One of the biggest thrills of CG art is creating characters -- in fact, it's the biggest thrill. This is what I got into it for, in many ways. And it's a huge pleasure to bring to life a character who's a major player in a very major fiction event. You must be able to "pick" this one! Six foot four, statuesque, white blonde with ice blue eyes, brain like Einstein, fists like Xena, lives and works on an industrial ship that's as powerful as any warship?!
You got it -- Barb Jazinsky. I got the nod of approval on this character this afternoon. And put another tick against another Hellgate character! Mel Keegan is "tickled" with this one. My next project is to pose the two of them together -- Vaurien and Jazinsky, they go together like ham and eggs. Add Mark Sherratt, and there's the brains trust that makes a lot of Hellgate go. Can't wait to see the images myself! You won't notice how big Jazinsky is till she's standing in the same scene with other characters who are normal size. This is going to be fun!
So here you have Victoria 4.2 wearing a new hairdo that I bought this afternoon specifically for the character. It's the Accents hair, and I switched to this because after about an hour of mucking about with other styles, I was getting nowhere. She's wearing the Shadow Dancer costume, but I changed the texture out completely, and added a pair of stylish boots rather than the "cockroach crushers" that come with this costume. That's the Mimi skinmap (actually, it's too olive to be 100% right on this character; I definitely need to get a couple of new skinmaps for V4) and the palest eyes in the Eyes Have It set of eyeballs. The set is Commander, which is a vast starship ops room and bridge set.
Answering a quick question I was asked the other day: Can I use V4 poses for M4, or do they not work, and therefore stuff up your scene and/or computer? In short ... you can use any pose for any character; it just might need a bit of adjustment because the various characters have different proportions, so what's perfect for one will be a close fit, maybe not a perfect fit, for another. (A lot of the V4 poses, when applied to M4, are going to look like scenes out of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but hey, give me a reason why not? You want "go-go boy gorgeous," check out Guy Pearce in that movie ... and this is the effect you'll get, slapping V4 poses onto M4 as he arrives right "out of the box.") But yes, short answer -- any pose can be applied to any character. M4 poses work fine for V4, giving her a lot of gravitas ... how well the V4 poses work for M4 depends on, uh, what you want out of them!
Not much else is happening in this neck of the woods. Just working while the year winds down into fall. The sun is gone much earlier and the blackbirds are singing, which is a sure sign that we're well into fall.
Jade, 18 April
***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!