It’s Tuesday! That doesn’t mean anything in and of itself, other than the fact that I’ve arbitrarily decided it’s time to pay the Empire Club of Custom Order Maid 3D 2 another visit. And that has nothing to do with it being Tuesday.

Today, we continue getting to know our “main three” maids a little better as Hi-chan tries her best to convince Majima-san to join her on her quest to become an idol maid. Aya, meanwhile, has numerous things to practice. And who knows what that mysterious little fox girl is up to?

Dust off your membership card and come on in, and be aware that there are NSFW images and themes ahead!

Well, here we are again. A million credits in the bank, four maids in the… maid-recharging chambers and a club rating of one blue blob. Time to get to work.

First, shopping! This isn’t just for fun… there’s a bunch of materials here you’ll need to buy if you want to upgrade your Empire Club’s facilities. So I purchase some basic materials to get started on tooling up the theatre.

I have a bunch of money left over, though, so I blow it all on a bunny girl outfit. We’ll save that for a special occasion.

I decide to set new girl Kyuko to work on doing up the theatre. She seems like a handy type, and doesn’t complain when I ask her to get on with it. You need two people to actually man the theatre, anyway, and I’d rather Hi-chan get on with a bit of training.

The initial upgrade to the theatre adds some music facilities, and increases the experience gain rate. Given how relatively cheap it was to acquire the materials for this, I have no reason not to do this right now.

Both Hi-chan and Majima-san have a bad morning, but they learn a bit from their mistakes, at least. I drop in on Aya’s sommelier training, and she seems to be doing just fine.

I decide to sit down with Kyuko for a chat as she works in the theatre that evening. There’s something not quite right about her… I suspect kitsune shenanigans, but she seems harmless enough for now. Plus she’s cute. And good with DIY, apparently.

Boopy-doopy-boop-boop SEX

During tonight’s session, Aya masters the art of missionary position sex, meaning we can try some more adventurous stuff next time. The astute among you may notice that I’ve only been doing the dirty with Aya. This is because 1) she’s my favourite and 2) I want to see how maids get on without any of the sex training side of things. In theory, they should be fine, given the existence of the all-ages version of the game, but I’m still curious to see if it affects anything.

A good evening for everyone. The three girls I’m not having sex with all bring in a nice amount of money for the club, and everyone seems happy.

Aya addresses me the following day. It seems she’s a little hesitant about the “customer service” aspect of her job; she worries that she’s not interesting enough or able to have a “normal” conversation with guests.

She wonders what could possibly be enjoyable about “just” talking to her. Trying my best not to ogle her breasts when she’s sitting like that, I inform her that it’s her job to figure out how to make a conversation entertaining. Tough love and all that. She seems satisfied with this explanation.

Meanwhile, Majima-san is busy looking at dirty websites on her smartphone. Purely to check whether or not they’ve been deleted yet, obviously.

Unfortunately for her doubtlessly throbbing genitals, Hi-chan bursts in without knocking before she gets a chance to do anything too shameful. It seems the youngster wants some “girl talk”.

Or rather, she wants to try and convince Majima-san that it really would be nice if she’d reconsider the whole “becoming an idol” thing. She resorts to a flagrantly transparent bit of emotional manipulation, but she has a point: you shouldn’t deprive yourself of doing something you’re interested in because someone who isn’t you says that you “can’t”.

It seems Hi-chan and Majima-san are getting along rather well. Majima-san’s tough outer shell is showing some cracks, and Hi-chan is clearly a lot smarter than how she likes to portray herself.

The following day, I’m looking over the schedule when I discover a book of sex tips. Feeling a bit sore from the previous evening’s ministrations — and suspecting Aya might be feeling the same — I invite her to spend the evening studying.

During the day, I observe Hi-chan working in the theatre. It seems she’s not altogether comfortable with drunken customers erring on the side of sexual harassment. I encourage her to take a firm but fair stance when such things occur, and reassure her that I will step in if necessary.

The dear girl understands completely, and puts the randy old fart well and truly in his place.

A good morning for most of the crew, aside from Aya, who makes a right old mess in the bar. Perhaps she was missing my constant supervision?

Later that day, Majima-san comes to deliver a report on the club’s comings and goings. She’s so reliable, and I’m lucky to have her on the staff.

For a moment, I feel like there’s something more she wants to tell me, but she claims it’s nothing and heads off to do Majima things.

I take a moment to review my maids’ performance. They’re all doing pretty well and developing clear specialisms. Aya likes me the most right now, largely due to a combination of my having spent most time supervising her work and having spent most evenings up until this point banging her.

I also check what our facilities need for some further upgrades. It seems that we can get the training room waxed without any particularly special materials required, so I decide to set Kyuko on that task in the near future.

I find Majima-san practising her piano later that morning. She seems satisfied with her technical abilities, but is concerned she doesn’t really understand the expressive side of things. This is not a surprise to me, but I choose to keep quiet. She’ll get there.

Kyuko gets to work on the training room. The improvements are minor but will help: the maids training there will get more experience.

The morning goes well for everyone except Hi-chan, who knocks over a vase and inadvertently pulls the heads off an entire bunch of flowers while trying to save it. Well, again, as long as she learned something, it’s all fine.

I rendezvous with Aya that evening, interested to see what she learned from her study session. Quite a bit, it seems; we decide to try a few things we’ve never done before.

Nice

She seems rather fond of doggy style, worrying that she’ll get “addicted”. I’m okay with this. You may also notice that I now have an actual penis instead of a semi-transparent blur; you can thank this excellent guide on Steam, which provides links to an “All-in-One” mod that uncensors the game and adds a number of other helpful bits and pieces. Despite the guide being on Steam, it also works for the Nutaku and S-court releases of the game — you just don’t need to buy the 18+ DLC in those cases because those are already 18+ versions.

Back in character. Aya levels up her doggy style immediately; evidently it is to her liking. She’s so close to mastering the art of blowjob, too, but just needs a little extra push. She’s learned a few new tricks in the meantime, as well.

Hi-chan performs badly in the theatre that evening, and doesn’t make that much money. I’m not too mad, though, because Majima and Kyuko both do well, putting me back well above the 1 million credits mark.

Later that night, Hi-chan and Majima-san are talking outside.

Majima-san confides in Hi-chan that she doesn’t really like herself — not from a perspective of self-hatred or anything, but because the way her mind works frustrates her.

She is cursed with an overly logical nature that means if things won’t be perfect the first time she tries something, she simply won’t try it at all. It seems that this is the main thing that’s been holding her back from joining Hi-chan on the Idol Express.

Majima-san admits that the reason she stuck around at the Empire Club is because she wanted to try and break those habits and get out of her rut. She wanted to challenge herself to try new things… and she’s starting to see a potential opportunity to do so.

Having not been privy to this conversation, I’m surprised when Majima-san bursts in my office and starts talking about how dumb idols are and how there are much better ways to promote the Empire Club.

I’m even more surprised when she says that she wants to try singing a song I commissioned for Hi-chan and her as-yet nonexistent group.

To celebrate the occasion, I decide to take the girls into the photo studio for a commemorative photo shoot.

I begin with the selection of an appropriate background. Backstage seems like a good one. You can choose from facilities you haven’t yet unlocked in the main game, or you can turn the background scenery off altogether and have a coloured backdrop instead. You can use this in conjunction with image editing software for “chroma key” effects — cutting out the maids and putting them in various other circumstances not possible in the game itself.

Hi-chan first. I summon her and place her in front of the stairs, pondering what we should do for the photo.

I sit her down on the stairs and position her for maximum cuteness.

We need to do something about that weird face she’s pulling, though. A gentle smile should do the trick for now. Veterans of Custom Maid 3D 2 will be interested in the “Expression Detail” panel, which is new to Custom Order Maid 3D 2: this allows you much finer control over facial expressions by providing sliders for various eye, brow and mouth movements and shapes.

Custom Maid 3D 2 veterans will doubtless be well familiar with the Pose Edit tool, however, which allows you to move the characters’ various joints around to create custom poses. This uses a system called Inverse Kinematics, where you move an endpoint (such as a knee or foot) and the bits that are attached to it are taken care of for you.

This means two things: firstly, you can’t stretch arms and legs beyond anything that looks natural, and secondly, you don’t need to painstakingly adjust every single joint just to get someone sitting in a particular way. Just position the endpoint (and perhaps midpoint) and then you can worry about making fine adjustments if necessary.

Here I’ve positioned Hi-chan so she’s put one foot up on a step, and has a hand resting on that knee. It’s a nice casual pose that looks different from the default sitting animation. The “body” panel you can see on the left allows you to select specific joints and rotate them independently of the Inverse Kinematics movement, allowing for much finer control over your pose.

I position her other hand on her thigh so she at least looks reasonably natural. It takes practice and experimentation to create natural-looking poses, but it’s great fun to play with. You can use any of the existing animations as a starting point, and study their arrangement of joints and endpoints to get an idea of how things work.

Time to bring in Majima-san. She doesn’t seem like the sort of maid who would be sitting on some cold metal stairs, so I opt to have her standing to one side. I think it’d be nice to have her leaning on the handrail, though, so out comes the Pose Edit window again.

A bit of moving her hand and elbow and some minor rotation on her wrist joint, and we have something that works quite nicely.

Pose Edit goes into so much detail that you can customise the joints on individual hands and feet if you so desire. Alternatively, you can take a simpler approach and simply control how spread the character’s fingers are, and how much they’re curled up into a fist. I tweak these settings to get Majima-san’s hand looking reasonably natural.

For her other arm, I feel like a defiant hand-on-hip is very Majima, so I arrange that. I also move one of her legs outwards a little bit so it looks a bit more like she’s leaning her weight on the handrail. It’s the little things.

Time to bring in Aya and unleash some headpats! Aya seems like the sort of big sister type who would headpat Hi-chan, so I  set to work making that happen.

Once again, a bit of careful joint and endpoint manipulation gets Aya’s hand into a position where it’s not seeping into poor Hi-chan’s head.

By default, the maids all face the camera, but you can turn this behaviour off in the Expression menu. Once you’ve done this, you can use Pose Edit to rotate the neck joint and get them facing any way you want. You can even go full Exorcist if you want to, but please do not do that. Treat your maids with respect!

Now for Kyuko. As the scene starts to take shape, I feel like I want her peeking in cheekily from somewhere. Just behind Majima-san, peeping through the bars of the handrails, seems good. I move her into position.

There we go. But that composition is all wrong. She looks a bit unnatural there.

No matter, a bit of fiddling with her spinal joints allows me to get her leaning forwards to peer at us. There are several spinal joints in total, so by manipulating them you can make all sorts of interesting poses, not just standing and sitting.

I then use the Pose Edit tool to get her draping her hands around the bars in a casual, child-like manner. I know she’s going to turn out to be like 900 years old or something, but this works for now.

After that, I turn the lights out. Then I accidentally fling Kyuko up in the air because I wasn’t paying attention to what was selected. I put her back into position.

This lighting panel is another new addition over Custom Maid 3D 2, which only allowed you to control global light settings. Here, you can create up to four additional light sources in the scene, which can either be point lights (light emanates in all directions from the point, like a lamp) or spotlights (light emanates and spreads out from a single point, like a… well, like a spotlight). Here I’ve set up a spotlight and positioned it above the girls’ heads.

To improve the composition further, I set to work on using the camera settings for some depth blur. Here, you can set the focal distance, the focus field size, camera aperture and variance. With a bit of fiddling, you can really make your stars “pop” while your background is suitably muted.

And as a finishing touch for some atmosphere, I add a bit of fog to the scene, primarily behind the girls, rising up from the floor and refracting the light to create some spooky silhouettes. Good stuff.

If you want to make screenshots with dialogue, there’s a Message Box tool you can use. I will not be held responsible for any misuse. Please remember the golden rule of Be Good To Your Maids.

Once you’ve set up a scene, you can easily save it for later recall, then use it as a basis for something else or take some shots from other angles.

And here’s our final result, also seen in the header to this article! Good work, maids, we’ve had a fine week. Keep up the great work and your goshujin-sama will remain a very happy man.

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More about Custom Order Maid 3D 2

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