Do you use characters as they come or do you modify?
Drogo Nazhur
Posts: 1,265
in The Commons
Do you use characters as they come fresh out of the box or do you modify them to make them truly your own?
I rarely use a character exactly as s/he comes. I normally merge a few characters together in different percentages and then maybe add a few morphs as well.
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Historically, I've been fine using characters as-is unless some specific modification was needed, because my renders are more about the story (or, more frequently, joke) being told, and the characters are secondary at best. I have changed more recently since I've been working on crafting a cohesive world with more distinct characters, but even then, one of my characters is just Daiji with an ork mouth and pointy ears.
It depends - for background figures or where the focus is on the landscape or buildings then I often use out of the box characters, but if the figure is the focus then I normally mix morphs from different characters/morph sets/my own shapes.
Modify, 100%.
I always modify, except when I just need a generic background character.
I always modify, for
I just don't like stylized characters.
I don't ever actually load the characters. I just use the character parts - notably skin and shape elements - when constructing characters from a stock G9 figure.
I almost always modify them.
Always modify. Even if the charcter is a "celebrity look alike". I see no point at all in doing something with a character that hundreds of other people are already using "as is" when just a little work makes it something unique to my art alone. With as easy as it is to change characters since the Genesis line of figures was introduced, I can't understand why anyone would want to use a character as it comes "out of the box" and see adding new figures to the inventory as just a way of speeding up the kitbashing.
I typically use parts and pieces until who they were is nothing bujt a fading memory.
Equal parts Swole, Hercules & Guy with some bodybuilder and stocky morphs thrown in alone with George skin ...
Main characters are the base with tons of morphs, starting with a 50-50-40-30 or so split on Core and/or PA heads. But with supporting and background characters, I've taken to using stock with tweaks.
It's just so much FUN!
This started as a blank G9 figure. I added Wagner mats, then my character's textures. The shapes are mostly my character (dialed to near 100%), plus some general morphs, and then small (15-35%) of core/PA characters dialed in.
...same here.
Most of my characters are often a mix of various ones in my library along with merchant resource kits, morph kits, shaping kits and morph/shapes transferred to G3/G8 using GenX/GenX2, Zev0's Xtransfer and Riversoft's character transfer scripts It's the closest I can get to actually creating a character from scratch (my modelling skills are nothing to write home about).
The only characters I use "as-is" are AIko 3, Sadie, Sam, and other toon characters as well as those by PAs like RawArt. and Oso3d.
Depending on the character: both or either option
Both, but I usually modify them at least a bit.
I even modify my own characters for fun art renders....it all depends what the scene needs
It depends.
If the character is particularly beautiful, then there's almost no hope that anything I could do would be an improvement, that's when I leave well alone.
If the character is a one off (eg some of MDD's alien characters, or RawArt's humanoids) then they're often unusual enough to be unaltered.
However, there are a few characters I regard as my 'regulars', and those I do tend to modify. The modifications are usually small and incremental, with it going on over a protracted period. The result is that I'm often surprised at how much they are changed when I look back to the starting point. I tend to keep each clothed 'regular' character as a group in a scene subset, and append the version number to the subset filename so I can go back if I want. A couple are at version 10 now. Not all the changes are to the character, the version number can be incremented when I alter the clothing too.
Finally, if a character becomes ubiquitous (like Mousso's Albany, V7 or V9), then they will always get changed before I use them. Unless.. they're illustrating freebies & as I get asked who the character is so regularly on freebies that on those I leave ubiquitous characters unchanged in the hope I don't get asked.
Regards,
Richard
Is there really much to say about this?
The topic comes up fairly often, and every time the people who dial up their own characters jump in to say they do that, there's a few half-way answers from people who do both depending on how much they like the original character/whether its just a background character they don't care about/either or both depending on current wind direction, but generally no-one who says they only use them as default, because people who use them as default are less likely to be on the forums and less likely to care about the question (it's kind of a case of selection bias - people who dial their own characters have stronger opinions about the matter than those who don't).
A more interesting version of the question would be something like "What character did you deliberately choose not to modify?"
And in that respect, I have one character who uses an almost entirely default version of G8F's head, albeit retextured. For one thing, you don't actually see the default shape used very often unless it's used with the default skin, so it's actually a somewhat unique look... but for another, because it's the shape most expressions were developed on, the shape actually emotes very well without the oddities that other faces need creators to make correctives to fix.
(And as far as less technical and clinical answers than mine, I think it'd also be more interesting to hear about which characters people liked too much to change).
That depends. I like some of them (a few) so much the way they are that I could only spoil them and destroy their individual characteristics by changing them. Most of the ones I buy offer good source material that I can edit to my liking. Fortunately, the original model is always preserved.
I use them as is. If I ever feel the need for a truly unique character, then I'll start from scratch and make my own texture and morph.
When I buy a character, my first thought is "What can I turn this into?"
Hmm, what don't I change for a specific reason (paraphrasing Matt_Castle)?
For creating and illustrating freebie pose sets I use G8F Base body and a more interesting head. The latest two sets I've done use Cherubit's 'Milan' head and body texture coupled with the base G8F body shape to try to maximise the applicability of the body pose and minimise the changes users need to make to get the pose to work. Also, Milan's head is much more interesting than G8F Base, which is why the head is changed.
Regards,
Richard
Is this a poll? Modify, yes.
Typically when I buy a character it is because I LIKE THAT CHARACTER, so I seldom buy it with the intent of changing it. That said, I have absolutely no hesitation changing any aspect of any chracter for whatever reason if I perceive some benefit in doing so. Usually I make pretty subtle changes, but have also done some crazy stuff.
Short answer: If I like it enough to buy it, I am not very likely to change it. (Base Genesis figure for each version is free - change that rather than purchase new! <shrug>)
We're also supposed to justify our answers? Anybody can render the character out of the box. I want to change it - Swap skins, modify skins, mix morphs, make something that's mine out of it.
I think it really comes down to your intended audience and where you want to spend your time. I had a crazy painting instructor in college who insisted that we all had to stretch and prime our own canvases, as "real" artists didn't buy commercially made art canvases, and banned the use of any medium other than oils. (She also wanted us to grind our own pigments to make our own paints, which we sucessfully stopped by pointing out that many of those were toxic. Needless to say, she didn't last long and only taught for one semester.) So, needless to say, I've felt ever since that insisting that any one way of doing something is totally counterproductiove to the process of creating. You do what works for you, and I can totally see using something straight out of the box if you're making things primarily for your own amusement, have a projected target audience where people aren't likely to recognize an out of box character as specific figures, or are intentionally buying a model because it resembles a specific celebrity, etc, On the other hand, I also remember that have been many periods where, if you went on DevArt, you would see dozens of people doing renders featuring certain characters over and over.... there was one period in particular where there was a Scarlet Johansen and a Daniel Craig clone that were literally everywhere, including the promo images for dozens of different vendor's products.
All that said, I personally find it to be extremely rare for a pre-built figure to exactly fit the look that I want for the stories that I'm telling, and even on the rare cases where one does work, it's also rare for that character to then blend perfectly into a group of other figures that were created by different PAs, as most tend to have certain aesthetic styles and design preferences that, while subtle, are just varying enough to make a mixxed group look a little odd. I could spend hours just dialing morphs, and I used to do that back when I was first starting out, but these days I find that starting with a pre-bought can be a huge time saver as it gives me a great start off point at getting into the general zone from which I will then invariably start aging/deaging, adding/subtracting muscles or weight, and adding specific points of definition like making ribs and spine verterbrae more pronnounced, and adding a slight bit of asymmetry. Likewise, there are a couple of vendors who simply do skins that look more statisfactory to my eye than others, so those usually get swapped out and.or heavily modified, using shaders, settings, and actually going in and redoing portions of the textures in photoshop, and replacing the original breasts with geografts that have more nuanced shaping and posing options... and while I'm doing all this, I'm constantly saving off different variants as character presets so that the next time I need a similar character ona different project, I can pick up with one of those rather than starting from scratch.
...I think I pretty much memntioned which characters I rarely if ever alter. (though many years ago in the Gen3/Gen4 days, ) I did a fusion of Sadie and Aiko3 which took some doing)..
...long before I ever got into 3D, (like 45 years beforehand as of 2007) I was heavily into visual arts. In high school I was allowed to do self paced study and in college I had a major in art (one of three concurrent majors at the time the other two theatre and music) which was focused in oil painting and drawing I always stretched my own canvas as it cost less than the commercially stretched and prepared variety. I also did paintings in "non standard" sizes and dimensions.(my biggest was 6' x 8' and my oddest was 8.5' by 1.5'). I also studied mixing pigments as well as worked in various historical techniques, but that was a personal rather than enforced decision as I wanted to experience what artists before my time dealt with, and then graw from that into my own works.
Debilitating arthritis pretty much took working and experimenting with traditional media away which is what got me into 2D and 3D CG almost 2 decades ago. I still tend to approach every scene as I did when drawing, painting and lighting scenes on stage (below).. Granted, when I panted I didn't have to worry about the actual "physical" nature of light and surfaces so much save for making sure the source, shadows and textures looked correct (even though Iray has been around for years it is still a "wrestling match" for me to understand all it's technical nuances) .
I also worked in theatrical lighting, which is why I still have a soft spot for 3DL as it's lighting system functioned similarly (compared to Iray). I had spot, flood/fill, and point lights as well as a "soft box (though Studio Light Pro and later Age pf Armour's "Advanced lights). The beauty was they worked similarly to theatrical lighting with a 0% - 100% intensity and not having to worry about lumens, light temperature, and such as in stage lighting if you wanted a certain colour you put a "gel" in front of the light's lens (Similar to assigning a colour value to the light in Daz), Light colours could also be "mixed", similar to paints.
Apologies for getting all technical but that is the background I come from and how I approach every scene I create in Daz which also extends to developing characters.
I probably would have enjoyed that class, but true, that is a personal preference.