, and nausea that I've been battling for the last decade or so. Also really zeroed in on some strategies to sort out sleep issues I've had since before I can remember.

As far as art....I was completely fucked on ability to focus and learn. I kinda spent the year occasionally taking stabs at sorting out the clusterfuck of corrective flexes I had to make to get Mia's expression range to actually work in SFM (she's got somewhere around 650+ total flexes, jesus fuck), but for all intents and purposes it was a lost year for progress on learning character design and creation.

So that was 2022. Rough times. How about 2023? Aside from some fluctuations here and there, 2023 was a complete turnaround from the state I had been stuck in for the last year. In fact....looking back, 2023 was something of a turning point in my life. One of the best years in a long time, and one where I managed to rebuild my mental, physical, and financial situation.

The change in pace at work proved to be exactly what I needed to turn this ship around and start cruising back to port. I'm a person with very short social batteries and a need to wear myself out physically, so the shift actually helped the recovery instead of stalling it. We're still in the process of a union push to repair relations with administration, but we managed to win some big victories and dismantle some long standing facilities issues. We even got ourselves a complete renovation of our workplace, so for all intents and purposes, things are looking up over there.

On the personal side, 2023 was a year of intensive growth under the radar. I managed to cut my reliance on THC for sleep management, though I did end up experimenting for a little while to see if I could get an idea of what my thresholds really are, and what constitutes a healthy usage pattern in a therapeutic sense without nuking my motivation (been thinking about talking to a doctor about medical use in the future, since most pharmaceutical alternatives fuck up my body). I also "hit the books" as it were, pushing to rewire my philosophy on life, the world we live in, and how to adapt to the wild shit that's going on in the transition we're making into a way too ridiculously online society. I think part of the reason I even started my profile in this community was to escape from some of the social dynamics of the internet that have been coarsening, and I managed to re-asses and rewire my understanding of all of that in a way that no longer requires me to feel like I live in a shitty hellworld full of insane people. Not that there's any lack of insanity out there these days but.....I understand it more, and judge people for it far, far less. You can't live your life hating the world and expecting it to not affect your health, ya know?

And as for art, well......I haven't posted very much, but the amount of work I'm doing to learn and grow have been starting to bear fruit. I have a goddamn solid update for Vega coming down the pipe that's a bit roadblocked by some rigging problems at the moment, but should be ready to rock prettty soon. Dropping SFM has allowed me to fully embrace custom rigging with Rigify, and to really push my understanding of high>low poly baking and texture painting. There's still a lot to do and learn, but I'm hoping that by the end of the year I'll be able to speed up these workflows and start delivering some interesting models for y'all.

Most importantly, I managed to connect to so many other artists in this community by hanging out in the discord back channels and VCs. I'm honestly more of a voice-to-voice kinda guy; text interaction isn't really my thing. So having all of these little VC lounges to hang, shoot the shit, build knowledge, collaborate, and mutually support each other has been a godsend. I'll probably make this the last full on journal for a long time, as I'm now more or less a discord creature in this community, but you'll always have access to the fruits of my labor here on the galleries once things pick up a bit.

I want to shout out so many people here, but I just feel like I would forget too many, so for now I'll just say that if you've ever had an extended, positive interaction with me on a VC, you are an awesome person, and thank you so much for helping pull be out of the shit. But I will give a special shout out to Kaitou3d and Warfaremachine, two of my closest collaborators on the 3d production grind. We've been discussing some plans for 2024 that I'm going to keep close to the vest for now, but know that we're cookin' for real, and we're looking to serve the good shit.

For those of you here and there who have tried to message me over the last year or two only to not get a reply, I apologize if you caught me during one of my rough patches. I have some social overload issues that get particularly bad when people try to contact me via any sort of text medium. Like I said before....I have an internal editor that only pops up when I'm talking via text, and it socially drains me way faster than when I'm speaking over a mic. Add neurological reasons for social burnout to the list, and it just creates a dynamic where when someone hits me up on text during an "off" period, I just.....can't. If I'm socially blown out, it needs to be via voice, and it needs to be interfaced through a group that I trust to take the heat off me when my batteries crash. I'll never be able to "unwire" that, but with time I may be able to push my battery capacity to make it a bit easier to interact. But for now, I think I'll keep my non-discord-VC communications to a minimum to preserve the energy levels I need to do the work I want to do.

One last thing........the next "phase" of my work will be major overhauls for 4 characters; Nika, Qhala, Vega, and Mia. instead of just moving on to new characters, I want to dig in and push those four as far as I can. Not just upgrade the body functionality and bump to blender 4, but also create high quality clothes, gear, props, and maybe down the line, environments. These 4 have been a big part of my artistic development over the last 6-7 years, so I'm going to treat this as my "Senior Thesis" to graduate from the doldrums of being an intermediate level 3d artist and push myself to professional grade. After that.....sky's the limit in terms of what I might make. Maybe I'll make more characters. Maybe I'll get wrapped in some bigger project. Or maybe I'll work out some stories to tell with them and actually use their character attributes to create cool art. Maybe I'll do all of that. Or maybe I'll do something I don't expect. Whatever I do, it'll always be focused towards making unique, dope ass characters that don't have to hide the naughty bits to appeal to the masses. I've come to the realization that I'm not one for publicly creating porn, but I'll always do everything I can to facilitate y'all that love to get wild with it.

2024 is going to be an interesting year. Lets roll up our sleeves and get to it. AAD out.

This is a post I was desperately hoping I wouldn't have to make this year. Or ever.....

About a week and a half ago, my mother passed away from cancer.

We had some reason to believe that we might have been out of the woods after her surgery earlier in the year, but everything flared back up in August. At that point, there just wasn't enough time to do anything direct to combat it. Two months was all we had from that point on to say goodbye and help her wrap up the last moments of her life.

The last few months have been a nightmare. I've been avoiding talking about all of this purely to avoid the trainwreck that my head turns into when I think about it. Tinkering with Vega and Mia here and there and hanging out in discord VCs during some of the moments of clarity between work/family/anxiety overload was a tremendous help in keeping my sanity intact, and I can't thank you guys enough for putting up with me.

So yeah...just wanted to get this off my chest. Not talking about it was starting to hurt worse than talking about it. Right now, unfortunately my focus is completely fucked. Projects will not halt, but the pace is going to stay extremely slow for obvious reasons. Apologies to anyone who DMed me in the last few months that I wasn't able to respond to. When I'm in this state I just can't manage replies sometimes.

Don't waste time. Don't take the people you love for granted. And take care of yourselves.

- AAD

So it's been brought to my attention recently that there is someone on Gumroad attempting to resell a VRChat port of the recent Qhala model I released:

https://gumroad.com/trioguru?recommended_by=search#VoJlA

https://sfmlab.com/project/27382/

Just to be clear; under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever have to pay money to download this model, or a port of it. DO NOT waste your money on this plagiarized model. The seller previously tried to host this model on booth.pm, who took the model down on the first request. However, Gumroad has been less co-operative in taking action.

All of my models use base bodies provided to me by other creators with their expressed permission (Warfaremachine and Petruz), under the agreement that the derivative model (or any further derivatives) will only be distributed for free, NOT be resold, and contain proper attributing to the parties involved in their creation (Me, the base body modeler, and the OC owners). All of this applies specifically to distribution of model files; you do have our permission to publicly distribute *free* downloads of ports or edits of the model, and you are allowed to commission (or take commissions for) model edits and renders from other artists. The intent is to not hinder any of the common ways people use these models; only to make sure people are not attempting to claim ownership of and directly sell them like this scumbag is doing.

For all intents and purposes, you can consider these models to fall under a CC BY-NC 4.0 creative commons license, with the aforementioned commission exceptions:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

On that note, I'm going to say something that will probably throw a wrench into everything I just wrote.....

I'm likely not going to go through the hassle of trying to DMCA this model thief. I'm just not in a good position to be engaging in risky legal maneuvers on this, and I have some concerns about submitting personal details directly to bad actors via the DMCA process. It honestly makes me feel like shit, but I just can't afford to get dragged into conflicts of this nature. So after discussing the matter with RatherDevious and some potential collaborators, we have come up with an alternative plan of action:

https://imgur.com/a/nc2IDCE

Back when Qhala dropped, a couple of mad lads going by EpicGhoul/Epix and CaptainJoosh ported the model into VRChat themselves, with some texture edits. I checked in with them to see if they're interested in providing their files as an "official" VRChat port with the original textures/features, and they've been gracious enough to accept my request. We will be sharing the port for free, under the same terms as the SFM model (CC BY-NC 4.0 with commission exceptions).

We will also share the .blend source files for both their VRC model and my SFM model. This should hopefully give people access to everything they would have gotten if they had made the mistake of paying for the stolen port. We should have a download ready within the next few days, so stay tuned!

As for the thief, I would advise avoiding purchasing any of his products. The Hornet model he posted is also stolen from another modeler as well, so you are going to be ripped off either way:

https://twitter.com/realHSama/status/1288555573990928391

Instead, consider sending Gumroad a report, letting them know that this user is selling stolen goods. You can report his storefront with links to the original models and written feedback through this form:

https://gumroadhelp.typeform.com/to/b96L4I

On that note, we've got a snek waif to port for y'all. Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and HUGE shout outs to the VRChat/Unity crew for keeping me informed about this situation and helping me sort this out. Stay safe out there everybody <3

- AAD