Do you 'play with dolls'?

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  • #1730522
    Ethiopia
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    I find myself rendering less and less these days. The problem is that my scenes have become more and more complicated and rendering times are now glacial, if they finish at all.
    I'll load an interior (I have several favourite rooms) then furnish it and load all manner of accessories and toys (ya...that weird stuff from R'otica). Then comes the ladies. I mainly use Vicky Four because she loads so fast, has a billion pre-made poses and expressions, and of course there's her extensive wardrobe which all the Genesis bimbos don't come close to matching. My girls get fully dressed from underwear to evening wear. I have a great time dressing them in lingerie with shoes and jewelry. The outer clothes are usually a bit translucent to showcase their unmentionables.
    I'll try out numerous poses as the ladies interact with each other and the 'furnishings' (anyone remember Dirtier Eddies stuff?). I like lots of sheer window dressings and canopy beds. When it's time for bed I'll set it to render. Rarely do the renders finish by the morning.
    I've realized that I'm not all that concerned with final renders anymore as I am with just playing around. I take regular screenshots and save entire scenes in order to play with them later.

    #1730534
    barc
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 4

    TMI bro

    null

    #1730552
    Cage
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    Absolutely! Wish we could do multiplayer 😀

    #1730618
    Frank21
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 4

    @Ethiopia Worse.... my dolls want to have lives. Plan to do a single render then I think what are they doing, how did they get there, what going to happen next? Before long I go a series on my hands I never wanted.

    #1730629
    Ethiopia
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    *chuckle* My mind also wanders as I play and I wind up with numerous back stories that often lead to new ideas. I usually keep a text file open to jot down ideas for future scenes.
    I've been goofing with ridiculously over complicated torture machines in the vein of James Bond baddies. If one of them would have just put a bullet in his head he'd have been gone decades ago but noooo, they had to devise all manner of Rube Goldberg-ian gizmos to eliminate him, all of which he was able to circumvent. I'm aiming for something fun and a bit camp.

    #1730637
    ADAM
    Participant
    Rank: Rank-1

    Posted once on Daz forums that Daz was pretty much Barbie Dress up game for adults. They deleted it.

    I think I enjoy mixing morphs to create something different. Rarely ever use a full character as is.

    Also kinda like Pokémon in I gotta catch them all. There are characters I'll probably never install or use in a render but DL them anyway. I have been occasionally skipping one every so often. Skipping a free item must say something about how much I dislike the product. Usually a normal looking model with a ton of crappy "alien" textures.

    I almost always start with the model. I'll mess around with a bunch of morphs till I get something interesting then I think " What type of place would this look good in".

    My quest for the perfect dial is ongoing and will probably never happen.

    #1730764
    Ethiopia
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    I pretty much leave my girls as they are and avoid 'morph hell' (my term). I like to make the breasts a bit fuller and eliminate sag so that they look better under clothing. I have to laugh at the hyper-sexualized look that seems so popular with the R'otica crowd.

    #1730788
    La_Pucelle
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 4

    My girls and boys, well, the ones that are my favs, have fun backstories and lives. Heck, I even wrote a book based on one of my gals - book 2 should be out in 2022. You never know where this will lead you.

    #1730863
    Grouchy Old Fart
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    The backstories (and forestories!) are IMO the best part, truth be told. It's not always erotic stuff, either. I almost always keep a doc file (usually RTF format) that tells a story to go along with the series of renders. I love that a cool story develops as the series of images evolve. Sometimes I'll even go back and squeeze in an interim render between two others to better match the story flow (so the pics "story-006" and "story-007" get an image named "story-006a" wedged between them).

    If the story turns out really good, I'll keep it and its images for years. I have some that I made a ton of years ago, and even though the earliest ones are objectively crappy and the poses were stiff/awkward (I learned along the way), I still enjoy them because of the backstory.

    Render times are pretty decent, since I always pay attention to the balance between performance and detail with each new scene. Thanks to HDRI, a (very) light touch with DoF, and filtering? I can speed things up a LOT - most of my renders rarely go on for more than 20-30 minutes.

    In fact, the most time is spent getting that initial room/scene/lighting balanced. After that, the rest of the images in a scene go much faster. With very few exceptions, I can really get into the flow, plan the next moves, any dialogue (I don't do speech bubbles or suchlike, but imagining what is said in that image and the attitudes/emotions, then setting it all up, is incredibly enjoyable.)


    @ethiopia
    : I totally agree about figure shapes. I much prefer females with an actual waist, unless I'm using toon figures (one of the few formats which visually allows the use of hyper-exaggerated body shapes without being jarring). Even then I don't tend to go too crazy about it (I'm not a big fan of chest-tethered zeppelins).

    BTW, regarding: "I’ve realized that I’m not all that concerned with final renders anymore as I am with just playing around." - have you thought about diving into Filament and using that? With a bit of tweaking (especially to bolster shadows... ugh), you can not even bother with renders.

    IS it a digital Barbie-doll set? Not going to lie, it is. Do I care that I'm a grown dude playing with digital Barbie dolls? Nope.

    #1730882
    Grouchy Old Fart
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    @d0gg0d said: "My quest for the perfect dial is ongoing and will probably never happen."

    Ditto. Megaditto. Gigaditto.

    Whenever I'm in the mood to create a new character, I usually start dorking with dials until something catches my interest... then I follow it. once I get the shape halfway where I want it, I go find a skin that fits it. Then I'll refine the shapes a bit more. Then I'll add a bit of hair that fits the character. Then I'll do some final tweaks and call it good.

    Once I get something I want to keep, I'll create a custom dial from them with that new character's name, then lock that dial and save the character out. I know I don't have to do that, but it makes the list of dials a LOT smaller when browsing the "Currently Used" morphs to chase down a wayward dial.

    #1730938
    Corbeau
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 5

    Interesting discussion. My approach is slightly different, I use my "dolls" as actors (Have an excel roster... with scene presets morphed Genesis + hair). When I prepare a RPG scenario I select one of the dolls to play a part, then she/he is prepared for the shoot (clothing, props, expressions). So my dolls have always several "Personae", the actor (with a convenient actor name) and the role they play. Of course I have favourites. I have more ideas than time however.... And most plans remain unfinished... (because of a "brighter" super new idea...). That is why I am just an amateur...

    #1730997
    Frank21
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 4

    @Pooper (GOF) your third and forth paragraphs describe exactly my method and attitude to my art and workflow... are you my long-lost twin LOL?

    #1731033
    SkippyTheMeh
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    @La_Pucelle, I've got about 100,000 words of back (and front) story for a core group of my characters and I've spent longer in the last five years writing about them than I have producing finished renders.

    I'll either spend a few hours 'playing dress-up' with a character and that will give me an idea for another story, or scene or something, and sometimes I'll be writing and want a reference image to help me describe the scene, so I'll fire up Daz and knock up something quick-and-dirty so I can keep track of who is standing where or wearing what colour skirt, or doing what with whom etc.

    My characters definitely have a life of their own, and sometimes what started out as a quick 30-minute reference scene will turn into a multi-character, three-hour render and several thousand words of story that I had no intention of writing.

    #1731053
    Ethiopia
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 3

    What genre are people working in? I see tons of Sci-Fi and fantasy clothing being offered for sale so I assume this is what folks are dressing their dolls in. I like regular real world clothing and lots of it. This is another reason I mostly use good old Vicky Four. She has so much day and evening wear compared to Genesis.
    To this day there isn't a good wedding gown for anyone. The Vicky Three gown is the best for a traditional style (wide skirt and long veil). The Genesis girls only get a couple of modern gowns. How is a lady supposed to have a traditional wedding in one of those?

    #1731060
    Frank21
    Participant
    Rank: Rank 4

    @Ethiopia "I like regular real world clothing..." That my preference too, but it largely depends on the theme rendering at the time. V4 was great and I have tons of content for her and her clothes were often superior to the current stuff. As for the V4 model I don't think she's as good as Genesis, doesn't bend anywhere near as good and her skins were generally IMO less realistic, apart from a few excellent ones like danae's Metropolitan Collection.

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