Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
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:
As mentioned up front in this thread, my winter/early spring is occupied by outside obligations so this is the time of the year that free time starts to open up for me again. I haven't done much Daz work - or, sadly, work on the story itself - since these items from last November, but here's an new effort at my red-haired main character using part of the skin of one of several newer characters - Lauryn 9 here - as a foundation under the FT2-derived base color texture set from my source image. I was also tinkering with the new Omni Suite for the hair color.
https://www.daz3d.com/li-strand-based-omni-suite
I don't know what most of the vast array of settings in here do, but it does offer a lot of one-click options for base color, root color, roughness, etc. I really like the new Omni colors but they can be a tad too glossy so having tools to tone down to realistic levels is good. This character in particular does not live a life - most of the time - that involves fur coats and perfect hair so having the option to dial down to "clean but natural" is useful. Also, trying to get this shade of red as a natural hair color - with the right color of eyebrows, which this, IMO, is not yet - takes some doing.
She's very beautiful and naturalistic.
Thanks, and thanks for visiting!
I've finally circled back to something that I spent a lot of time studying years ago, before I wandered off down the path of creating "insta people" for product tests. Yes, my "insta people" are very satisfying: by definition, they are quick and easy to make, and many of them are pretty nice and close to what I had in mind for those characters. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter if I continue to create my own personal characters that way for motivational illustrations that no one but me will ever see. But it was high time that I took a minute to look under the hood of what went into the creation of the characters that I'm borrowing and slapping my Face Transfer 2/FaceGen textures on. That was my excuse for buying all of these characters - to analyze their textures and configurations to see what I like and then create my own.
I set up a simple scene and then created more than a half-dozen versions of Tai, my story's main character, with varying PA/Daz core characters underneath. I rendered the same view and took note of all of the skin settings.
Behind the scenes, there's a lot of similarity. In this test, I specifically picked numerous commercial characters from different PAs as well as a couple of Daz core G9s. There were some PAs that I didn't study here: CynderBlue comes to mind first. I love the CB characters and literally have all of the G9 ones, but none of them work well with Tai. I found out early on that a character doesn't have to be a dead ringer for my character in order to apply that character's mat files and replace with my textures, and get something that doesn't look weird, but if there's a significant difference in skin tone or age, I can assume it's going to be a bad match.
I'm not going to share any sort of proprietary info about commercial characters, but I will say that SC Isla, whom I picked up a couple of weeks ago, was significantly different in construction than the others that I tested in this particular round of research.
Having analyzed all of surface settings, I sat down and did texture editing on Tai's FT2-generated texture for ... well, for about the first time in years: removing eyebrows, fixing glitched eyelids (which both FaceGen and Face Transfer do) and retouching face stains a bit, which even FT2 still does to some extent. Luckily, I had notes for doing all this in Photoshop; it's been a long time. Also with Photoshop, I created an SSS version of fixed diffuse texture. I then gave Materialize a go and created, to the best of my first-time-I-really-sat-down-and-tried-to-use-it ability, a full set of height, roughness, specular, normal and AOs. This created a bunch of mat files that are way below professional caliber, but one has to start somewhere.
This is the original render using CS Isla, with my original diffuse textures from FT2:
This version uses all of the configurations, while replacing all of the CS Isla map files (except for a couple of Detail maps) with the ones I created with Materialize from my character's fixed texture:
I went as far as doing head, body and arm files. Here's a render I did looking for obvious ugly seams, at least up here where those come together:
On more than one occasion during the several years since I first began dabbling with Daz, I have debated if and how to actually share my story WIP. I spent so much of my life writing in isolation that I don't have - and never sought out - a group, either for collaboration or sharing of final work. I have observed that some personal threads here in the Art Studio forum in particular do include panels, pages and other excerpts of WIPs (or even final products).
For me, most of my creative journey is outside of art. I am, as noted, a writer first and try-to-be artist a distant second. I'm not just a writer, I am a writer of vast gray walls of text that - in terms of volume - smash through guidelines and expectations placed on commercial novel writing, much less graphic novels or strips. My foray into art was for the purpose of creating inspirational art, like that which initially set a fire under me that got the first book of my current series finished back in 2020. I realized very quickly that my stories are not ones that could reasonably be realized as graphic novels and the reality is, the only way art that I create would ever be seen by a reader would be as cover art, or possibly the occasional bit of art scattered through the book.
For now, I need to get myself in gear and actually write before I need to worry about that.
In the meantime, I have decided to attach a tiny excerpt of the beginning of my first book in case anyone is interested in this story and the characters I've spent all of this time talking about. Yes, it's just a plain text file.
A few days ago, I was visiting my parents and my dad and I got into a conversation about reading and thus, tangentially, about writing.
To build a picture of my dad, he was in grade school when the oldest Boomers were born, and to this day, he is enviably sharp and shrewd. He's not cruel but he's uncompromising. He was, in another day, a force to be reckoned with; he showed up in a room at an office somewhere, and smart people listened to what he had to say. His job involved presenting facts around which business had to accommodate - not the other way around. He's been retired for a long time now and his post-work life involves a variety of pasttimes, including reading.
The reality of age and the passing of time has taken some of his former hobbies away, but not reading. From my earliest memories of him, he was an avid reader and collector of novels - though in recent times, admirably tech-savvy as he is, the physical books are long gone, replaced by e-books. But way back when, when I was a kid, he had paperbacks neatly lined up on shelves and as I entered my tweens and teens and became old enough to read them, I did. I would borrow them one after another. I read through his cops and criminals books (Joseph Wambaugh, Mario Puzo, et al) and the spy books (including Len Deighton, an early favorite of mine, and Robert Ludlum and the - for me anyway - utterly unreadable John LeCarre). He had a bunch of war books; Vietnam did not interest me, but over time I developed a fascination for WWI and WWII. And he had a whole shelf of scifi - Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, etc. Although I did eventually read a smattering of Heinlein, I never shared dad's consuming interest in scifi.
I think that lends some insight into how different we are as people. He dreams of a hopeful scifi future full of self-driving cars and entire libraries stored on a handheld device. I live in a dark place where I cannot unsee that humanity, unknowing and disrespecting, skips along a razor's edge of blissful ignorance, thinking that civilization is a default. Civilization took millennia to realize, and it's always one disaster - manmade or natural - or a generation or two of lack of building and maintenance away from crumbling under us.
Anyway, so having established the characters that are me and my dad, I can tell this story from a few days ago in which he casually told me that my writing isn't good enough - mainly because my characters aren't deep enough - to live up to his current distinguished tastes in reading. This would have to be based on the first chapter of my current WIP (from which the small excerpt in my last post is taken) because it's the only piece of my writing that I ever gave him to read. Back in the 1980s, when I was a teen writing stories on the household's shared computer in the kitchen, he used to delight in materializing behind me and reading over my shoulder. (OK, he only did that once or twice, but I've been looking over my shoulder ever since.) I wrote vast amounts of material that I never showed anybody, knowing that everything I wrote was too weird, or too childish or too stupid to share. I grew up and the only change was that over time, while writing in isolation for an audience consisting of me, I became a competent writer whose material has no market or audience. And I'm mostly OK with that.
I was able to shrug off being told that I was a technically competent writer whose work has shallow characters with no heart and still hold a constructive conversation about other authors - from the classics up to about the 1990s, when I quit reading other people's fiction. (I was partly busy with IRL stuff, but mainly, I withdrew into the figurative forest to concentrate on writing.)
But I do admit that inside the black box that I usually present to the world, that was a hurtful assessment. I'll own up to being a lot of things as a writer: irretrievably verbose, irrelevant, boring. I am every bit of the pontificating bore that I know I must sound like sometimes. That said, I take pride in my character creation, and I think maybe I will talk a little bit about my characters after all.
A while back, I posted a few portraits of characters from my current WIP in my gallery with some commentary on the character.
About my main character, known by various names througout the five books of the series, I wrote:
"When I mention that the plotline of my story series involves the further misadventures of a teenage girl who spent time in her even younger days with a group of resistance fighters in a WWII-esque setting, I suspect that a Hollywood cliche immediately presents itself:
Aha, so my red-haired heroine must be some kind of Ruby Roundhouse character, taking on big, bad evil soldiers and kicking ass. Nope, not even. She's not physically imposing and was literally told by the older kids to do anything to avoid a hand-to-hand fight. But she didn't need to be told that. She never laid a hand on a soldier and wouldn't dare; she knows she would surely lose in a fight with one, because she already did. Instead, her tools were guile, stolen guns and the sort of shrugging willingness to take reckless chances that comes with the certainty that one is living on borrowed time. She accepted that she would get one chance at best, and only that so long as she wasn't taken seriously by soldiers who approached her. She admits to the reader at one point that she's not even a good shot - she just made sure to avoid circumstances in which she would need to be.
She is indeed a prolific "killer of men" but she's certainly not famous for it. Back at the time, every effort was taken to make sure no one was left to tell any stories about her; having a reputation that precedes you ensures that you won't get that one chance at a first move. These days, no one knows because she doesn't tell anyone. She doesn't want to be that person anymore, but no matter how far away she goes, circumstances keep pushing her back there.
Parts of this story - including the resistance fighter backstory - take place in a region which was riddled with poverty and violence even before it became a war-torn wreck, which happened because it was unluckily located on the strategic edges of future battlefield between the larger powers of the East and the West. There's nothing here that's pretty, or glamorous, or innocent or even particularly noble, including my main character. She's not even sure that she's a good guy, on the side of what is right, and by the time she's told you her whole story - which includes causing mayhem that destabilizes both sides of the brewing world war - she expects you to have your doubts about this also.
In her own narration of these events, she gives you the impression that back then, she was the weakest and least able member of the team. Yet, she is the last survivor - the one burdened with the task of being the caretaker of the memories of them and what they did. She refers to herself as a plague bird, in a nod to old mountain lore that nightbirds carry the plague but are themselves immune to it."
Tai, in a render I did during summer 2022
So clearly, I have given myself a monumental task of character creation here.
Comments from my dad notwithstanding, I put a lot of effort into visioning characters, including secondary characters, because for the most part, I don't tell stories that happen to characters, I tell stories that happen because of characters. My characters are free agents, the product of everything that has happened to them up to this point, and what they choose to do or not, and how that turns out, is unique to that character and his or her situation, motivations, aptitudes and skills, in this moment.
Expanding on that philosophy, I see life as the net result of all that came before - something that is perhaps obvious but sometimes overlooked when telling the story. Of course there are Carrington Events and sometimes the story is about your character responding to one. But a lot of plotlines are about things that are just one event in a long and complicated chain of events. This story is one of those.
Way back in the 1970s there was a TV series, James Burke's Connections (the first one, as I see that there have since been subsequent editions) and it was one of those things that affected that viewpoint. I have never been big on the "butterfly effect" - a trivial, unconsidered thing here having some huge effect there - but the idea of this choice or this action leading to that, and to that, and then that, was such an awesome idea that it never really left my attention. It's been decades since I literally watched that show but the whole idea of "because that guy decided to build a better breadmaker we have space travel" (kidding, but you get the idea) changed how I looked at events and actions. I see all of history in that context.
And so when I decided to write a story about a character altering the course of history, I knew that required not just working out all of the threads of relevant history but creating a character that was the right character, at the right time, in the right place, to do it.
I hope you don't mind if I comment.
A character like your 'Plague Bird' would, in real life, not talk, not show a depth of character of any sort to the outside world. She'd be closed in, tight lipped and armoured against showing any feeling. So, if your story isn't from the internal view of 'Plague Bird' no one would ever know or see any of her feelings and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to omit.
I have read many classic sci-fi books where your desciption above massively exceeds the whole character internal description in the entire book. Personally, I'd take it that your father was taking a slightly kack handed approach to try to get you to include more of the bits he currently enjoys. If he read Asimov, Heinlein and the lot in the past, then he certainly didn't get what he's asking for in those books. But possibly such parts of the stories were not common in any books (sci-f or other) during the classic-scifi era, so their absense wasn't noticed. It does appear now in some books, so that's possibly what he enjoys and wants more of.
Finally. Have you ever read any Fredrick Forsyth? He sold millions of books, and earned millions from his writing. And never once did he sully any of his books with character development, interior monologs or feelings. It was plot point - plot point - plot point - bang, bang, bang in a relentless progression from start to finish through the book. Personally, I didn't enjoy his books, but it takes all sorts and you do not need to satisfy every potential reader to be a sucessful writer. Different stories need different things, and if you make yourself happy writing and then your readers are able to find your books, that will work. If the clips obove are representative, you're a great deal better writer than many amazon kindle writers I've read in the last couple of years and all I can say is 'Keep it up'.
Regards,
Richard
Hi, thanks for visiting and commenting!
You're spot-on about this character. She struggles to communicate meaningfully and keeps secrets from everybody, including the other, equally silent and standoffish, kids who initially survived the whole business of killing soldiers. This story had to be told either in first-person or one of the third-person omniscient options because so much of it is internal - her perceptions of things, for right and wrong, and the choices she makes based on those thoughts, for good and bad. There's not much that would be known strictly from an external perspective. She does not seek counsel and in the "present day" of this series, there are only scattered moments in which there is an involved ally: when she involves others, she intentionally uses them, using conversation to mislead rather than inform. (Hence the reference in the post above about buying the artwork.)
She also keeps secrets from you, the reader. She's not an unreliable narrator to the extent of lying to the reader. She never does that, and when she does get around to telling you things, she does so in an unsparing manner. But she clearly picks her path carefully. She takes a long time before she gets brave enough to tell you about her most guarded secrets. By the end of the fifth book it becomes obvious who the reader is supposed to be and why this story series was written, and it's entirely because of her inability to talk about uncomfortable things.
Back to your comments, I know I have tried to read Forsyth. My dad had all those books (Fourth Protocol, Day of the Jackal, Dogs of War, et al) and I know I would have picked them up in their turn and set out reading them. For some reason Forsyth wasn't approachable to the me that I was in the early 1980s; I don't recall what I may not have liked. For the record, contemporary and reasonably comparable Philip Caputo I did like: Horn of Africa was one of my single favorite novels.
I think, having engaged in this interesting exchange about character development, I am considering that my approach to the subject is partly influenced by my fascination of this-leading-to-that; self evident when considering historical events, but also relevant to characters. Who my main character is today is absolutely the result of the life she has lived to this point. It also comes into keen focus for me because here, I'm writing a story where the protagonist does not have inherent business being involved in these events. Let's say I were writing a book about a big-city cop who gets entangled in international intrigue as a result of events that are kicked into motion by routine professional interaction: a traffic stop, maybe. In that case, you (the reader) don't want, much less need, to know about the protagonist cop's childhood and previous adult life. That would be a weird slam-on-the-brakes to stop the flow of a spy-thriller story to indulge in absurd flashbacks about ... well, the cop's ordinary life that had nothing to do with pulling over a suspicious driver during the routine course of his day at work.
I kick off my story series with teenage kids riding through lawless mountains at night, on their way to sell a contraband product, only to run across military activity in what is supposed to be neutral territory. A member of the group gets closer and discovers critical information that sets this story, and the series, in motion from this point. There's a lot of questions hanging on that. In fact, every party involved in this scene is doing exactly what one would expect them to do, if you knew who and what they were, but of course in that first sentence, on that first page, no one would know any of that, or reasonably expect or suspect it, based on a casual glance at the characters. It is indeed a monumental exercise in character creation and building, not just of Tai but of the other people in her life.
So, forging onward, I continued to give the whole matter some thought.
Tai and Anan, one of the older kids from the resistance fighter days, in a render I did in early 2022
It was decades ago when I first created the characters and started writing about the events that would - after a few rewrites and a lot of time - eventually become my current WIP. It was the 1980s and bad guys were Russians, Nazi henchmen, crooked law enforcement/feds, or heartless rich business owners. Good guys came in a variety of descriptions. But what there weren't a lot of, at least in a book or movie about heavy and serious subjects intended for an adult audience, were teenage protagonists. As all of my stories of that general era did, my story featured a main character who was a teenage girl, and this was not because I was making a statement but because I was a teenage girl at the time and wouldn't have had the tiniest inkling of how to write authentically from the perspective of anyone else - except maybe a pre-teen girl.
I actually did persevere with this story for a while back at the time. I wrote vast sections, then rewrote them a couple of times, through the 90s and into the 2000s, but eventually, I set it aside, waiting for some moment when I had new inspiration. I left Tai as she was, forever 18.
After a long hiatus, I dusted off this story in the spring of 2020 and realized that - for this story, at least - some character development was in order.
Speaking in context of the big stuff, the critical plot-driving stuff, the difficult stuff that the next person couldn't or wouldn't do ... Whoever, or whatever, a character is, if they know something, there has to be a reason why they know it. If they can do something, there has to be a demonstrable reason why they know how to do that. If they actually do something, there needs to be a reason why they would. (Or wouldn't, if that character takes a look around at the circumstances and unexpectedly opts to walk away.)
So that, then, brings me back to Tai, who musters a history-changing act at the conclusion of the fourth book. As I fine-tuned the idea - which developed as an extension and revision of the original partly finished/rewritten story pieces - I had to work out the answers to those big questions. Those answers turned out to be the first three and a half books of a gigantic and complicated story newly reimagined as a five-book series.
I'm loving your descriptions of your characters... definitely pulling me in to wanting to know more.
Perhaps related, but perhaps not... that mention you made with the situation with the cop and the traffic stop reminded me of a book on writing my 10th grade English teacher pulled a bunch of lessons from. The particular chapter this reminded me of was called "Stay In The Phone Booth With The Gorilla." Basically the premise was: there's this guy, and he's in a phone booth, and a gorilla barges in. And the author veers back into his childhood to talk about how once, when he was young, he suffered some gorilla-related trauma at a zoo, and on and on and... is this the appropriate place for that? Does the reader care? No! The reader wants to know what's happening this moment! Stay in the phone booth with the gorilla!
Mr. Olson was an awesome teacher, and one of these days I'll have to see if I can track down the book for nostalgia's sake... but I still think of that sometimes when I'm writing my own stuff and go off on a tangent. And then I figure out somewhere better to put the tangent.
Anyhow, clearly you already have a decent handle on all that, but I thought the gorilla reference might amuse you anyway.
The old reference I always remember is "Bambi Meets Godzilla." It's mentioned in one of these books on the shelf behind me. (I buy books on writing like I buy stuff at the Daz store.) I finally looked it up just now:
[4k] Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) - Full Movie
Clearly one needs to match up the protagonist and antagonist with a smidge more care.
But it's the silly stuff that we remember and take lessons from, right?
I've been debating where to start in terms of discussing the building of my story's main character and I decided to start at the beginning.
One day about 20 years before the events occurring on the first page of my story, more than a thousand miles to the northeast and not too terribly far inland from the sea to the north, a scruffy stranger traveling through a small town in the remote mountains caught the eye of the teenage daughter of the town midwife.
Technically speaking you could start talking about anyone's story from the moment their parents meet, but for most people, the circumstances of that aren't terribly significant from a story-telling perspective. But here, how Tai came to be, and who and what her parents are, set the stage for everything that came afterward. Plus I think it will provide a good excuse and impetus to finally create some coherent character art.
Tai's grandmother is not exactly a midwife. She provides everyday medical care to her small community and is the caretaker of arcane mysticism that no one has cared about in generations. Someone has to keep that knowledge alive, though, and it ends up being the town midwife, who is usually one of the only people who can read and write in these backwood little towns. The "Present Day" of my story's world is circa 1940, so 20 years before that, out in the middle of nowhere, there's no electricity, no plumbing, hardly any visitors and no friendly words or faces for what visitors do wander through. Travel through here would be strictly on foot, either one's own feet or by horse. There are no roads suitable for automobiles within miles, nor, in this part of the world, anyone wealthy enough to own a car. Strangers are pretty rare around here.
Within a year, young infant Tai and her mother are gone, never to be seen again by her mother's family. People in the community shake their heads in disapproval of a young life thrown away on a lowlife drifter.
He's not a drifter, of course. He's actually an army officer charged with gathering military intelligence in the West, a region hostile to his home nation and its allies in the East. Whether it's part of a plan or a last-minute decision to do what he thinks is the right thing, he takes his young family with him.
And this is why Tai, whose red hair and freckles speak of an origin far away on the north coast, ends up spending her childhood in various places in the western half of the continent, growing up fluent in its languages and familiar with its cultures. It sets the stage for a mysterious and constantly absent father and a distant and unhappy mother, isolated by language, wrapping herself in the lost customs of her homeland.
Tai's father, a man of many names, but friends who know who he really is call him Alvo.
This version of him was newly created today. Like the new "Tai" from a few posts back, this is entirely his textures derived from an Artbreeder image, though I used a different set of surface settings from a different vendor than the new "Tai" character. The texture is a bit too pronounced. Since I've bought dozens of G9 characters, with at least one or two by most of the PAs, I have lots more to try while I familiarize myself with the various approaches taken by different people.
This thread is about character creation, so I don't plan to wander too far down the rabbit hole of worldbuilding. This adaptation of a map from my story's world should be sufficient to illustrate how the setting contributes to the storyline and also, more relevant to this conversation, builds the characters in my story.
By the time of Tai's 14th birthday, she has lived in all of the places marked here. (For scale, it's around 2,000 miles from A to B.) Imagine a world roughly like ours a hundred years ago. Early automobiles exist but there's no freeway system crossing the continent yet. Aviation is in its infancy. There is a fairly useful, modern railway system, including the Trans-Continental Railway that runs roughly along the north coast, all the way out to B. (But inland train travel varies greatly in quality and quantity.) For generations, the bulk of travel over great distances, both passenger and commercial, has been and remains via steamer ship.
So it's possible for someone to have traveled to these places in this timeframe - but unlikely. The region shown in pinkish-orange on the southwest tip of this continent (with an eastern border barely 30 miles from location C) controls access to the waters in its area and is unwelcoming to foreign travelers and trade from the northern and eastern areas. Thus, adventurous tourists from the north coast might make their way as far west as B - the modern coastal metropolis of the more tolerant and open of the West Coast nations - but casual travelers would not venture further south. Neither is there much passenger traffic from the south to the north, for similar reasons.
The fellow traveler of physical distance is cultural distance. I'm not planning to make some lengthy (and potentially controversial) dissertation on culture, but put simply, the logical outcome of a scenario when travel between distant places is possible but still time-consuming and arduous, is that faraway cultures - and the people who live in them - are likely very different from each other. That has direct effect on building characters, who are in some measure the product of the times and places in which they have lived.
Tai's mother, raised in a remote and insular community, had likely never been further than a day or two by horse from her small hometown in the forested mountains of the Midland prior to leaving with Alvo. Just going to the coast directly north of her hometown would've been an adventure of a lifetime for a girl of her time and origin, and at least there, the locals speak a language she could understand. Now picture the complete disorientation a character like Tai's mother would experience when moving to B - a city of a million people, with modern (circa 1940) features that would seem otherworldly to someone from a town of hundreds with no electricity; a city 2,000 miles away, where the locals speak an entirely unfamiliar language, have completely unrecognizable practices and beliefs ... and are hostile and unwelcoming to people who don't share those outwardly inscrutable practices and beliefs.
The question, then, as one builds a character, is what happens when that character encounters that situation? It's not what I would do, or what some other character would do, or even what most people would do. And there might be a different answer to that question if asked of the same character at some other moment. But - at the moment relevant in the story - what happens?
Here, Tai's intimidated young mother Shehyafoe (shay-YAH-fee, in case anyone wonders how that was supposed to be pronounced) withdraws into a tiny world centered on the family's home - something made possible because Alvo has the means and inclination to hire at least a housekeeper to help maintain his otherwise helpless and isolated household in his constant absences. Shehyafoe's small universe revolves entirely around Alvo - one of the only people she can speak to in this place - and, despite the formal excommunication of a family that threw her out for her indiscretions, the preservation of and, eventually, the passing on of heirloom knowledge of her lost home and family.
I've actually not done much envisioning of Tai's mother, beyond the obvious. This might be the first time I have ever tried to create her as a character, and it's from a particularly crummy Artbreeder source image from the early days - it doesn't look like I ever made a better, updated version.
I am continuing to dial in my skin settings. This is only a slight evolution from the last new Tai render, but this is the first time I have done this male character in this way. Both have their own textures, but the skin settings are the same. There's always room for improvement but I am liking this for my characters whose skin tone is suited by it.
The textures are created as noted above - original diffuse textures from Face Transfer 2; Photoshop to remove eyebrows and fix eyelids, then to create translucencies for each; and Materialize to create the rest of the files.