The other day I mentioned having shopped a major sale at Renderosity, where I picked up a new skinmap for Michael 4, some props, a set, some Photoshop brushes, and a pack of textures. Today offered me the opportunity to take an hour and test-drive ONE of those items, and I zeroed in on the textures. Why? Because they're the easiest thing to play with in a very short time, when you're tired!
The result was quite the little fashion show. Victoria 4.2 was persuaded to change clothes about twenty times! Actually, the V4 doll is wearing the Jenna skinmap and face morph (toooo tired to even put on one of my own characters!) and the Aether hair, and a variety of costumes. There's the Strings Lingerie, the Arabesques skirt and jacket, the Ebony Star slacks and top, the Witch Hazel skirt and top, plus the top from the V4 Leisure costume, and Hongyu's evening dress, plus the Chaos Seed costume, including boots and gloves, and finally the "duchess" dress and its coat, Night Lily.
The thing of it is, when you change out all the textures for seamless add-on textures, you can mix and match bits from literally anything, and they all come up looking like they're part of the same costume. In other words, they come up looking like they fit together.
The trick is to use very good textures that really do the job. And I've got to recommend this texture pack ... it's from TMP, which stands for The Mad Painter, and it's the TMP Creative Designs 120 Textures pack. Honestly, I've never has an easier fit, better results, such a wide choice, and less hassle, with any fabric texture pack I've invested in before. Highly recommended. As the name suggests, there's way over 100 textures, of which you see exactly 21 here. Using the "swap color" tool in Irfanview, you could also switch out one or more colors and make a couple of thousand textures from these individual ones.
Tomorrow, I'll see it I can bribe Michael 4 to strut his stuff, model some clothes, and demonstrate some more of these textures.
For now -- gotta run. Duty calls -- seriously!
Jade, 8 July
