I’ve been tinkering with changing Ariane and Rachel from V4 based figures to La Femme based figures.

I’ve decided to abandon the project for a number of reasons.  First, no matter how close and recognizable the new versions were, they still didn’t look the same. Comparison test after test show V4 versions win every time.

I can say that at least the La Femme versions are recognizable. The one I tried using a Dawn  were not.  Despite the many advantages of using them, it feels like they are characters drawn by a different artist.  Caricatures rather than the originals.

That doesn’t mean I will just toss them.  Sometimes a caricature is a good thing, but visual stories are best told with consistent looking art.

The Truth about V4 vs. La Femme

La Femme is a great model, I love working with it. Many difficult posing tasks are made really simple with La Femme.  This is why I used the La Femme version of Ariane as a stunt double during the Day 3 Gymnastics scenes in Ariane in Paradise.  This is why three new female characters in AiP: Christine, Lin, and Trish, were made using La Femme.

Poses are better in La Femme, hands are better in La Femme, so are feet, so are breasts, so is genitalia.  La Femme hands are very close to human, the individual bones in the hand are poseable, and the fingers look like real fingers instead of sausages.  But reality comes at a price: Getting the hands and fingers in just the right place takes more work.

Yet there is one key thing where V4 wins: Expressions.  V4 models are much better actors.  The faces are much more believable.  I learned a long time ago, faces are key to visual storytelling.  I need the V4 faces!

If you are starting with new characters, La Femme has some nice facial expression tools in those facial “chips”, but trying to use them to make realistic human expressions just doesn’t work.  I’m constantly making faces that look too exaggerated.  The slider model in V4 is just much more precise.

Superfly vs Firefly

Poser 11 has two different rendering engines called Superfly and Firefly. Superfly is a lighting physics based engine that results in often impressive realism. Most of Ariane in Paradise was done in it.

Firefly is based on ray tracing, the mathematics of light and shadow. The results are not as realistic as Superfly, but they are often prettier.  Pretty beats realism every time.

The three mini stories were a test of this, too. The first story was done in superfly. Impressive images, but they took on average 50 minutes to complete.  The second was done in Firefly, at an average rendering time of around 20 minutes.  Generally speaking outdoor images with few lights (especially just sunlight), should be done in Superfly. Indoor images (especially multi lighted ones) should be done in Firefly.

Bottom line…

Time to go back to the old looks, and classic Firefly renders.

Since June of 2015, there has been a sometimes less than friendly war between Daz Studio and Poser which basically share a small community of 3D rendering hobbyists.

That was when Daz released their latest advanced model Victoria 7 specifically designed to not work in Poser.  Now some people have found often complicated ways to get Vicky 7 to work in Poser, but because it was not designed for that program its use was limited.  At the time, Daz Studio had features, like physics rendering with their IRay renderer, that Poser could not match.

Then in early 2016, Poser 11 came out with their own physics renderer Superfly, and a bunch of other techie stuff like “Subdivision surface morphing” (what the community now calls “chips”) which allows a better control of the face (or other parts) for the purposes of animation, and adaptable figure weighting making it much easier to create new figures.

This was great and all, but it went over most of our heads.  How does this help us Poser users make beautiful pictures like the people using Daz Studio are doing?

While we got some new models to work with, like Dawn and Dusk by Hivewire3D, Paul and Pauline by Smith Micro, and Project Evolution by Erogenesis there was only limited support and add-ons.  Basically, many hobbyists like myself were stuck with Victoria 4.2 with a bunch of add-ons to fix her many flaws.

Enter La Femme

A few of the more techie hobbyists got together a year ago to start working on a new figure that would take full advantage of subdivision surface morphing and adaptable figure weighting that most of us still don’t understand and came up with a new model named La Femme.

I made the above picture to demonstrate her features.  This is the model straight out of the box with zero morphs and add-ons.  Notice the joints: Shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, hands and feet.  I didn’t have to adjust a single joint to get it to look good, it did it on its own.

The point is is that the weighted figure can do any weird pose that humans can do and look like a human is doing them.  That is what adaptable figure weighting is all about.

The “free” version  comes with 140 facial morphs and 30 facial “chips” that can be used to make almost any face you want.  At the top of this post is a La Femme version of Ariane I made playing with those 140 dials.

If you’re into this stuff, you probably want to get the body morphs, too.  This is not free and comes in two parts.  There is the basic body kit, which adds a ton of new dials to controlling the body shape, and the high definition kit that doubles the polygons in certain parts of both the face and body to significantly increase the detail.  These two were designed to compliment each other and make pretty much any kind of body you want.

Bottom line is it surpasses Daz’s Genesis 8 in complexity thanks to the use of tools not available in Daz Studio yet.

The Big Question: Will it be supported?

Even thought I have already created a La Femme version of Ariane, I plan to finish Ariane in Paradise with the V4 version.  Partly because I am too far into the project now to switch models, and partly because there isn’t a very good selection of clothing or poses available yet.

Genesis 8 currently has many advantages.  There are more users of Daz Studio than there are of Poser, and there is a big catalog of characters and clothing available for her.

To be successful, La Femme needs similar and continuing support.  More characters, more clothing, more exclusives.  Because it cannot be used in Daz Studio, that support has to come from us Poser users.

I personally will be watching with great interest.

Over the past month, I have been debating on updating Ariane for her next game. The above was an early draft which I am NOT going to use as I will explain.

Like many in the 3D People Rendering Community, I am still torn between the Poser vs Daz Studio rift, which I previously catalogued here, and here.

The last high quality DAZ figure with full Poser support was Victoria 4, which is now over a decade old.  Ancient by tech standards, and still widely supported with new clothes hair and accessories, because such things still sell well.

But Victoria 4 still has some flaws that make it less desirable to use…
I picked this Victoria 4 image to point out the main flaws: 1.) The armpits are way too high up the arm. 2.) the hip to thigh bend looks unnatural, as does the thigh to shin bend.  Finally, 3.) while there are literally hundreds of skin textures available, most do not support the latest renderers like DAZ’s iRay and Poser’s Superfly.

The DAZ Studio solution is really easy: switch to G3 and G8 based figures (there are no G4 to G7 figures because: “reasons”) which DAZ is more than happy to sell you. Most of my fellow Dating Sim/Visual Novel makers have made the switch fairly successfully.

The Poser solution is not so easy. There are advanced models natively available to Poser, namely Dawn and Dusk by Hivewire3D, Paul and Pauline by Smith Micro that come with Poser 11.1, and Project Evolution by Erogenesis that is even more advanced than G8 as far as versatility goes.

The problem is that there is not a lot of support for these figures. Dawn has a fair amount, and Project Evolution may eventually, especially since it has backward compatibility with V4. But the majority of the support for new figures is not surprisingly for G3 and G8.

It is possible to convert G3 and G8 figures to be used in Poser, instructions can be found here.  But because it is not supported natively, you have to convert every accessory the same way, and that could get time consuming, and the resulting Poser figures are memory hogs.  I briefly considered creating a new Ariane based on Karen 7.

Attempts to make a Dawn version of Ariane

My initial idea was to try and make an “Ariane” using the Dawn figure. While the Dawn figure on the right has a more realistic body shape and curves, I could never get the face right. No matter what I did, the V4 face on the left is better looking and more realistic.

The truth is I ran into many of the same issues when I converted V3 Ariane to V4 Ariane, but ultimately V4 Ariane was a major improvement.

This time, I am sticking with V4. The three problems with V4 mentioned above can be addressed by new products: 1.) The shoulders and other model issues can be fixed with “Perfect V4” by XandM,  2.) The bending problems can be fixed with products like “Overhaul for V4” by ironman13.  I used these products extensively to create the graphics update of Date Ariane.

The rendering skins can be updated with a python script “D3D Perfect Skin SSS Lite” which will change a basic skin texture to simulate SSS effects in the Superfly renderer, and as a side bonus, the Superfly renderer renders even faster. (The only flaw is that it shows solid white skin in superfly preview mode, switch to firefly preview mode to see what the textures look like, then switch back to superfly mode before rendering.)

There is still the issue of the body shape looking better in Dawn than V4.  I solved that by using the rarely used Muscle Pack for V4. I originally got the muscle pack to make Wendy the Weightlifter look stronger, but adding a “toned” shape to Ariane at about 40%, I can give her the athletic curves I was looking for.

Now to create some new content with this improved Ariane…

Sorry I have not written in a while or posted anything.  The truth is I am having one of my creative mood swings, which is something I have been having for a couple of decades now.

For most of June and July, I was in creative mode working on the graphics update (see last post) and a thread for “Rachel and Ariane”.  As per usual, I started losing interest in creating and now I have swung into gaming mode, where all I want to do is enjoy other people’s games.  At some point in the future, I will get tired of playing and want more creative control, and will suddenly want to create again. It WILL happen eventually.

So to answer everyone’s question, I have no idea when the next game will be out, or when the android versions with the new graphics will be out.

The Android Copyright Problem

The biggest complaint is that people can’t download the android version directly to their android devices.  The reason is that Google has a strict copyright on APK files.  My file server that I rent from GoDaddy protects Google’s copyright. If it detects an apk file being downloaded by an Android device, it kills the download, hence the reason you can’t download the game directly.  I tried using a Google file server, but they stopped it in other ways.

So the only way to get the APK file for Android is to download it to a non-android device like a Windows computer or a mac, or a Chromebook, and then move it to the android device via USB cable or microSD card.  Sorry this is difficult.

The INTP Personality

I have an INTP personality. This is our greatest strength: We are good at stuff and know stuff. We find something that interests us, and we study the hell out of it until we become experts. We find a skill that we enjoy doing, and we master that skill.

This is our greatest weakness: When outside forces develop expectations for these interests and skills, our desire to improve to meet expectations goes right out the window.

I mention this, because I am having an INTP style dilemma.

To make a really successful indie gaming enterprise, I need to set up a Patreon, and find ways to release these games on Google Play Store and/or Steam, and I need to get them properly translated, because for some reason I have huge followings in Germany and Brazil. To do it properly turns it into a part time job.

The more I think about doing all this work, the less interest I have in finishing the actual games. It becomes a distraction that hinders my interest in even making the games.

So content creation comes first.  No Patreon, no Play Store, it’s too much work I am not interested in doing.

My number one motivation is to make these games for myself. It’s my hobby, my way to relax, my way to express myself.  I enjoy playing them as much as I enjoy making them.

I could either share them the way I have been: posting them on a file server and letting people download them with no support and no promise that they will work on your devices, or I could not share and just enjoy them myself.

So I choose the easiest route that benefits the most people and keep doing what I have been doing.

Anyways, to prove I’m still working on stuff, here’s some art you haven’t seen yet.: