On June 27 2012, software mogul Valve released the free, open beta of Source Filmmaker to the gaming community through its Steam service, and the landscape of 3D pornography would be forever changed. The SFM platform made 3D film creation accessible to everyone, and no canon or fandom was safe from the Renaissance of hardcore, boundary pushing porn that came to exist as the direct result of this otherwise innocuous software release. Favorite characters from Bioshock, Dead or Alive, Overwatch, Tomb Raider, Life is Strange and Mass Effect became newly minted pornstars who could star in hundreds of new films simultaneously.
From this sprouted an underground community of artists, voice actors and full-fledged production studios that began from short loops and eventually expanded to the development of feature-length 3D films. While I’d initially intended to write one article about this 3D Production boon, but as I’ve learned more, it has become apparent to me that I need more than one article to adequately address the depth and variety of this community. I’ll be writing a series of artist profiles about this new breed of auteur, of which this is the first.
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce Lord Aardvark.
Even before SFM was released for free, Lord Aardvark was a scholar of programming software, “I went to university to pursue (and have successfully obtained, as of two years ago) a bachelor's in Computer Science. I have been a hobbyist programmer since I was 13 years old, having self-taught myself Lua, and then Java. By the time I went to university for CS, I had not only been programming for 6 years at the time (went to uni at 19 years old), but had developed and maintained a handful of Garry's Mod servers running my own custom gamemodes, and had experience running a gig as a small Garry's Mod community's lead game programmer for about 4 years.” Aardvark told me in response to how his affinity for programming began.
Today, Lord Aardvark is responsible for dozens of narrative works as well as hundreds of 3D models and moderations that he shares for free among the SFM artist community, broadening the appeal and availability of the software for novices. For his part, Aardvark insists that none of this facilitation is borne of benevolence. “I don't give a damn about facilitating other artists.”
“That isn't to say I have any particular disdain for facilitating other artists. It's just the simple fact that… I am in this for me, and me alone. Everything I do is for myself, and everything I make is for everything I do.”
Nonetheless, Aardvark’s stance on sharing his completed works comes from a deeply rooted belief structure that dates back to his previous coding experience, “I can't possibly tabulate all of the times I found someone who had solved a problem I was trying to solve, or made a tool that would benefit me, whose response to my asking them to share the knowledge or tool, was some flavor of "fuck off and do it yourself." There are entire communities who revolve around exclusivity. More than once have I found a Russian programming / modding forum, whose registration page has (in Russian, obviously): "Non-Russian IPs are immediately banned." Russian subcultures have a very strong feeling of "Russian efforts for Russian peoples" - if you're not Russian, you don't get to benefit from their labor, in any way.”
“And so, far before SFM was even conceived by Valve, I vowed to myself to never be like that. Any information I found, any tools I make, will forever and always be free and public, for anyone to use for anything they want. The only stipulation was they credit me for the work I did - beyond that, they could do anything with it.”
In spite of his insistence that he’s solely in this for himself, Lord Aardvark has created some of the most widely used and abused models in SFM. “It's hard to pin exactly when my blog started picking up steam, but I know that a notable achievement for my own popularity was with the creation of the original Curvy Elizabeth. I made her as a one-off joke, to poke fun at Shadman's recent-at-the-time Elizabeth artwork, which had his signature (at the time) "huge bolted-on tits" look. I made some shitty parody of one of Shadman's posters, watermarked it, and put it up on my blog."
“It practically exploded overnight. If you can count "almost 80 notes" as an explosion - which, to me, was over twice as many notes as anything I had ever made.” Aardvark explained when asked about times the reception of his work surprised him.
As to how he got started making dirty movies in the first place, Aardvark is again very specific about creating what he wanted to see, “Now, all my life, I have been picky at just about everything. Porn is not excluded from this. I found myself disgruntled with how live-action porn was done, constantly saying to myself "No, focus on that shot longer!; No, have more of that!; No, don't move to doing that next!"
Yet in playing exclusively to his own tastes, Aardvark’s work has resonated with a very wide audience, sometimes unexpectedly so. “Another positive example is my animation Pig Party. It's a shitty looping animation I made on livestream, in I think 3 hours total. It's Cop Marie Rose and Cop Honoka, from Dead or Alive, French kissing as two cops fuck their butts. And for some god-forsaken reason, it's entered my top 10 most-rated posts ever, ranking alongside my voiced animations. It's currently over 1500 fucking notes. And it's just a shitty loop I slapped together while entertaining a live audience and giving by-the-seat-of-my-pants technical advice.”
As Lord Aardvark continues to make his own work, his models have been reused by other animators countless times, expanding the roster of hard-working 3D model actresses. He’s recently continued his work with Samus Aran, after temporarily postponing his work on the third installation of “Blue Star,” a Mass Effect narrative.
“I have a lot of Mass Effect stuff. A lot of Mass Effect stuff. But that isn't out of a preference for Mass Effect. Instead, it's because Mass Effect has one of the most diverse and rich cast of attractive female characters to work with. There's a lot of different idea archetypes that can work perfectly with them.
“Submissiveness? Liara. Sneakiness? Kasumi Goto. By-the-books? Miranda or Ashley. Bad-ass? Femshep. Punk? Jack. Bona-fide lesbian? Samantha Traynor. Super-slut? Kelly Chambers.
“Pretty much every character trope you can think of is not only represented in Mass Effect, but their representative is attractive and has a well-defined and fleshed out personality.”
In addition to the release of all his models, props and costumes, Lord Aardvark leads a weekly Picarto tutorial series about how to build and operate SFM effects. At the forefront of this SFM movement, Lord Aardvark is exceedingly approachable and adamantly in favor of furthering the advancement of adult SFM artwork.
Check out some of his longer movies, hosted with the artist's permission on Hentai0.com
Mass Effect - Blue Star Booty, Part 1
Mass Effect - Blue Star Booty, Part 2
Check out his Tumblr and Patreon for more of his amazing work.
