I made a series of “happy” character pics. This is the last. A hot tub party! There is a little depth of field happening here so Mia and Rachel look slightly out of focus, but not enough to blur them, just soften their looks. These pictures will show up in Hopepunk City as transitional scenes. The ones with nudity like this one will be in the later part of the game.
I was reminded that April 22 is “Earth Day” and wanted to do something with that theme. Then in my e-mail I got a newsletter from Poser that includes a nice tribute to a 3D artist named Dinoraul, who recently passed away. I loved his modeling of historic animals and they are of very high quality, but didn’t get a chance to purchase any until I came up with the Dodo plot in Ariane in Paradise. So I thought Earth Day and Dinoraul tribute, I should release the dodo selfie from AiP. When I pulled it up and took a closer look I found that the shadows around the feet were off. Pulling up the image in Poser, Ariane and the Player Character are actually hovering over the ground. So this week’s picture is a corrected re-rendering as well as a tribute. 
Feeling down, I decided to make some random pictures of my characters having fun. This is my favorite. I added some depth blur on this one with focus on Mia in the middle making Rachel and Ariane slightly blurry, but not as blurry as the background. Love the dog looking in. 
I’ve decided that my next project after Hopepunk City is Date Ariane Remastered. A lot of the games in this genre have been using cycles rendering and other technologies to make pictures look better and better, and I think it is time to do the same for Date Ariane. Full 1920×1080 renders mostly in superfly when possible, plus both male and female avatars and an interface similar to Ariane in Paradise. This is an early image. 
I felt the need to do some pictures with the characters happy and having fun. This one may or may not make it in the game, but I had fun doing it, and it looks like the girls are having fun too. 
This week’s pic of the week is one I made for a scene in the next game “Hopepunk City”. Ariane is talking to an old friend at a public pool. Some of you might recognize the friend (hint, she changed appearances throughout the years). I wrote and illustrated a whole scene (about 8 pics total), and thought this would be the best to share.
This week I spent the week setting up a new set inspired by “Cyberpunk” and “Times Square” with lights and huge lit up advertisements. It is also a red light district type of place with burlesque, strip clubs and brothels are all sort of congregated in one place. It is also elaborately decorated with elements from all four games spread out on the busy set.
And then for the “Pic of the Week” I put Ariane and Rachel in front blocking of most of it. Don’t worry it will show up a few times in the next game.
I’ve been so busy working on the next game all week, so I thought I’d take a picture from the game I am working on.
This is the beginning of a scene where Rachel offers to take your photo. You can see on the wall her modeling pics on the left and her photography pics on the right.
This is a test image inspired by “John Carter and the Princess of Mars” using Ariane playing Dejah Thoris. The character is canonically naked except jewelry, which of course was changed in the Disney version. The creature on the right is a 3D creature I have with six limbs, but looks nothing like a Martian described in the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. 
This week’s picture comes from the new game Hopepunk City. This is a new character, but uses a model I used before in Something’s In The Air as one of the supermodels Rachel worked with in the magazine layout. I like the mostly teal blue look of the picture which is why I picked it as a picture of the week.
February, I have been doing re-renders of different games. This week it is Ariane in Paradise’s turn. The original game picture is set in mid afternoon, I changed it to dusk. The original was rendered in Superfly, this is Firefly. The superfly original looked like a photo, this looks like a painting.
Ariane also looked smaller and wore shoes to be consistent with the picture series in the game. No need to follow that protocol for single pictures.
Continuing my pattern of new renders of game pictures, I thought with the record cold weather I would re-render this ice skating scene from Rachel Meets Ariane.
Besides moving the characters closer together from the original, and zooming in a bit, I also changed the render engine to superfly.
To get scenes designed to render in Firefly to render in Superfly, you have to change the materials. The trees and pond an ground came with materials for both FF and SF, so that was easy, and I use a script to change skin textures to SF. I used a generic red velvet texture on Rachel’s jacket, and a generic black leather texture on Ariane’s jacket. I also adjusted the light to work with SF and this is the result.
I decided to continue to take game images and re-render them in different ways. This is “outsideclub2” from Something’s In The Air, but I changed the lighting and opened up the aperture, causing the background to blur, then took the newly rendered image and did some color correction. The result is a really striking picture of Rachel in classic model mode. 
This is a new image from the latest release of Date Ariane which has an option for a topless barbecue. Game available for sale at arianeb.com
I really like the lighting and Ariane’s mischievous smile in this picture.
