Blog #1 – A (Not So) Brief History of Master Dan

Hello Friends,

My name is Master Dan Hibiki and prior to April 2017 I knew nothing about animation, digital art, Photoshop or anything really. I don’t know much now either, but to understand what brought me to April ’17 and on to the little I know today we need to go back a bit further.

Let me start by saying this: That if you are going to say anything about Master Dan, say that he is a sick hentai loving fuck, he always has been and he always will. I still remember the joy and confusion I experienced the first time I realised that crazy awesome Japanese dudes were making professional quality porn comics about all my favourite computer games. Later I would experience a similar revelation about Overwatch porn, but it all started with Final Fantasy hentai. After many years of leaching all the free hentai and doujinshi I could get my sticky little fingers on I started to feel like I wanted to give something back. After all, this porn I was enjoying so much was made by people just like me, so why not me? I decided then that I would make a doujin of my very own (now, I know that it wouldn’t technically be doujinshi, but it’s an easy shorthand so give me a break).

I set about writing and learning to draw. The writing came to me in floods and before long I had a fully fleshed out, multi-chapter concept that I was aching to start producing. The drawing however, did not come as quickly. Or at all. I plugged away but for every tiny improvement I made and everything I learned only revealed an ocean of stuff I didn’t know. After two years I felt I was little closer to beginning the project than when I started, still unable to produce even an acceptable first panel. It was demoralising, having this grand idea that I was utterly incapable of actualising. So I did what all great men don’t, I gave up.

It was around this time that I had started to notice the rise in prevalence of 3D porn comics and I became curious as to where it was all coming from. At first I just assumed it was a small community of super talented 3D modellers doing something dirty on the side, which I guess it was at first. But soon there was so much of it about that it became apparent to me this was no longer just the purview of professional modellers, it was available to the layman as well. It was as I looked into how people were making this that I discovered Source Filmmaker and Overwatch porn.

This had all somehow passed me by as I had previously written off amateur 3D porn animation as being largely bullshit that looked awful. But while I was spending my time working and trying to learn to draw, the 3D porn community had come on in leaps and bounds. Upon realising this it occurred to me that I could very easily use SFM to bring my doujin to life. While I initially only wanted to make a comic, as I was watching the tutorials about how SFM worked it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t limited to still images. Animation was daunting, but not impossible. I quickly found sfmlab.com and realised that everything I needed was already there and the only thing holding me back was not knowing how to animate. April 2017 had arrived.

So I started over, screw drawing, I’ma be a NSFW animator instead. I set off to make my first bouncing ball and then to make the scout jump in there air and then to make him walk across the stage and so on. Once I was done with the value tutorials I watched all 78 of Jimer Lins’ SFM Tip of the day tutorials, I read ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams (which I credit as being THE thing that helped me the most in learning this. If you have any interest at all in learning animation buy that book). I made walk cycle after walk cycle to learn the ropes and then something amazing happened. I got good, not great, but good enough at least. Nine months of learning and practice had paid off and I was starting to create walk cycles that (while not of professional quality) no longer looked like they were made by someone who didn’t know what they were doing.

It felt great. Finally after all this time to have the means to take the thing I saw in my head and reproduce it for other people to see. What I had been incapable of expressing with pen and pencil was now wide open to me. My only limits were my own imagination and SFM’s 4GB memory cap. Tired of all this test environment, walk cycle bullshit I cracked on with a real project and spent a couple of months on the Mei goes on Backroom Casting Couch video. I had about 3 minutes of animation done when the Lifeguard and Stitch models came up and I knew immediately that I had to do something with them. I mean, it’s the Lifeguard! The Mei video is just two people in a room talking and then fucking, it wasn’t really going to push me animation wise. But the idea I came up with for the Lifeguard had people running, crawling, jumping, falling over and throwing fruit at each other. I decided to the delay the Mei project and focus instead on the Lifeguard video.

On paper it was a stupid idea because your first real animation project should not involve non-verbal acting, physical comedy or long complicated single take shots. But fuck paper. Choosing something really challenging was the right call because while it might have slowed me down production wise, what I learned from the myriad mistakes I made along the way taught me so much more than the Mei video would have done. And when I go back to Mei that video will be all the better for it too. By the way, I’m scrapping all the original animation for Mei and starting over from scratch. Some of the animation is just embarrassing compared to what I’m doing now. I will release the original first 3 minutes as a rough cut once we get onto the Mei video proper though.

While I had been focusing on animation primarily I was also experimenting with posters as well. Since the animations take so long I wanted some content I could knock up quickly as well plus I had some models I really wanted to play with. Also having a gallery of images to put up in places like e-hentai and and hentai foundry seemed like a good way to promote the videos. The plan was to centre everything around a tumblr account. I even got so far as putting the banner on the page and adding at tumblr.com/masterdansdojo watermark to all my posters. I think you all know what happened next.

Fuck. Now what do I do? I was concerned that until the community settled on a replacement, my work stood a very good chance of getting lost in the shuffle. Plus what if the next site decided they were going to bounce all us honest god fearing perverts out with no warning too? The animation was nearing completion and I wanted Master Dan’s Dojo to have a permanent home before it’s release and people started knowing who I was. Unfortunately, it seemed like there was only one 100% safe path. I needed a website.

So once again we start learning something else from scratch since I don’t have the money to pay some jamoke to do it for me. Turns out that it’s not really that hard since you have tools like elementor page builder for wordpress that does most of the heaving lifting for you without needing to actually know any code at all. I built this whole site myself in three weeks from scratch using only youtube tutorials and freely available tools and widgets with absolutely zero knowledge of how to do so beforehand. I’m not saying that I’m some kind of genius, I’m saying building your own website in 2019 turned out not be as difficult as you might think it is. Just don’t try to view it on your phone. I haven’t got that bit figured out yet.

As I write this today we are at the end of the three weeks website building. This blog post is the last thing I have to do and the Master Dan Empire is officially founded and will sit here quietly until such time as I’ve got some real animation content to share and people start to take notice. Hopefully they will anyway.

And there we have it, A (Not So) Brief History of Master Dan. From pimply faced teenage masturbator to jaded somewhat grown up adult masturbator.

I’m just getting started with whole animation thing and I hope you will come on this sleazy journey with me, because it think it’s going to be a fun ride.

Thank you for your time.