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It's interesting that you mention books demanding that you take action, tsroemi. This particular story demanded that I write it and it almost feels like I know the characters. I think that's one of the reasons that I was so insistent from the beginning of my Daz dabblings that I wanted my characters. On seeing them come to life for the first time in Artbreeder, I was inspired to revive this project and go on with it. Funny enough, I have assorted other unrelated WIPs, many of which I'd done more with in recent times, but even now, even with all these tools at hand, I don't see those characters the same way, like actual people insisting that I write their story.
Over the years, I've tried to get active in online writing groups now and then, but you can guess that never really went anywhere. I've done so much better sharing art, and staying engaged with other people while sharing art.
I have story info in most of my more recent images in the "Plague Bird" part of my gallery so you could check those out at least, if you're curious. I don't think I have a lot of smut going on, but there's dark romance and a sadistic psychopath.
Oh no, should I go put my foot in my mouth? I didn't mean to sound derisive or anything. I've nothing at all against romance, or dark, or smutt for that matter; I'm just heartily sick of these certain books telling me a horrible man who does horrible, non-consensual things to others is really sweet and awesome because reasons ... Will definitely have a look at your Plague Bird infos, although with a cautious eye if I might find the psychopath lurking there ;-)
I didn't ever have much success with any form of group writing or group-to-encourage-writing either. But then, I'm not generally a group person. I guess we all just have to find our own little niche way of doing things. However you're gonna go about it, I sincerely hope you'll feel better in your own artistic self again soon.
By the way, before I forget to post it there, I loved your recent meadow-flower-woman render over in the USC thread! I know you were having problems with it, but that sun streaming lighting and the whole set up are just so gorgeous. Very cool!
No offense taken
. But seriously, there are unhealthy relationships between messed-up characters and there is an actual psychopath in there. My main character and her friends made it through something that you can't even refer to as wartime conditions, because it was so one-sided that you can't call it a war - and none of them are better off for the experience. You probably don't want to hang out with them, in their world, but they're safe to meet in the gallery, lol!
The USC image was a test I originally did a long time ago, a one-off in which I was experimenting with totally overblown lighting conditions. I liked it, don't think I ever posted it. I decided to revamp it the other day with a G9 figure and - now that I know how to use the USC toolboxes - move the vegetation around so it wasn't impaling her. But ... man, the Daz release version on my art computer is slow, slow, slow. I'm bummed without my friend USC to play with. A friend of mine has the new release version and USC, and is planning a test today to see if it's that, or just me.
I sat down today and took the first steps toward creating a new set of steps for creating characters, based on everything that I've found and learned since summer 2022 - which is when the last set of instructions for character creation I have date back to. I never finished the instructions, back then or with any of the earlier versions. I never actually created what I considered to be a finished working character. It's been a WIP all this time.
Speaking from the experience of the previous attempts to get a process written down, I expect there will be several refinings and revisionings, a few backtracks and a total embarrassing "Oops!" or two as I get further along and realize that something important was forgotten or done wrong way earlier. Up to this point, I've had the luxury of pontificating about things I did so long ago that I know if they worked or didn't work. All of this might look pretty stupid in a week.
Anyway, this guy is a beginning, a first step. The thing I was testing here probably sounds arcane but he's a test of creating a Face Transfer character on a stock G9 just from the saved shape, not a direct transfer from Face Transfer. I'm setting the stage to use existing FT2 shapes for mixing with other characters. There's no doubt multiple, better ways of saving a Face Transfer 2 shape for use in other scenes but I found one that seems to work. Let's see what happens.
I'm still alive. My characters are waiting for me to do something with them. For the moment, I've been re-reading the existing first book of the series while testing the - um - rather large amount of stuff I bought last year during my "Let's buy everything in the Daz store" phase.
That's an extremely stylized view of my main character's father, here being used as one of my product-testing "insta people" as I work through what I suspect might be dozens of untested pose sets. (Of course, this is the "young Alvo" version of him, since he's around 30 years older than this at the time of my story.) I just like this particular image the way it came together. Alvo is arrogant, with the sort of arrogance that goes with people who actually do have everything in the world to be arrogant about. Even if he is in the same room with you, he's not really there. He's essentially untouchable and inaccessible as a person - nothing but cold, polished ice on the outside. And he had to be. He is a complicated character whose back story is essentially the prequel to this story series - which I'm sure I'll never get around to writing, though working out the major events and details helped establish a lot of "Present Day" stuff for the current WIP.
Here's a two-fer as I work through some product testing here on July 4th. In addition to trying to work on the actual story, I've done a little work in recent weeks streamlining my latest process for character creation, which is officially going to use G9, based on FT2 shapes. I've been pretty sure for a while now that I was going to go with G9 rather than G8. I see some of the flaws that some don't like about G9, including some bends, but the more I look at G8 vs G9, I just prefer, more and more, then G9 characters I create. In this particular case, they're in full new-stuff-testing mode; nothing about these characters represents who they are in the story. (In fact the girl is - mostly - a "young" version of a 60-year-old woman who is the mother of one of the main characters.
The unsung hero here is Wagner 9. No, I didn't use the Wagner 9 character or shape for either of these, but both of them are using the skin from Wagner 9, which is probably my favorite so far for the purpose. I apply the mat files, then replace the commercial character's Base Color with the material files for my character, created from either FT2 or FaceGen, depending on which I end up liking best. One day when I don't have a giant number of new things to test, I'm going to take a little time to analyze the mat files and settings of various commercial characters so I can see for myself what things I like best about the ones I like. I can then go back to creating my own translucencies, normals, etc like I was doing a while back.
My first impression of the above was that I was looking at a photograph, so I'd say you chose wisely.
Thanks! I'm really happy with how these two are turning out.
Just to prove that I have a sense of humor ...
marahzen_ (@marahzen_) | TikTok
It's a brief detour into silliness. A friend showed me Hedra a couple of days ago, and that happened. Not that I'm interested in animation, but it is impressive what anyone can do with a single image and whatever audio you have on hand.
It's also absurd considering who the character actually is in my story.
This was a four-day weekend for me (rather to my pleasant surprise, as I didn't realize that my company was also giving "the day after July 4th" as a holiday this year until I was in a meeting on Wednesday) and it gave me the opportunity to work on several things. I finally finished re-reading the first book of my story series and set off into the unfinished territory of the second book and also created a second new character who - like the last characters I shared - is specific to the second book. This is Mira and unlike the rather fanciful image I posted above, this is actually pretty much how I envisioned this character.
I'm still streamlining my new set of instructions, but essentially, what I'm doing at the moment is creating the character as a G9 character with Face Transfer 2, then I save all the files and create a shape dial. Of late, I've been doing that with Dial Fusion 9, which saves the Face Transfer shape as a persistent dial. What's weird is that the Dial Fusion dial itself only contains the other shape settings (which, in a newly created FT2 character, is just the Base Masculine/Feminine at 100%). But what it makes possible is that I can load a stock G9 figure in a new scene, select that Face Transfer shape and recreate the character anywhere I want it.
For now, I'm still doing materials by applying a mat file from a commercial character, then replacing the Base Color with with the textures for my character, created by FT2 or FaceGen. Yeah, yeah, will get back to doing it all myself one day, but for now, I'm just glad to be back in business of even trying to create real characters.
I will spare you all the video I made of Mira and the first 27 seconds of one of my Suno songs.
A lot of my summer has been hijacked by non-art-related things, but I had some time this weekend to tinker a bit, and I decided to put the recently released Young Victoria shape to the test for my purposes - that is modification of my custom characters.
https://www.daz3d.com/young-victoria
Because a significant part of my story involves parallel story-telling of events that occurred when my main character was a young teen, contrasted with a "present day" in which she's a young adult - literally, a four-year gap for much of it - I was game to try out a new product offering a "14-year-old" version.
Here, I am testing with a character I've been doing recent G9 product testing with, essentially the same character as from my July 4 post. Specifically, she's actually a Man Friday conversion of a G8.1 character created by the original Face Transfer.
So I set up a test scene with this recently acquired High School Bathroom so I could compare the overall impression, and then also did a close-up of the face. Young Victoria offers a one-click option for Age 14 and Age 18, or new dials - Victoria 9 Young and Victoria 9 Young Proportions. The one-click applies the Victoria 9 shapes - my test only includes the new Victoria 9 Young dials dialed at 100%, which is what the one-click for Age 14 applies. (The one-click for Age 18 applies differing values closer to 50%.) In my case, I'm not working with Victoria 9 - I'm working with a custom character, so I only wanted the "Victoria 9 Young" shaping.
Here are the results:
Custom G9 Franken-character: No shaping, left; Same character with Victoria 9 Young and VIctoria 9 Young Proportions = 100%, right.
Same character. (Ignore the lip texture issue, which isn't related to this experiment.
) No shaping, left. VIctoria 9 Young shapes as noted above, = 100%, right.
I'm pretty satisfied with this, actually. Presuming they make a "Young Michael" version, I'll probably pick it up. (I didn't test this one with a G9M custom character, but I wouldn't expect it to do that - there are some female-specific considerations to "de-aging" an adult female to a young teen female.) Of course I do have all of the other G9 age/shape products, but I like having an assortment of tools to choose among.
As a footnote, for anyone who wanders across this thread, as I mentioned in a previous post somewhere, I've generally had good success using G9 character "shapes" on my custom G9 characters, though sometimes you can't crank them to 100%.
So here, at long last, is an image correlated to an actual scene in my story WIP.
As I mentioned earlier this thread, I've done almost no art related to the story since the first few weeks that I started using Daz. And sadly, I've done very little writing on the book in that time. I took this detour into art to create inspirational images intended for no one but myself, for a series of books that no one else will ever read, and somehow got sidetracked into buying the entirety of the Daz store.
So I did something today that I've never done before. I signed up for a writing session, which turned out to be a bunch of us working on our own during a Zoom session on whatever aspect of our current book that we wanted. Some people were writing, some were outlining. Once in a while we'd meet in the Zoom session for a quick chat. I ended up writing about 1,100 words on a new scene which I had some rough ideas for but hadn't done any work on yet.
I wasn't really sure what to expect so yesterday, I created this simple image representing the basic idea I had in mind for this scene I planned to write. This scene isn't really an accurate portrayal of the setting I ended up describing, but the base content - Mira, seen in earlier incarnations in images above, plots mischief with my main character while surveying paintings for sale. I've just realized that in all of this thread, I've never actually said much about my story or its characters, and I don't know if I meant to explore the story itself, or stick mainly with character creation in this thread. But either way, she has a lot of names. Mira here knows her as Khara; the boys in the outdoorsy/horse images knew her as Tai. Mira is planning to get a splash of attention in buying this painting, while Khara has something much darker in mind in going along with the game.
In terms of character creation, there's no huge changes in my process since my last comments on this thread. Both of these characters are created from the stock G9 figure, to which I applied the Face Transfer 2 shape saved for each of these characters, then some amount of Face Transfer Shapes to fix the profile. Both of these characters have tiny bits of random G9 female character shapes, which I have multiple "random shape" generators to do. I do that not to make my character look like some other commercial character, but just in small doses - like 5-10% - just to break up the "FT2-ness" that is somewhat inherent in most FT2 shapes. (I used 3D Universe's version here: Character Mixer Version 2 for Genesis 8 and 9 | Daz 3D) After that, I've applied the materials of G9 characters that I thought had good underpinnings for the real textures of these two characters, then replaced the base color mat files with the FT2-derived textures.
Here's a closer look at the characters as I created them in this scene: