what is the hardest part about creating quality characters for G3/G8?

2»

Comments

  • EllessarrEllessarr Posts: 1,395
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    yeah here a exemple this is a "famous" ex porn japanese now cosplayer Shibuya Kaho

    she is natural large breasts and definitly she is not 300+bls, some peoples have that idea which womans must be "small breasts" all over the world which is the "natural" and only if you get fat which they "grow" but it's not really like that, this what make humans a so special race, because different propertions and spects of the body can happen and is really, really hard to 2 peoples looks like "twins" or equals even when we talk about "races, like 2 caucasian or 2 african never gonna look's like the same, aside from the color, in the same way you can have "ugly or no so attractive womans" being born you have really gorgogoes/awesome or "saiko-desu body" and face womans, the same goes for males, what is matter more is the "genetic" as a big factor, good genes gonna create good look peoples even if they are a little fat(not super ungly fat) the same goes for breast sizes if you family genetic is about "large breast womans" then you aways gonna see "large breast womans" on that family and only few rare cases this not gonna happens.

  • LeanaLeana Posts: 11,842
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

  • 1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    Sometimes I'm afraid of making a character's shoulders too narrow since I play with that slider and I usually dial back "breast implants" and dial up natural 

    One of my favorite characters is Amira since she's big yet still pretty. When I dialed up fitness I actually had to dial up her waist too

    Most of the characters I use run a bit thin but it's not the only way to be attractive and even then not all characters have to be hot 

    For tomboyish girls I'd add more makeup options such as contouring in a way to achieve a more masculine face and yeah a lot of default looks are madeup too 

    There's a whole different set of fashion rules for different bodytypes too 

    And I hear you on the rigid part some guys when you use an age down still look way too defined for their new age even if you mess with so many face morphs 

     

    While I don't make models (yet? I know there are good Udemy courses on it) from what I can see it's texturing. Mari's not only expensive but you have to think about making normal maps, bump maps, and all that too and get them to wrap around the model it's made for too 

    Tho I'll probably do environments instead of people since there's so many great potential environments. There's so much good new sustainable and hi tech architecture too. So at least one completely green city where poverty's been eradicated and very walkable and cool trainstations too tho maybe I can make them seperate? Anyway it would be set during a good future where climate change is solved and not a worry anymore and some of the buildings will be wavy with cool lights and windows and palms and other trees along the streets and plants seen on some buildings 

  • watchdog79watchdog79 Posts: 1,026
    edited September 2020
    Leana said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

    My sincerest sympathy to your backbone.surprise

    I have had girlfriends with all sorts of body types, from thin to overweight, from absolutely flat chested to really busty, and while I do prefer the curvier body shapes, not all women are like that, nor do they need to be to be attractive to me.

     

    One problem with the really busty figures I feel in creating scenes in DAZ studio is the challenge to make any combat poses look realistic. Big boobs tend to make many melee weapon poses look like the poor gal is going to either cut pieces of her body herself with the sword swings, or she is surely going to fall over boobs-first, should she dare to move at all.laugh

     

    I have some body morphs, allowing me to adjust the size of the breasts, as they can help me use a character that won't do with the shapes the character is sold with.

     

    I am not a PA, only a hobbyist artist. For me to get the "Wow! I really need this character for my collection at this instant!" reaction, or even to immediately picture a scene where I could use that character, the character should follow the guidelines posted by Penguinisto to an extent. There needs to be a distinct personality displayed in the character promos, preferably with a body type that is absolutely not a "they come 12 in a dozen" type. Some make-up matching the personality helps a lot too.

     

    Oh, and to all the PA's out there, do list the items used in the promos, pretty please. Some of the promos alone would have made me buy your character if only I knew the hairstyle used, and the outfit used, so that I could re-create that striking look.

    Post edited by watchdog79 on
  • PerttiAPerttiA Posts: 10,024
    Leana said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

    The point in this context was, you can easily make mountains out of molehills in DS, but doing the opposite can sometimes be impossible, and having those mountains on a figure sets a tone that you are not looking for or even wanting.

    The fact that there are females with larger than life appendages, doesn't mean that they all do.

  • GazzalodiGazzalodi Posts: 50
    edited September 2020

    From a customer prospective

    I'm probably in the minority from what I've read in the forums.  But here's how I create my non-photo real comic book characters.

    1.  I render in 3Delight. (my average scenes with 5-10 characters render in under 10 minutes.).  I used only V4/Genesis until about 4 years ago then moved to G3 (still in process for a lot of assets).  I won't be moving beyond G3 I imagine.  It was too much work getting to this point.  Other than some SASE characters that maybe I'll get and convert to G3 someday, there's really nothing in G8 that looks worth the effort.

    2.  I get rid of all maps other than diffuse and specular.  Specular maps are generic for all my characters that share the same UV set.  All shaders are either Daz Defaults or Ubersurface.

    3.  Resize all maps to be 1024x1024 at the max.  Backgrounds might be bigger, but no character/prop/environment maps are.  I see people debating 4k and larger here; for me, 4k maps just mean 16x more memory eaten up that won't be reflected in my final panels.  Plus most of my map library is quite ancient, from back in the days when 256 and 512 were the norm so 1024 was kind of edgy.

    4.  Dial in some basic morphs that get me kinda close to what I'm looking for.  I'm one that resizes my 'citizen' females down to be somewhere in the 61-69 inch height, guys range from 65-72 inces.  My heros/heroines are in the 69-81 inch range.

    5.  Export to a modeling program for all the detail work.  Personally I love symmetry, it's aesthetically pleasing.  I even want my villains to look good.  Not sure how making something less attractive makes it better, but whatever.

    6.  Use a graphics program to tweak the diffuse of the skin to make it 'unique' somehow.

    7.  Re-import as morph for G3, erc freeze, save as morph, apply textures and save as character.

    I've made around 200 characters this way.  Someday I may get the nerve to actually post one of my comics somewhere :/  For now their adventures live on my hard drives alone.  I've been a 3d hobbiest for about 30 years and Daz for about 10.  I'm no Sickleyield, but I know enough to make what I like.  If you are just starting out making things, there is a learning curve.  Be ready for it and don't let it frustrate you.

    Disclaimer and mini-rant: I'm not a PA and I only purchase a couple of things out of the store because what I'm looking for I haven't seen for the most part, and it's getting worse by the week.  Like dforce, which seems to have given license for the creation of poor quality assets that don't fit properly or look good, with the expectation that the customers will be fine waiting around for a simluation to run to fix it, every time the character is moved.  Where as I can just use an older non-dforce asset that fits properly in the new stuff's place, modify a couple of material maps to make it look different and render immediately after each pose.

    Post edited by Gazzalodi on
  • TheKDTheKD Posts: 2,706

    Boobs probably should have been geographs, with a few different size choices. But then boobs would probably be sold in pro packs only, and only the most popular boobs get support after a while so in the end wouldn't matter anyways :P  But going from big to small or small to big all have their own issues, and both have texture issues. Small to big textures stretch, big to small textures compress.

  • PerttiA said:
    Leana said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    As a woman with 100% natural G-cup breasts and who doesn't weight even half those 300 lbs, I can guarantee you we exist. Granted, mine are still far from the watermelons some DS users give their female figures...

    The point in this context was, you can easily make mountains out of molehills in DS, but doing the opposite can sometimes be impossible, and having those mountains on a figure sets a tone that you are not looking for or even wanting.

    The fact that there are females with larger than life appendages, doesn't mean that they all do.

    That may have been the point you intended. It's not the point you made. You said that there was no credibility for a "spinster" having large breasts, and you made the further point that she must be 300 pounds if she did. Leana is telling you that no, she need not be 300 pounds. FWIW, I've had two kids, and I'm an I cup at any weight. *shrug*

  • I think in a summary answer to the original question based in part on the replies above...

    The hardest part about modelling a character is getting two people to agree about anything.

  • Things that kill realism for me:

    • "Bee stung" lips that are so huge that they look like they were done by an unlicensed plastic surgery intern who's never passed a biology class.
    • Skin with such exaggerated normal/bump/displacement maps that it looks like the person exfolliated with a cheese grater.  Oddy enough, I've seen this more with dark skinned characters than light ones.
    • Skin that's either dry as the Sahara or oiled like the character was a participant in the world's lengthiest baby-oil wrestling match.
    • Dazzlingly white sclera (eye whites).
    • Eyes with so many tiny red veins it looks like the person needs a doctor or an exorcist.

    I want regular people as well as "perfect" ones but I don't want oddly ugly ones (unless it's a mutant, etc.)  Some of the "common people" characters have their imperfections exaggerated so they don't look normal.  Instead of a over-sized nose or a weak chin, etc., it's a massive honker plus a chin that's recessed almost to the ears and eyes too far apart and the ears were stolen from an elephant ... and ... and .... 

    Although perfect symmetry is actually pretty rare and can break realism, I prefer it for characters I purchase so I can then apply individual morphs afterward to tweak the results.  It's easier to "de-symmetricalize" a character rather than the other way around.

     

  • Ellessarr said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:
    Gordig said:
    PerttiA said:

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection  since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.

    BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.

    I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there? wink)

    Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.

    Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?

    None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts. 

    Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...

    Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.

    yeah here a exemple this is a "famous" ex porn japanese now cosplayer Shibuya Kaho

    she is natural large breasts and definitly she is not 300+bls, some peoples have that idea which womans must be "small breasts" all over the world which is the "natural" and only if you get fat which they "grow" but it's not really like that, this what make humans a so special race, because different propertions and spects of the body can happen and is really, really hard to 2 peoples looks like "twins" or equals even when we talk about "races, like 2 caucasian or 2 african never gonna look's like the same, aside from the color, in the same way you can have "ugly or no so attractive womans" being born you have really gorgogoes/awesome or "saiko-desu body" and face womans, the same goes for males, what is matter more is the "genetic" as a big factor, good genes gonna create good look peoples even if they are a little fat(not super ungly fat) the same goes for breast sizes if you family genetic is about "large breast womans" then you aways gonna see "large breast womans" on that family and only few rare cases this not gonna happens.

    This would also fit into the "photos, that look like renders" thread. Can't find it, though.

  • DrekkanDrekkan Posts: 459

    1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...

    2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.

    3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...

    4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup. 

    5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman.  Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please?  Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch. 

    6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals:  Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set.  Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.

     

    6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.

    7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed. 

    8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand. 

    Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.

    Cheers!

    Apologies for getting back so late to this I wanted to thank you for the help here.
Sign In or Register to comment.