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It's a new month on my Mastodon writing challenge and I've changed the characters I'm writing about, in an attempt to finish the book this month. So this is Rivande (Reev) and Averaan (Vers). Please don't read their short names side by side or you can't unsee it, which is a mistake I made early on... But neither of them will agree to being renamed, so I'm stuck with it.
Finally, buying Beatris Hair paid off! I'd intended it for a different male character (who cares it says it's for G8F?) but in the end it didn't suit him... but the hair I'd intended on for Vers got stolen by Yve (more successfully, I'll add...) and the one I initially tried him with didn't quite suit either. But this looks exactly how I imagined it when I started writing, so I'm happy.
(I may be happy, but Reev definitely isn't. I found the only way to make him happy to render is to give him a bath and take his clothes off... and the resulting render, while mostly dressed, isn't quite ready for the forums yet. A little too much hair visible in places some would rather not see hair...)
Playing with some new (and not so new, but needing a little time to work on them) purchases.
If you take limits off the Gala Bob hair length, you can make it even shorter and it still looks very good. It's much more nicely detailed than some of the promos of Joan gave it credit for. And on the subject of Joan, she really does look good on the men... but seeing Alien Odd-Jobs Guy looking human(ish) is terrifying. He's more handsome being alien.
Some of her new items kitbash together really well for the men too. I also smooshed the decorative thing from the Royal Lines outfit with the scarf from the Mediaeval Dwarf bundle and they worked out unexpectedly well. I like this top from the Swords Legacy texture expansion enough that I'd happily buy a real-world version too.
And a pinup back on his homeworld (whoever HE is *glares at him*), because I do like a good pinup. I'm really happy Sue Yee included a masculine fit for these shorts in the Cool Summer Set, they go together nicely with the T-shirt from the Sunny Road outfit (grabbed a while ago on discount and mugged slightly with dForce here, not that it thanked me for it), and I really like how the Wet Style Curly Hair renders... and that it has colours that match him already set up.
I set it to dForce while I was working, so having to wait wasn't so... fidgety. Long hair really suits him... but most hairs seem to suit him. Very odd.
And while I happily admit I bought Venus Smile because getting G9 to smile naturally beyond the basics is tough for me and sometimes I don't have the patience for the fight, the smiles and eye expressions in it are fantastic*. Absolutely incredible work, they all look nice and natural!
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* Especially the cute lop-sided ones that I so completely failed to do manually with Alex previously... This'll save poor Alex and his awkwardness from my ministrations in the future. (The poor guy had to learn to smile by practicing in front of a mirror and never quite got the hang of it, so it has an in-book explanation at least... but there's no need to compound it with my awful efforts.)
I can't believe @Sade is giving away one of her awesome Mixable outfits! The minute I snagged it (because of course I did, I love her clothes), I just knew the sweater would look incredible on Alex. There aren't enough awesome sweaters in the 3D world (the downside to watching Korean dramas... I want all their clothes) so this was an absolute delight. Thank you so much for this amazing outfit!
A spot of low-key imagery, because Alex likes loitering in the shadows.
I spent a significant chunk of G8 fiddling with his model and textures, and apparently that trend is going to continue with G9. Here he's got Joan's normal and SSS maps (they're not only very good, but suit a 26-year-old man very well) and Mousso and justspitey's Nabi and Minjun textures. And Thadeus Hair, which looks very good on him! I can't keep on using his three-raccoons-in-a-trenchcoat solution, and I tried it on a whim only to find it actually has morphs to get it almost where it should be, and dForce assisted the rest of the way. (I've now invested so much time in trying to find other solutions that it would probably have been quicker to just get into the hair editor myself at this point. Maybe when I have the time, and patience, and...)
I'd love to, but I can't see where to do an image review, only a regular one. ^^; (I can't get it to change my display name either, from my real name to my author/artist name, possibly because I'm an idiot. ^^; )
I'm really happy you like how they render came out~!
(silly question, i re watched the thread, can the post like? These so cool! Do u upload into gallery too?)
I always forget to post to this thread. ^^; I have a gallery here on site, but I always forget to upload things to it... I should probably try to remember now and again.
I post some stuff to my Fediverse account too, probably to the horror of my instance owner because it's a writing-focused one, not an art one. (But most of the time it relates to my own characters, at least.)
*scrabbles around in folder* I have so much stuff I forgot to post...
Right... Oh, this is going to be long.
I was testing out some purchases, and also was curious as to how well older Aery Soul/Aeon Soul/AlfaseeD (did I forget one?) hairs stand up to the test of time. The answer is: very well, although I changed the shader to Outoftouch's Hairblending one. This is Golden Drops Hair, parented to Alien Elf Guy's head. The outfit is the Sunny Road dForce Outfit open shirt and shorts, which proved to be... weird. It's set up as a dForce dynamic object, and then it absolutely does not dynamic. I had to fiddle with it a lot to get it to do this.
I really do like doing runway/pinup pictures. I'm so lazy. *sobs*
Testing out Ardamir Hair and the Fantasy Scarification Tattoos on Alien Elf Guy, and I like the effect of both!
Not exactly a pretty boy... There's a shopkeeper that my characters are trying to steal a spear from (it's a long story... because it's already over 50,000 words) and I needed to render him, partially for the writing prompts I was answering, and partially because knowing what he looks like turns out to have helped a lot. He's some weird, unholy combination of Nikolai, Thimor, Redz Kaz and, apparently, 16% Minjun. 100% of Nikolai's HD details and, fairly randomly, 50% of Freja's too, with Base Masculine at 100% and Base Feminine at -50% for that Absolute Masculinity. No, I don't know what I was doing either, but it came out well so I can't complain. Nikolai's skin textures, Michael's transluscency textures - I'm pretty sure I went through every character I own, male and female, before I settled on Michael's. (Nikolai's gave him too much of a red nose.) The hair is M3D's SemiBald Hair (which I think was a Christmas freebie?) and LI 5 O'Clock Shadow.
Also for the writing prompts, I did a bunch of pictures of one of my main characters' travels. It turned out to be quite fun, and also quite time consuming... This is the best of the first three, and I like the little details I spent ages fiddling with that you can't even see. *sob* The time I spent positioning that bag strap...
No secret that I adore Humo The Dragon and the gorgeous Phaff textures! Honestly, fartling dragon is probably my favourite render of mine over the last couple of years... and also (minus the flame) an accurate depiction of life with a Miniature Pinscher. She really does pull that face! I probably need to render "smol dragon ascends to highest part of sofa" too. (I think my dog has a height complex...)
I mean, this is the idiot beastie in question. Look at that ridiculous face...
Male version of Xiu Lin, with Navarro Hair, Aroon's eyebrows (they're really nice!) and wearing the Oversized Hoodie from Mixable Hoodies. (I want one in real life... I love all the designs!)
And E3D Aroon, wearing Xiu Lin's skin (that sounds wrong...) Thadeus Hair and the Business Casual dForce Outfit. (Also, if you want to watch a funny but very weird kdrama, Oh My Venus is on Netflix...)
I made some tweaks to male!Xiu Lin's face and gave him Xiu Lin Hair (which handily has a rigged ponytail so I could make it even shorter), but mostly I was trying to set up the really old Way of the Samurai outfit, which still looks pretty good despite being ten years old. Added the very pretty Ultra Shaders: Japanese Fabrics, checked the render through a face camera and... discovered I'd accidentally made a historical drama series protagonist. The irony is, once I'd finished the actual render I was working on, I realised I really didn't like it compared to the headshot image. *sigh*
And then, when trying out the Spaceship Jumpsuit Outfit, he suddenly ended up meeting Alien Elf Guy, dressed in his Worker Uniform and Texture Addon from previous shenanigans. Testing out the AK Punk Hair, which looks good long even if you push it past its limits. Also finally rendering the Cyber Garage and the Dystopian Garage addon, which for some reason was an absolute pain to light.
And now my two accidental characters are flirting. *facepalm*
Incredible renders and characters! I really like the swords legacy outfit as well. And, naturally, I tested it out on a male figure (I shared the results in the Joan thread) and it looked indeed surprisingly well. I'm glad you linked the venus smile product, I bypassed it, but it looks pretty cool and I also need some quick Smile presets for when I do promos. Glad the Fantasy Scarification Tattoos helped in your character creation! The cool thing about Genesis 9 is that you can indeed mix and match between genders and it gives a ton of flexibility.
If you want more good, quick smiles, then NG Build Your Own Smile is excellent too. It even has nice lopsided ones!
I loved the original Genesis's mix and match ability too, enough that when G2 came out and went back to being two different meshes, I stopped buying stuff entirely. Only came back when I needed to make some new book covers and decided I quite liked G8 once I got the clothing gender swap tools. And now G9's came out and I'm happy again.
I got The AntFarm's Fish Market Cart, mostly because I love anything they make, but wasn't sure what I'd actually do with it. Well, it turns out Male Xiu Lin (wearing a retextured Vo Kelly top that I bought banking on its braces and v-neck being textures; it looks really nice on the guys) has a job as a delivery driver. It was nice to break out the ancient Droids, and they still look good with new shaders — although they aren't good at angry gesticulating and posing them seems to introduce a brief moment of ragdoll physics into DS (no, really, move them and their legs lag behind.
It was a weird discovery) — and Stonemason's Prototype, which seems only fair because it's the Wonderland set (with about 99% of it hidden or deleted, because even if my GFX card has double the memory of my old one, it's still not a powerhouse and the set doesn't fit in the slightest). There's even a Meck9 in there being a bad doggo.
I had vague ideas of turning it into a jigsaw so I have a version with more detail along the top, but as both that version and this don't fit on my GFX card, and Redbubble want the render to be ~10,000px wide... if I start rendering it now, it might be done in maybe two months?
On getting Julia 9, obviously the first thing I was going to do was turn her into a boy. And I think it comes out more like a teenager if you use male morphs.
After doing the above render, I sat there for a while thinking, why does that character look familiar? In part it's cause it looks a bit like Eddie Redmayne (mostly the hair and around the mouth, I think), and it reminded me of a character from a horrifying 13 years ago. So, building on the Julia face base (toned down to about 75% I think?), I spent about two-ish days fiddling around and trying out various hairs, I finally managed to mostly recreate Zero, my ethical hitman. The story doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, haha, but it had potential. Maybe one day I'll rewrite it.
I admit though that a lot of the time was spent swearing at Photoshop CS6, because texturing anything on faces now is an Experience, all to try to recreate the tattoo line that Freya and Adiene's Kanda character for M4 had. It was part of Zero's original character design (because like so many stories, it started with a character... and about half of Sonata Arctica's back catalogue) so I obviously wanted it back, but... yeah. One straight line across the face ended up taking nine iterations of increasingly irritated puppet warping. But I mostly got there in the end! It's mostly straight! I never want to touch it again!
I don't have a single G3, G8 or G9 hair that matches his original Genesis hair, so he's gone through a. lot. of haircuts. I changed the shader on Montreal Flip Hair (mostly so I could keep his hair colour across multiple hairs) and accidentally swapped out the transmaps, and it came out surprisingly well.
And sorting out his red eye was interesting, because I completely forgot he had a cybernetic one until I re-read the story, so I had to go through every single part of his eye texture layers and swap out the maps for the red one in the Essentials pack. Came out nicely though!
In the story, he was trying to live quietly without drawing attention to himself, but I'd tried out the Geometrical LIE Full Body Masculine Tattoo Art right about the time I found male!Julia has two sets of nipples and really liked the look (uh, of the tattoo, not the nipple; he's now got Freja's normals), so he gets a new tattoo.
He's also got a slight hint of NewGuy's smile morphs too.
He looks pretty good in Sade's Meggy outfit (which looks incredible all by itself!). With a body like that, it seemed a shame to hide it.
As for the puzzle, you could render the image smaller, and then upsize it with one of the online upsizers. I've had really good success with some of them in getting the images big enough and still clean for RedBubble and Society 6
https://bggenerator.com/pngenlarger.html
This is the one that I use, I bought the Pro version, which was super cheap at the time I did.
But it has Icon/Logo/Cartoon as one option, and Photo as the other option
And it will enlarge 4x and 16x
You download it to your computer, actually for this one. For online ones, I don't have any great ideas at the moment.
Some of the AI ones can do a pretty good job.
Thank you, that looks really helpful! I'm looking forward to seeing how well it does with a more complicated scene like the market one.
Although the Redbubble point just became moot, because since they announced their plan to take even more money from small accounts I just closed mine. ^^;
Yeah, I just got that email yesterday. What are they thinking? They already take the lion's share. I'm really considering closing mine, too, but I make about $25 every 3-4 years...so at this moment it doesn't cost me anything. I had been putting more effort into it than Society6, but going to lean the other way, now. Etsy is out for their practices, too. And so is FineArtAmerica. Leaving Zazzle and S6. ArtPal was too niche to be useful. ArtStation and Deviantart don't really work as a store front. My things would never make AmazonMerch, and I don't have the sales drive for TeePublic or the other one. I guess in a way, it's making it easier for me, I needed to concentrate on just one or two anyway. lol
And it's helpful for lots of things I've found (the program), Perfect for book covers where you can render smaller and then go bigger for adding details, text, etc. (I really need to get my book cover website finished!!!)
The sliding scale of stupidity didn't help either. As someone on Twitter put it, "You sell $300 worth of products and you make $75. You now have to pay Redbubble $28, so you only get $47." They hadn't actually decided what tier I was going to be in yet, so I just closed my account anyway. I don't sell enough on that account to make it worth while even bothering with the effort to keeping it open. I have another account that has some regional NaNoWriMo-based stickers that I'll probably keep open though, because although I sell quite a few of one sticker, they've only ever paid me once. ^^;
Apparently they're doing because their stocks are down so, what better way to increase them than by *checks notes* obliterating a chunk of your userbase and penalising the poorest ones instead of the richest?
It's such a pain though, because as you say, there's little else to fill the niche. TeePublic is apparently owned by Redbubble so if they haven't pulled this ridiculousness already, then it's only a matter of time before they do. I'd heard DA stopped doing prints entirely now? I closed my 3D account with them last year over the AI debacle (and the fact that, since their redesign, I only ever got messages from cryptobros trying to get me to make NFT art for them) so I can't check any more... and I've heard such bad things about Zazzle's functionality, it seems to be stuck in the previous decade.
I just wanted somewhere that isn't ridiculously expensive to ship to the UK, but all the alternatives seem to be US based...
But all that aside... I hadn't actually considered how useful that app would be for book covers! That's an even better usage for it!
Ugh! I didn't know that about TeePublic, so strike that off the list. I still have a CafePress account from a long time ago, but it was never great either, and never made anything from it. As I said, marketing is my worst subject!
I haven't had anyone buy a print through DA for a long time either, so if they have stopped, I wouldn't know!
Printfull is another one I've heard about and haven't tried. And Like I said, Society 6 is a slightly more "upscale" Redbubble. So, you might try that.
It was particularly unintelligent of RedBubble to do that, they obviously didn't think it through.
And yes, book covers... (I really got to get me site up and functioning!....right after I finish teach the PDHowler course this Saturday....And finish....and finish...bleh! Too much to do! lol)
He is AWESOME!!! Im not fan of pretty boys, but you allways add some image what makes me change my mind :D
Another one of Zero. I spent ages fiddling around with the atmosphere cube I made behind him... and only when I finished did I remember I had a Kindred Arts product that would do exactly the same thing without the swearing and re-rendering... It turns out the dForce Cocktail Dress makes a nice shirt, and the dForce Virtual Assistant Outfit has some really nice, albeit slightly short, trousers.
And a quick render of male Xiu Lin having a little sparring session while working on a transport ship. Mostly I just wanted to play with some new nice toys. ^^; So he's wielding a Steampunk Staff (which I bought mostly because they look cool, I didn't actually know what to do with them ^^; ), and in one of the Staff Bearer Poses, while wearing the dForce Soul Gear top (drapes very nicely), the pants from the dForce War Witch bundle, and the boots from the Virtual Assistant outfit.
I picked up Lawrence because he was just far too handsome not to, and since I'd also got the Kawaii Alien Slime, clearly both needed to be combined. (The only thing that would make these guys even cuter is if they bent in the middle, because getting that one perched on his shoulder was surprisingly difficult. They do not want to drape.) Jumbo Side Braids conform really nicely to G9, and the crown came from, of all things, Neftis' Historical Curls from 2012. A couple of updated shaders and it still looks great! And obviously, a handsome king with his cute pet slimes needed a suitably regal outfit, so it was the perfect opportunity to play with dForce Milo Clothing and Black Forge Accessories.
I think this was the render I had the most fun with, but the slimes made it take foreeeever to render. And then once it had, I changed the lighting and did it all again...
One of the Writing Wonders prompt question asked about if my characters would attend a masquerade, so here's Vers and Reev dressed for one. I bludgeoned so many different outfits into these that I'd have to go and open the files to see exactly what it is they're both wearing (and all the shaders that went into it), but Vers is wearing an Artisan Festival Mask with its addon, and Reev has the mask from the Acicia Bundle.
And then it's a quick render with the Young Anime Heroes, much modified to make it more to my taste (and it takes it really well!), looking really cute in the short Mixable Hoodies top and the Mixable Meggy pants (I want a pair in real life... may have to go and look on Amazon later), all rendered in 3Delight with the Visual Style and Manga Style shaders which I still absolutely love.
And then Kiri, which I'm not wholly enamoured with, because turning it into a male character is incredibly awkward. And also I forgot to tone down the ridiculous redness of the standard subsurface settings, but by then felt too grumpy to go back, correct and re-render. I do like the Lixue Outfit coat though... and which anime character wouldn't be without their steampunk weapon?
Some very lovely work, and the kitbashing....you are a master!
The redhead based on Julia is super handsome! Very much my style (as I have always had a preference for redheads)! Your kitbashed outfits are as great as your guys! I especially like the clothing on your male Xiu Lin! Thank you for buying the staff and the Artisan Masks (+Add-On)! :D
JoeQuick's Slimes are super cute. I do wonder if mesh-grabber would help "bend" them or if that would cause them to distort too much. I have them, but I haven't played with them yet to find out. I tried to do a man out of Kiri, but I couldn't get rid of the feminine vibe (though I confess I didn't spend too much time on it). I think I need to give it another go. I figured using the head without the body would work, but that creates a really weird figure, lol. So perhaps not dialing the head in full might work. Or I just need to put more time into the proportions to make it less bizarre.
these are just simple wow.
my english knowledge just not enough for explain how much i love them!