Welcome to another Behind the Lewds feature, where LewdGamer takes a look at the creation process of some of your favorite pornographic works. Today we explore the bodacious world of erotic 3D animation with Umemaro 3D and sneak a peak at some Semen Analysis production details.
As with our previous Behind the Lewds segment, we are going to present you with a detailed overview of some of Umemaro 3D’s animations while also going more in-depth about the creator himself. The man known only to his fans as Umemaro, is a man of passion, bothfor his creations and pornography in general. We at LewdGamer felt that just skipping over his fruitful artistic career would be a grave injustice to both our readers and the creator in question. All the following information has been compiled, organized and edited from parts of the Umemaro 3D Wiki (a great resource for anything Umemaro), as well as from our own translations of Umemaro’s blog posts.
-The Umemaro 3D doujin circle-
Umemaro 3D (梅麻呂3D) is a doujin circle that has been involved in 3DCG animated pornographic work since its inception in 2002. Its first released animated short work was Aya in 2002, and since then the company has released eleven more “mini-movie collections”; two “Project Works”; and a 3D comic. The most recent collection, The Chiropractor -Erotic Este Course- was released in June 2014, with Semen Analysis in May of 2015.
The cover of Umemaro 3D’s first independent work “Aya”. The character is modeled in a similar fashion to renders used in erotic movies made by forester, Umemaro’s previous place of employment.
The credits for every release since Twin Succubus identify Umemaro as the 3D animator, Hirobon as the system programmer, and Akiwo Watanabe as the scenario writer. Umemaro 3D projects are released primarily through DLsite, with additional websites also carrying new releases as they come out. Aya was released as a set of disconnected .AVI clips that could combine into a full video, with bonuses such as wallpapers and concept renders included. Releases from Kasumi to Lewd Bomb Bust Female Teacher expanded on this distribution method, funneling the components of each release through an HTML document to be opened in a web browser. Lewd Consultation Room – OMEGA and OMEGA 2. Umemaro 3D then expanded into non-animated comics with the release of
The titular twin succubi from Twin Succubus added a sexy supernatural element to Umemaro’s work, which has been further developed in OMEGA and OMEGA 2.
All of Umemaro’s animations, up to Lewd Bomb Bust Female Teacher were straight up movies, offering virtually no player interaction outside of clicking on movie clips to get them running. The much needed interactive elements were first presented in Lewd Consultation Room, which allowed the player to pick which one of the two female characters the protagonist would have sex with, as well as when he would climax. These two small, but important additions set the standard for all future Umemaro productions, continuously including new ways to immerse the player by the means of new camera angles, point of view shots, interactive CG galleries, sex scene speed selections and more.
The interactivity aspect of Umemaro 3D movies isn’t the only thing has improved over the years. One only needs to take a chronological look through his expansive portfolio to notice immense improvements in rendering style, animation, sound design and body jiggle physics. Its safe to say that each new Umemaro release is marked by some major improvement—further solidifying the creator’s ever-increasing appeal.
Umemaro as a person
Umemaro (梅麻呂" target="_blank">The Chiropractor is the central figure of Umemaro 3D, and often wrongfully considered the sole member of the circle. He is 45 years old and has been working in the 3DCG industry for most of his professional career. He identifies his hobby as being “DVD watching.” His pre-Umemaro 3D work was with forester, a 1990s 3D CG eroge company. Umemaro once noted that the OMEGA series was his “revenge” for having worked on Gakuen Z, a forester work with similar themes.
Umemaro maintains a blog that is used to post production stills as work is done on upcoming Umemaro 3D releases, as well as discuss other things that have been occurring in his life. He has been plagued with health issues relatively frequently. These health problems are often cited as a contributing factor to the sub-par nature of OMEGA 2.
According to the main Umemaro 3D website (now showcasing and promoting just his latest work), Umemaro uses LightWave 7.5, Adobe Creative Suite 3 (specifically Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects), Real Flow 4, and FiberFX. His current workstation setup (As of March 17, 2015) includes four computers; a primary PC running Windows XP for the bulk of the animating work; a second PC running Windows 7 for additional work and rendering; and another two exclusively for rendering; one running Windows 7, and the other running Windows Vista. Umemaro also keeps a laptop in his room for web browsing when he takes breaks, with a sixth computer used exclusively for Internet-connected TV.
According to his November 1, 2014 blog post prior to upgrading, Umemaro did all of his rendering work on Windows XP up until Microsoft’s extended support for XP ended in April 2014, likely leaving Work in Progress as the last work rendered on Windows XP. Umemaro’s January 21, 2015 blog post revealed that he had upgraded to LightWave 11 for the 13th Mini-Movie Collection after his ten-year license for LW 7.5 expired, however; on March 22, Umemaro announced that he had reverted back to LW 7.5 on an older computer, as his attempts to make LW 11 work for the 13th Mini-Movie Collection had failed.
Umemaro’s manga style self-portrait.
Work on Semen Analysis
Semen Analysis’s production cycle was marked by a much more detailed, open account of the game’s production, with Umemaro repeatedly posting lengthy, and technical posts during the course of the release’s renewed production in February and March. We have already described most of Semen Analysis’s contentin one of our previous news posts, but as an added bonus you can also read some of the directly translated Umemaro blog entries right below this paragraph. The February and March post should give you a greater insight into Umemaro’s creative processes and personality.
###“I made a nurse.”
“I ended up shutting down the site after all. I’ll reopen it if I have the chance, I think. Thanks for all your opinions, everyone. I still have to cancel the contract, though…
It’s still in the testing stage, but I made a nurse character. It looks quite similar to that one girl, huh. lol (TL Note: He doesn’t mention specifics, but I think we can all guess who he’s talking about – Tifa Lockheart)
But man, FiberFX keeps crashing. I’m doing pretty simple stuff on it, but it still makes me nervous.”
###Character Retouching
“Retouching the glitzy look. Still pretty glitzy lol. I redid the eyes to make them look more like a real person’s. All that’s left is touching up the small body details and completing the outfit, and the character creation will be done.
Next we’ve got creating the lines→taking VA applications→compose the lines in the game→create a dummy version and hire a programmer→hire a VA→creating background scenery and getting the male actor ready→debug the scenes, and it’s done!
TOO MUCH WORK! (>o<;)”
###Radiosity is hard to use.
“Getting the background bright, having them dark, I’m kinda worried about how to use this correctly. I ended up retouching the character model again. It’s been a tough struggle, but I think I’ll probably move on now lol.
I wonder if I’ll need video loops. I’d like to not have them, but that would take some huge amount of work, heh. Maybe I’ll just have to make the transitions between loops really smooth.”
###A little problem
“Thanks for the comments ^^
Good rendering took me quite a while. This time I was using FiberFX, which takes a ridiculously long time, so I tried the network rendering. I have two PC’s at home with Win7 and Vista on them, so I wanted to see if that would render faster. However, and it’s been this way for a long time, the network rendering is so bad it’s almost guaranteed to have some kind of problem, haha. Not understanding what the hell the official explanation was, I tried site after site, and I finally was able to get it to work…but for some reason there are jaggies on about every 2 or 3 frames out of 100. I looked back on the official site, and…turns out that if you’re using Radiosity/FiberFX, you’re gonna get flickering. The site says this, and of course it happened, hahaha. For some reason I’m not even mad. It’s just funny.
I was thinking about just doing special rendering on those frames, but considering the time it would take, I just couldn’t do it. Worst of all, this pixel filter thing screws up from time to time on the rendering, so my adventures through network rendering hell ended with no progress at all. TT;
Thinking about it, I decided to just use LightWave and do individual rendering. It’ll cost some money, but this way I know I can do the rendering. I had two older versions of LW on my older PCs that I hadn’t really used, so I upgraded those to the 2015 version, and now I have 3 PCs I can network render on.
It’s finally over… I can concentrate all my efforts on the motion work. Or so I thought…
But it seems as though they made some “improvements” and changes on FiberFX in the 2015 version… guh!
So I have to change up the settings and do some more work on both the 2015 and 11.62 versions. It’s better than jaggies…probably…
And so, this is what my room looks like right now lol. It’s all mixed up because I can’t get away from my main XP work computer.”
###More problems 3 (final)
“I gave up trying to work with LW2015. Or more accurately, I abandoned FiberFX and Radiosity. A detailed explanation would take way too long, so I’ll put it like this, I decided they’re not made for animation. I tried to make the promised deadline of the 20th, but because of this I couldn’t do it.
For still images, I think I’d love to use LW2015.
But the real question is, what do I do now?
I’m continuing on with LW7.5 and 9.6.
I used PCs A and B that have the 2015 version for the scenery rendering. But then I didn’t have enough power for the main rendering.
That’s when I brought out my old main PC. It’s an old relic I bought when I was starting out making doujin stuff. It had an old version of LW on it, so it wasn’t a bad PC at the time, but compared to today’s PCs, its specs are pretty poor.
But still, I went and looked for my dongle, and set up the parallel connector. A parallel port, LOL!
And it booted up!
It’s alive, haha! LW booted up and the license and everything worked too.
I set up Sasquatch in LW for some test rendering. The finished product with the after effects on it, is this.”
“The hair volume concerned me a little, but I can honestly say it’s a pretty good quality result. It obviously fails in comparison to Radiosity, but this is the lowest rendering setting too.
As for LW2015’s FiberFX, rendering the 200 frames takes about 30 minutes. I could lower the settings and it would be faster, but that would also make the quality suffer…
as if I’d ever do that lol.
But the worst part about LW2015 is the area lighting feature. It does make the still shot quality go up, but if you put two of these lights, which are essential, it DOUBLES the rendering time. Three of them QUADRUPLES it…just why, lol. And this is without Radiosity.
This is probably the thing that contributed the most of my giving up…just no.
With the older versions, you can add a bunch and it’ll increase the time by like 30 seconds^^;
There’s a line from the Dungeons and Dragons 2 movie by the Rogue Nim that I think applies here.
“This is the first time I’ve ever met such crybabies. You call yourselves heroes?” (I love this line lol)
I kind of wanted to say that to myself, haha. I think it’s a pretty good line to get some emotions flowing from someone.
Well, it’s not like this whole thing was totally pointless. I did learn that I can use the old versions of LW for some stuff too, so let’s put the crying away for now and move on.
Or rather, let’s back up the version I’m using, then move on, lol.
Thanks for your encouraging words, 神天くん and those from DStorm!
The left is my main PC, on the right is my old main PC. They always have that fan blowing on them. They’re both pretty “experienced.”
Also, it gets really hot in that small room with all those PCs, haha.”
Umemaro 3D in English
Starting from Lewd Consultation Room, all but the latest of Umemaro 3D’s movie collections have been subtitled in English, and two of them (Lewd Consultation Room and Twin SuccubusI) have even been professionally dubbed in English. The circle’s work is available for purchase at DMM and DLsite . For those fans that would like to support Umemaro’s scarce non-erotic content, the creator has set up a PIXTA, on which he sells safe for work illustrations.
We hope you enjoyed our short but insightful Umemaro 3D feature, and will join us again when we look behind the cum-stained development curtains of the lewdest games and art out there. Be sure to check out our other Behind the Lewds entries and follow us on Twitter for news on your favorite erotic games and more.
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