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Yeah, you can add around 15 years to the age they look to get the age they really are. It's just part of the package deal when you're so ridiculously perfect. (But also somewhat Truth in Television(?), because WM's parents both looked much younger than they really were, until very close to the end.)
Ooof. I'm very bad with eyes, because... and this is going to sound very strange, I was accidentally raised to not make eye-contact. It was something I had to learn as an adult. People have thought I had Aspberger's, because I didn't even look at them while we were talking. I still find eye-contact challenging, because I feel that I'm constantly giving the Bertine Zetlitz stare.
I tried to make it look like TV light, but that's as good as it got. The ghost light is set to "monitor," which should give that same cold, sharp light a TV screen does. It was a pretty fast-rendering image, though. I could try again.
Thar. The light be blue. I did it the cheater way, by changing the surface colour of the ghostlight to pale blue, because that's the only method I know.
After a lot of trying and failing, I discovered the fact that making the light-pane the same size and shape as I imagined the TV screen to be didn't give the best effect. Making it a long, thin horizontal strip looked a lot better. I think this is as much as I'll fiddle with this render.
"'There are some rays of sun outside,' said Dad. 'Go WaLk ThE dOg.' Why didn't HE take the dog out then, if he thought it wanted a walk?"
"We're not going to wait for you, Precious. Roller-derping hasn't been cool since... oh, I dunno? Since Mom was born?"
"Dude, Mom's not that old! Oh, and we're going to tell her that you left your helmet at home."
"And your bum-protector, because that's the part you do most of your thinking with."
"Spe-speshul?"
"What, Jane?
"I'm big girl. I wanna walk."
"Oh, really? Are you now? Answer me this: Do your feet reach down to the sidewalk?"
"No."
"No, they don't. So are you big, then?"
"Y-yes..?"
"Okay, I have a deal. We won't tell Mom or Dad about you going roller-skating without a helmet, if you don't tell them that we borrowed Mom's Karen-SUV. That goes for you too, Jane.
"My shouwder hurts."
"Allright, I won't tell! Thanks for taking us to get take-away!"
"Yeah, the alternative was cooking, so there was no alternative."
"Hey Nerniya, look. It's those weirdo twins."
"Oh no. Those two creep me out. Their whole family does. When the least creepy member is a zombie baby, you know there's something wrong with them."
"I don't like how they give being freaky blonde twins such a bad name!"
"And they have such crazy names, too. What were their parents thinking?"
"Maybe they weren't? Thinking, I mean."
"Hey look! That's those two creepy twins over there."
"Oh, yeah. The ones who are called stuff like Tanganyika and Serbia, right?"
"Yep, that's them. Their whole family is loonytoons, like their grandfather married his own grandmother, or something."
"I hate how people are confusing us for them! We don't look anything like that."
"They're not even identical, they're fake twins!"
This series of pictures took much longer to set up than to render. They came out pretty dark, but that was actually intentional. I wanted to make it look like the kind of overcast, dreary mid-summer days we've been having around here the past week or so. You probably know the type, when the clouds are so thick it almost looks like it's night at noon. I'll leave it up to each one to decide which pair of twins they think is the craziest.
This post is All About Aubrey. She's kind of unique (heh) among my characters in that she originates in DS. Most of the others have a background as original story characters or Sims, Aubrey doesn't. She came into existence because I was messing around in Studio two years ago, with very little content and even less experience.
Out of curiosity, and apparently a lack of better things to do yesterday(?), I extracted previous iterations of Aubrey from very old scenes. I was amused by how she got steadily taller with each new incarnation (inpixelation?), almost as if she were growing up.
Starting from the left, we have the first child character I ever dialed. I had no idea what I was doing, apparently, because her ribcage is... to put it bluntly, misshapen. This version wasn't even called Aubrey. Her name was "Lola," because I thought she was a creepy and wrong child so I named her after Lolita. Yes. She did appear in one render, but I'm not going to post or link it. The warrior outfit she wore isn't really appropriate child fashion, although it's perfectly SFW and all that jazz.
Next to her is the first "real" Aubrey. She's taller and has less warped proportions. (And she's sinking into the floor. I didn't notice that until after this set-up no longer existed.) You can see a couple of renders featuring this Aubrey on the first page of the thread. At that point I had collected some free clothing (especially from Wilmap) that was more child-friendly. This was when Aubrey's personality started emerging. I began thinking of her as a young girl who was in a situation where she had to make do with whatever she could get. My runtime was pretty much a barren wasteland at the time, and my fertile (hurr hurr) imagination started picturing a scenario that was more than just regular poverty. Aubrey lived in the aftermath of some kind of infrastructural breakdown. (Hellooooooo 2020!) She and the other characters were displaced, hanging out in woodsy and remote areas. Anyplace more urban must have been rife with death-viruses and riots. At this point I had started looking at DS content with desire of possession, and it was easy to imagine that Aubrey felt the same way. Uh, what can I say? My characters tend to become very real to me. I don't mean that I have lapses where I believe they exist, or anything to that degree. It's just always been very easy for me to start developing complex ideas of the characters' identities, almost by accident. To Aubrey, in her fictional pixel universe, the models in Daz Store and Rendo promos were glamourous celebrities. She wanted to grow up to be pretty like them, to wear the kind of clothes they did. Alas, she was just a homely child, leading an austere and rather unenviable life. It kind of struck a chord with me, I guess.
The third version is mainly different from the first in height, and it looks like her head is also a bit proportionally smaller. You can see she's also wearing PA clothing now. The 2018 PC+ sale broke my resolve to keep 3D as a free hobby, LOL! Some of the first paid content I owned were the Aussie Girl and Mall Girl sets, and I had everyone wearing different mix-and-match combinations of them for a while. Yes, I paid for Genesis 1 stuff. Have a moment to get that out of your system. x) It looks like Aubrey's life got somewhat better, though. If I accidentally predicted the predicaments of this year, maybe this is a ray of hope.
Aubrey number 3? 4? errr... the one on the right, was a radical redesign I made back in early 2019, after I'd had an involuntary break from DS'ing, due to installation troubles and crap. Aubrey got even taller, her headshape got a revision, and I did some adjustment on her features. When I tried Thorne's Wednesday's skin materials on her, something just clicked right, and I decided that this was how Aubrey was going to look from now on. Now she was pretty, transforming from a duckling to a young swan, to use an old cliché. She doesn't look like a 12-year-old anymore, so I suppose she needs an age-bump. Maybe she's fourteen now? I don't think she looks any older than that.
The previous versions of Aubrey all wore adult characters' materials, which contributed a lot to her looking homely and kind of just "off." Just for fun (I have low standards) I decided to see what her unintended age-progression would look like with materials that were meant for a young character. I plopped the Andrea for Julie skin materials on Lola and the smaller Aubreys, and voilá. She's still somewhat "homely," but all the creepiness is gone. And yes, I did fix "Lola's" ribcage expansion. Poor child looked like she was about to give birth to a Xenomorph.
Uh, WinterMoon (or TigerAnne, or whatever you're calling yourself right now), why don't you just transfer Aubrey to Genesis 8, if you like her that much?
Well, I could do that, obviously. But they way I see it, that would actually be counterproductive. The thing with Aubrey is that she's a Genesis 1 girl, with the limitations which come with that. Although she has a better selection of clothes and hair now, a part of her will always be that little girl from the wasteland, who couldn't go to school, who wore second hand clothing that smelled like desinfectants.
But Genesis 1 is totally outdated, and I don't understand what's going on in the heads of people who insist on using that, and V4, and other old stuff. You can transfer the clothes to G8, and then you just decide that she only wears that. Why are you making things so difficult????
Because I want to? And that concludes todays post. Wear a mask, eat your vegetables, spay and neuter your pets, and be nice to your family. Peace!
People You May Know:
Justine Dupree Clishmaclaver
You have two mutual friends on FaceBook.
Justine is your cousin's co-worker, and you've never really met her in real life. You think you'd recognise her if you ever were to see her, though. Sometimes she's just got magic coming sparkling out of her.
Dana
Getting an Eastern European vibe here...
Also, getting a unicorn princess cupcake vibe here
Hee hee, thanks!
Now that you say it, Justine looks a little bit like a cartoon/caricature version of a Polish girl I went to school with. She was nowhere near as pointy-faced as this, though. The filters I put on her are beautifully hideous. I'm having way too much fun editing pictures of my other characters. Those won't see the light of day here, though. I'm not a complete sadist.
Plus, I'm attention hungry and I don't want people to stop looking at my thread.
Sometimes a scene just refuses to render, and you forget about it for months. Then you find it, decide to try rendering it again, and this time it works. It's not too great. Cindie's head is hovering, Adana is too close in colour to the wall behind her, and there wasn't really room for a DoF. Yeah, I could try to fix all those things and re-render, but I've got several other scenes from the same periode that failed to render and I want to try again. You know... better scenes.
Poor Adana, though. It wasn't her fault that she was born into a family of immortals. Maybe it was her fault that she started taking the anti-aging drug too young, and froze herself as a teenager. It was not her fault, however, that some seventy years down the line her great-nephew developed a royal straight crush on her. Nor could she control the fact that she started returning his feelings. Adana has a fiancé who she's so far been completely faithful too. Ryan is happily married to Cindie, and has three children with her (including T'anamika and Nerniya). Cindie seems blissfully unaware of the inappropriate attraction between her husband and her best friend. Adana feels so guilty sometimes, it's as if an army of tiny beavers are gnawing on the inside of her stomach.
Ohai, here's another previously unrenderable scene that decided to play nice today. I like how the light hits Aylatani's face in a way that makes her look absolutely homicidal. I don't know what got her so mad, but chances are good that someone mentioned her ill-fated fourth husband. That guy was the only reason she ever fought with Maikana. No one liked that husband. He died in a hail storm. (Sims gameplay.)
Because the previous version initially didn't want to render, I made another one. In this one I switched out everyone's hair with lower-poly styles, and replaced the dForce clothing on Liranda and Aylatani. It looks like I changed Liranda's materials as well, since you can tell she's less tan here. A few more flowering shrubs were added.
I can't really say which of the pictures I like better, so I rendered both. I like the backyard better with more flowers, but I prefer Aylatani's first outfit. Liranda looks more accurate with the paler skin, and both dresses are on point, but the hair in the first version is more "her." She also looks so fabulously ebul in the second picture, I love it!
It's time for the kids to go back to school, and Precious is showing off some of the new threads she got when the twins took her shopping. Her mom, Hunnybear, wonders if maybe she should have come along. The girls were supposed to be getting school clothes, but the new shirt Precious is proudly modelling is much too short for her elementary school's dress code. She also wonders why they twins have such an obsession with dressing Jane in black, and in clothes with skulls and creepy stuff on.
Why is it I love my silly characters so much? Anyway, I've been thinking I should do some more interior scenes, and possibly something for a longer story. Uh, well... something story-ish, because creating an actual graphic novel is much outside my attention span. I'm not short on ideas either, so if there's anything you'd like to see me try to take on, feel free to suggest. There's a lot to choose from! (Just nothing political or too serious.) There's so much stuff sitting in my run-time just waiting for a chance to shine!
Althernative render, with the sun a little lower.
I've had a little break from rendering, but of course the anticipation of the PC+ sale is drawing me back in. :) Plus it's autumn, which happens to be one of my favourite times of the year. Time to set up atmospheric and spooky scenes! I've started easing myself back into the rendering game with a couple of Halloween-ish portraits. They're dark, they're supposed to be dark.
I wanna see some of your characters go into a Tim Burton esque haunted house and scare the ghosts! Or have tea with them.
Oh my gosh, those poor ghosts! They might like tea, though. Tea and gossip with Aylatani. x)
I did some more character dialling tonight. This time it's one of my "serious" characters.
If you remember Annie, who's a couple of pages back, this is her brother Frank. (Yes, Annie and Frank. I legit didn't catch it until their names were permanent.) Frank's the second oldest of the four siblings. He's well above average smart, but he chronically questions his own ability to perceive the difference between reality and deception. I originally intended Frank to have something Harry Potterish about him, which is how he ended up with an "unsexy" grandpa name and permanently messy dark hair. Instead of having a dangerous dark wizard as his mortal enemy he's only got his kooky uncle, who's more than enough trouble as it it. Poor Frank is incredibly skinny. I'll try to spare you from shirtless pictures of him.
Yeah, I know I've got a habit of posting the same pictures with different lighting. Sorry. x) Lighting is still my nemesis, and I've been playing around with different HDRIs.
I'm definitely thinking seriously about how to set up the best scene for @Hylas's suggestion. It'll probably be my weekend project.
I got the Mesh Grabber, for the purpose of editing clothes. So... of course this was the absolutely first thing I did, because y'all know me by now.
Her name is Contessa Xorinina Qabooze and she's Queen-Empress of her homeworld.
My friend Sam thought Contessa was missing something.
Images from last year's Halloween celebrations have surfaced. (Done for @3dcheapskate's Pointless Priceless Challenge.)
Ugh, I don't want to be on page 5! Honestly, though... I haven't really rendered anything worth showing since long before the holidays. Mostly it's just been tests and visual references for my own eyes only. (And I also severely ODed on social media, and developed people-allergies.)
This innocent-looking picture of children is also just a reference. I had a story idea the other day, and it involved someone's mother keeping a picture hidden in a drawer. This is a mock up of that picture. I'm only posting it because the kids turned out so darn cute.
And then I decided to try something different. You've probably seen original art with this aesthetic posted online before: Pastel colours, strong Disney eyebrows, glowing skintone and a befuddled expression. If I'd had the make-up to give her white freckles, that would have really completed the look. I don't know what the actual name is for it ("Kawaii" is too general), but I've seen it described as "aggressive cuteness" and hailed as The New Punk. It's young people of the 2020s' style, it's progressive and anti-establishment. Needless to say it's not a style I'm very good at, being a crusty old Millennial. (Or GenX, depending on where you draw the line.)
Adana. 19. She/Her. Half Elf half Human. Professional Gamer. Time Traveller. Tea not Coffee. Cats. Loves Summer hates the Cold. Afraid of Thunderstorms. Likes Science.
Very nice!
Dana
Very nice! I find your usual style a little toony (not a criticism!) but those two, especially the girl, are practically photorealistic!
Yay, you're posting again! I really missed your renders and characters.
Beautiful renders! I'm so glad to see you back!
Darn double post!
Here's some motivation for the mods to delete it.
Awww, you guys are so sweet!
Only a little, eh? We're talking about Aylatani here!
I can't really take the credit for these characters, however. The girl is Aster by AngelWings, and the boy is Connor by FWSA. I only did minor tweaks on them, such as dialling out Connor's chin-cleft to make the sibling look more plausible, and gave them the Marilla skin.
I just love you sence of Ha Ha!!!
Thank you, Saphire!
Oh no, what have we here? Am I having too much fun with this?
Anybaloo, I was thinking of what Hylas said about my regular style being toony, which of course it is. More than half of my "models" are recreated from Sims, who are nothing if not cartoony, and I've tried to recreate them as faithfully as I've been able to. However, I'm an orignal generation Simmer, my style has roots in an earlier era. If I'd been 15-20 years younger, I'd have made my characters with an entirely different aesthetic in mind. So here's GenZ Adana! I modelled her features on a style I've seen both in pixel- and resin dolls. The eyes should be small and far apart. Regardless of whether the character is Asian or not, they should be slanted. We want a cat-like look here. The nose must be short and stumpy, because that's cute. And what is cuter than fish-mouth? (Don't ask me, my opinions were obsolete around 2012.)
Now, I'm not opposed to the "kids" doing their thing, because we certainly did, not too long ago. I think the cuteness overload is a creative and aesthetical backlash against the gritty-grottiness of the previous couple of decades.
Her sweater says "nerd." to inform society that she's smart and not ashamed to flaunt it. It's vitally important that you keep that in mind, because during her story-arc she's probably going to do things that make you doubt it. She's just learning about herself, though!