Here’s the part nobody tells you upfront: the studio behind two of the three tools in this comparison doesn’t exist anymore. Illusion, the Japanese developer behind Koikatsu and Honey Select, shut down development and sales on August 18, 2023. No warning tour, no “we’ll be back,” just a Steam announcement and then silence. A group of former Illusion staff regrouped under a new name, ILLGAMES, and they’re still shipping games in 2026. But ILLGAMES doesn’t sell Koikatsu. It doesn’t sell Honey Select. Those two titles are now orphans, kept alive by whatever stock is left in your regional storefront and by a modding community that never got the memo to stop.That matters if you’re walking into this scene for the first time in 2026. You’re not choosing between three actively supported products. You’re choosing between one tool that’s still very much alive (Valve’s Source Filmmaker) and two that are running on fumes and fan patches. None of that makes Koikatsu or Honey Select bad picks. It just changes how you should think about buying them, modding them, and trusting what you read about their “current” storefront status, including this article.
If you’ve never touched any of this before, I already broke down what SFM porn actually is in an earlier piece: short version, it’s Valve’s free filmmaking tool repurposed by a community that never asked Valve’s permission. Read that first if the term is new to you. This one assumes you’ve got the basics and want to know how SFM stacks up against the two Illusion games everyone in 3D hentai circles keeps name-dropping.
Source Filmmaker: still free, still alive, still a grind
SFM is Valve’s own tool, built to make the “Meet the Team” shorts for Team Fortress 2. It went into public beta on June 27, 2012 and hit Steam two weeks later. It’s free. It’s still on Steam right now with a Very Positive rating from tens of thousands of reviews. Valve never pulled it, never sunset it, and as far as anyone can tell, never plans to.What Valve didn’t plan for was a small army of animators ripping character models out of games like Overwatch and posing them into scenes Valve never signed off on. That’s the entire NSFW SFM economy: game-ripped assets, imported into a free animation engine, animated by hand. It’s a real skill. Keyframing believable motion takes patience most hobbyists don’t have, which is why the polished SFM shorts you’ve seen took someone weeks, not an afternoon.Where does it live? Model-sharing hubs like SFMLab and Open3DLab, plus tagging communities such as Rule 34 Animated for the finished clips. If you want a broader library that isn’t SFM-specific, SFMCompile is the compilation site most people land on first.The one thing you’ll hear a lot, and shouldn’t take at face value, is that “everyone’s moved to Blender now.” They haven’t. There’s a real and growing interest in Blender, thanks to tools like SourceIO and HoovyTools that let creators drag SFM sessions straight into Blender’s modern renderer. SFM’s 32-bit memory ceiling and its habit of crashing on complex scenes push people toward it. But that’s a gradual drift, not an exodus. SFM is still where a huge chunk of this content gets made in 2026, and it’s still free.
Koikatsu is where the cel-shaded, distinctly anime look comes from. Illusion released the original in Japan in April 2018, then brought an English version, Koikatsu Party, to Steam in June 2019. Unlike SFM, you’re not animating from scratch. You’re building a character, saving it, and posing it.The engine room here is CharaStudio, Koikatsu’s studio mode. Characters get saved as PNG files, “cards”, with all their data embedded invisibly inside the image. Load a card someone else made, drop it into a scene, adjust lighting and poses, and you’ve got output without touching a single animation curve. That’s the whole appeal: a much lower skill floor than SFM, with a specific anime aesthetic SFM’s game-ripped models can’t replicate.Cards and finished scenes circulate on Pixiv, DeviantArt, and Patreon. If you want the review-site rundown on the game itself, including where people are still finding copies, check the Koikatsu Party page.Now, the honest part. Illusion’s own Steam post said sales of every Illusion product, Koikatsu included, would end on August 18, 2023. Some Reddit users report the Steam listing is still live and purchasable in certain regions well into 2025. Nobody’s storefront experience seems to match anyone else’s. My advice: don’t trust a blanket “yes it’s for sale” or “no it’s gone” from any single source, including this one. Check your own regional Steam store before you assume either way.
If Koikatsu is the anime option, Honey Select is Illusion’s realistic-3D answer. The original Honey Select launched in Japan in September 2016 with a bundled studio mode called Honey Studio. Honey Select 2, often shortened to HS2, followed, with an English “DX” Steam release landing in 2022. The studio mode got a glow-up too, rebranded Studio NEO, and it’s the same posing-and-rendering workflow Koikatsu fans already know, just aimed at a more photorealistic character model instead of cel-shading.That’s really the entire decision between these two Illusion games: cel-shaded anime versus realistic 3D. Same studio-based workflow, same card-sharing culture, different visual target.Purchasability is the same story as Koikatsu: Illusion announced an end to sales in August 2023, HS2’s Steam page still technically exists, and community reports on current availability conflict with each other depending on region and timing. Check for yourself rather than taking anyone’s word on it. For the review-site breakdown of the game and where people source it, see the Honey Select page.
Which one should you actually pick?
If you want total creative control and don’t mind a real learning curve, SFM (or increasingly, Blender) is still the only free option that lets you build a scene from nothing. It rewards patience. It’s brutal for a first-timer.If you want anime-style characters and you’d rather pose a finished character than animate one from scratch, Koikatsu’s card system gets you there fastest. Thousands of pre-made cards exist so you’re never starting from zero.If you want that same low-effort posing workflow but prefer a realistic look over cel-shading, Honey Select or HS2 is the equivalent pick. Same CharaStudio-style logic, different visual language.None of them require you to buy anything if you’re just browsing finished output. Every platform above feeds the same communities: 3D Porn Sites is the broadest hub if you just want to see what people are making without touching any of the software yourself.
The IP problem nobody advertises
SFM’s biggest weakness isn’t the learning curve, it’s what the models are actually made of. Almost all NSFW SFM content leans on ripped game assets, characters pulled straight out of a studio’s files without permission. That’s a real legal exposure, and it’s not hypothetical.In May 2016, shortly after Overwatch launched, Blizzard issued DMCA takedowns against SFM creators using ripped Overwatch character models. One well-documented case: a creator known as “Spornm” had a video pulled after a third-party copyright notice targeted content built from those assets, despite the creator’s argument that the models had been heavily modified by the time they were uploaded. Blizzard’s own director at the time called the situation “an inevitable reality of the internet.” A fan-run publication built around the same content got shut down via cease-and-desist the following year.Nothing on that scale has repeated publicly since, but the mechanism never went away. Ripped assets stay legally exposed, which is exactly why so much SFM output lives on decentralized boorus and tagging sites like Rule 34 Animated rather than on any single centralized platform a studio could shut down in one move. Koikatsu and Honey Select sidestep most of this because the characters are built inside the game’s own creation tools, not ripped from someone else’s IP, though modders bolting on unlicensed likenesses is its own separate gray zone.
None of these three tools have an official monetization program, so creators route around that through general adult-content platforms. Patreon allows fictional, animated, and game-character content on 18+ pages behind a paywall, as long as characters read as adults and nothing crosses into hyperrealistic or real-person territory. That covers a lot of Koikatsu and Honey Select output, and a decent chunk of SFM work too, provided the source characters aren’t canonically minors.On the Japanese side, Fantia and Pixiv Fanbox serve the same crowdfunding role, though both have been tightening rules around what counts as acceptable content. DLsite works differently: it’s a straight storefront rather than a subscription platform, and it’s one of the main places creators sell finished 3D hentai CG sets and games outright. If you want to browse that ecosystem directly, the DLsite games page covers it.For the modding and card-sharing side specifically, rather than finished-content sales, F95Zone is where a lot of the Koikatsu and Honey Select community actually organizes: patches, translated mods, and card-sharing threads live there more than almost anywhere else.
Frequently asked questions
Is SFM actually free?
Yes. It’s been free on Steam since 2012 and Valve has never charged for it or announced plans to.
Can you still buy Koikatsu or Honey Select in 2026?
Genuinely unclear, and anyone who tells you a flat yes or no is guessing. Illusion announced an end to all sales back in August 2023, but some users report regional Steam listings are still active. Check your own store before assuming either way.
What’s the actual style difference between Koikatsu and Honey Select?
Koikatsu is cel-shaded anime. Honey Select and HS2 go for a realistic 3D look. The character-creation and studio-posing workflow is otherwise very similar between them.
Is making or watching this stuff legal?
Watching finished, adult, fictional content isn’t the legal risk. The exposure sits with creators using ripped game assets without permission, which is exactly what got Blizzard to issue takedowns back in 2016. Content built inside Koikatsu’s or Honey Select’s own character creators avoids that specific problem, since nothing’s being lifted from another studio’s files.
Where do creators actually post this stuff?
Cards and scenes circulate on Pixiv and DeviantArt. Paid content and subscriptions run through Patreon, Fantia, and Pixiv Fanbox. Finished games and CG sets sell through DLsite. Mods and community patches mostly organize on F95Zone.
Start with what you actually want to do. If you want to browse finished output with zero setup, 3D Porn Sites and Rule 34 Animated get you there in two clicks. If you want to make something yourself and don’t mind a steep curve, SFM costs nothing and is still fully supported by Valve. If you’d rather pose a finished character than animate one, Koikatsu or Honey Select gets you working faster, assuming you can track down a working copy, so check your regional store rather than trusting a random forum post.Whichever tool you land on, the same names keep showing up around the edges of this scene: Pixiv for art and cards, and if you’d rather hunt by fetish than by tool, the tag-based browsing approach works just as well here as anywhere else. If you’re curious how 3D hand-built content compares to what AI generators are producing now, that’s a whole separate rabbit hole worth pulling on its own. There’s also a growing overlap with VR hentai if you want these same character styles in a headset instead of on a screen.And look, I get that this is a lot of tools, storefronts, and gray zones to keep straight. The shortcut: everything I’ve named here, every game, hub, and community, is reviewed over on ThePornDude.vip, so you can skip the guesswork and go straight to the source.
