DollsArtCats

 It's been a bumpy few months, Stripey passed away on November 23rd 2021; and I miss her a lot. She required a lot of nursing at the end, so I stopped blogging, and then kind of fell out of the habit--Covid has also given me some eye and other problems that are ongoing, but hopefully will resolve over time. Meanwhile I have downsized the enormous crowd of dolls--I was sort of aiming for 20 dolls total, but we seem stuck at 35 ..or so :D I'm hoping this year, maybe in the fall, things will have stabilized enough for covid that doll meets will happen again, I miss them! Meanwhile I plan this year to sort through the boxes of doll things and match up clothes and accessories with the correct doll, because stuff has gotten scattered all around over time, as dolls have come and gone. I also need to do my picture inventory for 2022! Work has also been very busy, I work with a wonderful work partner who keeps me more or less focused and on deadline, and we have been turning in store it...

  Pixeluna and Shadownet, my talented Renderosity friends, just finished a new clothing model for Daz's Genesis 8 figure. It can be animated, so they named it Soft Winds-- as the drape can blow around if you want it to. I have had a lot of fun making an add-on set for it, since I learned how to make things glow in Daz Studio! The trick is to put your grayscale mask in the slot next to the Emission slider, and then change the Luminance Units from the default to the MUCH BETTER Kcd/m^2 . Who knew? This is the setting that actually works to make lights, instead of the default. No, I don't know why. Your Emissive value becomes the color of the light--3000 units is more reddish/yellow, 6000 and up become more blue-white. if you look in the render settings under Filtering you can add a Bloom filter to make it blow out, too :D (The background here was designed by Fabiana Kofman --FKDesigns, or fabiana on Renderosity). it's a mirrored floor and a transparent curved background prop,...

  Sicktress sent me a box of gorgeous clothes! There were so many I haven't even gone through them all, though I did use the back of a cloak that was a matte black to photograph some lace for a 3d project: The lace around the bottom of the skirts is the lace that I scanned :D Anyway, here is an inspiring little jacket modelled by Phoenix Doll Android Mei: I did swap the buttons on the back for smaller ones--the one it came with were beautiful but almost too large to go through the buttonholes. It fits her perfectly--she just needs compatible pants now! Here is Honey in another pretty outfit from the box--those pants! Mermaid pants! So Sicktress has now made many of my dolls much more stylish--thank you SO MUCH! <3

It looks like a DeWalt planer (mostly because of the yellow and black color scheme) but it's done! I even loaded it correctly into Daz Studio. It's now waiting to be tested and approved and I am pondering my next modelling project. It really is a fun way to learn things. Speaking of fun, if you are on Pinterest, you can go to the search bar and type in your first name +core+aesthetic and see what you get--it helps if you are already on Pinterest and have a couple of boards. My results were spot on: Yep, that is it.. a tiny toad. :D

It looks boxy and dumb right now, but I managed to model something with a lot of parts, and map all of the parts, and then load all the parts into Daz Studio, assemble the parts and actually SAVE THE PARTS so I can share it. I just need to put the real final textures on it. While I did manage to map every part, I did not do such a professional job on it that I know exactly what items on the map correspond with the model, so I have to figure that out as I paint it. But I learned all kinds of tricks and tips making it! Including if you are going to make something for a Daz Studio human figure to use, you should probably put it next to the figure early in the building process-- because when I first imported the BeeBike into Studio, the woman here could have put it in her pocket :D *yes, I know she has no shoes. I have shoes, but I was afraid I would crash the file if I added yet more polygons at that point.

                                       YES 40 DIFFERENT COLORS FOR THIS HAIR BY PRAE :D Since I didn't create the underlying model, I had to make a LOT of colors to fulfill Renderosity's slot for a product. But I made it, plus a couple I pulled because they were too close to another one or just not perfect. Here are the thumbnails: I hope that gets bigger when you click on it! It was surprisingly fun--the hardest part was making sure I didn't accidentally pick up any of Prae's textures for my own pack (each color has 16 to 20 slots for maps or setting). I had to import her model, then make it white and blank, save it as a Character in the Daz Studio library in it's cleaned state,close DS, reopen it,  re-import my demo model, and then apply my own setting and maps, and save each one as a short script to load the colors and maps.  But it passed testing today and should...

                              This render is very pink :D You can see the key is scalable!                                       The character is Arryn, by gypsyangel, at Daz3d.com

More clothes! It's like being a clothing designer with no sewing. This model of Rhiannon's is so good, too, it's a pleasure to color and render. But it is keeping me busy! This is the same outfit as the one I posted a couple of days ago, just with different "fabric".

I'm still here, life is just coming in fast. Working on the Steampunk Alice textures when I am not glued to the news. Tomorrow I am going to NOT LOOK AT THE INTERNETS until the evening because stuff needs to get done.

I've been working with some of Gypsyangel's new figures, which is why I have been behind in doll stuff. It's pretty much the same as dolls, but they store flatter and cost less. This is "Aryn" for G8 over at Daz, with Fabiana's Halloween Expansion wings for the Lumino Wings. (Renderosity.com)

A shoe with weirdly inappropriate, but hilarious, sharks with hearts. It has great colors and I am so proud of the velvet on the bow. I also did some "bunny slippers" for Andy-- I need to render the back--the heel is a giant carrot. Tomorrow I start on something more dignified :D

So I took a photo of this aloe vera leaf at Home Depot, just because I liked the patterns. Then I had a cool model by Xtrart-3d that needed new textures, so I tried out the leaf (with some tweaking) onto the suit bottoms: I still liked the pattern, but the waistband was meh and I didn't like the look of the center seam (though the spangles were kind of fun). It still looked suspiciously planty, too. So I recolored it and added a fur look to it. Here is the "alien fur" final: A lot better! I still may do a little seam refining, but the basic print is pretty good.

But we have shoes!! Actually there are even more shoes but the package was getting so huge no one in their right mind would want to download it, so some shoes got tossed into the closet. I actually thought I would do some matching hose next, maybe a dress... I can't tell you how much fun this is to do. I shouldn't because then people will want me to do it for free, so I will say it IS a ton of fiddly work with files and I don't like that part, but it's necessary for other people to be able to use them. A side benefit--here is a cupcake photoshop brush for you to screen cap and stamp on your own stuff: It's on the inside of one of the shoes :D

The splash page has this typo too, and I looked at it for a long time since it's in Mistral, which is never easy to read, and decided, yes, the word was "Clam". It's actually surprising that Soom does as well as it does with English, which is a messed-up language with a different alphabet than Korean. They can also blame it on April, that month notorious for jokes. Adonis himself is a re-release, and an Idealian--too large for me, but I do like his face. I'm not crazy about the Ringdoll-style officer uniform, but I do like this gender-bender version  a lot: Heel feets!! Those are so awesome, it opens up so many fashion possibilities, and yes, amazing boots. I have been busy with my own heels here: The shoes, left to right are "Conspiracy Theory", "Steam" and "Candy." Candy has the chain and the bow hidden--it turns out Daz Studio has an option in the material pane called "Geometry Cutout" which is a way to hide...

Iplehouse has a new Creaa girl up --when they first came out I found them a bit creepy, but Leah is just cute and elfin, with her little ears. For some reason I did not realize that the Creaa's were tallish and slim--here are the measurements, they are like slim msd dolls: There are a ton of new clothes for her at Iplehouse as well, it looks like they had fun making clothes for her. Here is a longer shot of her: Aww, what a sweetie! Meanwhile here I have been painting shoes and test rendering them. I did these today--the model is amazing, it's by Arren and Anagord: It's the Shellie heels from Renderosity.com, and I just hid the distinctive chain that runs around it, because there are already a ton of textures for these shoes with the chain, so I am making some without the chain. The heels are translucent in my version. The digital doll who has been modelling these is also named Leah, and she never falls over (though strangely I have had wig problems with he...

She's looking a bit rough, but the "mask" is a geo-shell--a copy of the figure underneath, with instructions on what to hide. All the white parts are the second figure, and I have applied a texture on the face part. It doesn't want to displace much for me, so my hope of a more textured cyborg girl may have to be in making some little props and glueing them on. But this is a great way to apply anything thin--including stockings and gloves. :D My Renderosity package passed testing, thanks to Andy. <3 Which means it's time to make something else, repopulate my store and pay the plumber.