#god i love these shaders too

[notscarsafe]

OKAY SO what with the TWO new Hermits implied by the updated banner I will say that, though the Skizz truthers have me convinced, I now have room to do my own crazy red string monologue and throw my hat in for my choice

1) Mythical J. Sausage (the J is silent) is a multitalented S-tier builder that absolutely deserves to be shoulder to shoulder with the Hermits. The man does buildings, interiors, terraforming, custom trees, and he does them SO WELL.

2) The production values!!! Beautiful replay mod sequences with shifting camera perspectives, shaders, music that sets the tone for each segment that's different from series to series. He already has more than a million followers on YouTube and for good reason!!

3) He has been SO consistent lately. He started a hardcore world about three months ago (about the time you might expect the Hermits to finalize their s10 choices maybe...???) and already has 15 episodes and hasn't gotten involved in any other big content. (He did just start playing a little of the BCG server but from what I understand that's super casual /copium copium copium).

4) That hardcore world is conveniently about to reach a good "pause" point. He started his world on a cherry blossom biome island that he's filled with a medieval village and starter farms, he's said it's almost full and what's left is the castle. I'm guessing the new season will start the first week of February, so if Sausage puts out a video this week building out that Castle and finishing that island it will be MIGHTY CONVENIENT TIMING.

5) This man can GRIND. His Hardcore world hasn't even been going half a year and he's built... So much??? Magnificent! And when he was on the Hermitcraft server he did the Razorcrest for scar AND the player head baby yoda/stormtrooper merch AND the noteblock themesong AND still built in the xmas village and other "diamond of peace" and so many other shenanigans. Did the man even sleep? He can grind with the best of them.

6) He can do redstone, too! Maybe not unique designs, I honestly don't know, but he builds farms for build materials no problem.

7) The DRAMA this man loves his improv and his backstory and trauma lore! For every series he does! Can you imagine if he gets to interact with Ren for an extended period of time, what that would do to them, to us?? Give Martyn a run for his money!!

8) Which brings me to my next point, which is that Sausage is already One of The Gang, because he's been in series with so many of the Hermits already! Empires and the crossover, obviously, but also Pirates with Cleo and Origins with Scar, and he's even done MCC! Joel is the only other player with the same depth of different series but there are other people truthing him already.

9) The EPIC BROMANCE with Pearl. My god the devotion of this man to his sunflower goddess bestie. I would try to do ot justice but y'all have seen floweroflaurelins work, you already know.

10) He's already a PG streamer but with HILARIOUSLY PG-13 tendencies. Imagine him and Cleo cracking each other up at an HHH stream, *grips your shoulders* IMAGINE IT.

11) Sausage comes with his own mascot in the form of interdimensional dog extraordinaire Bubbles, but he's also just an animal lover on general. Mans drinks his "I love Jellie" juice and had her in his world even before the sad news of her loss.

12) Diversity win! No one should be hired just for their gender, race, sexuality etc etc unless it's truly necessary to the job, but we were all happy when more women got added to the server in s8 and I know a lot of people would be happy to see some ethnic diversity added, too.

... That bulletin board had a lot more pins in it than I thought it did but anyway MYTHICALSAUSAGE TRUTHERS/ALL OTHER TRUTHERS RISE UP SPEAK YOUR TRUTH! we'll only get to wildly speculate for a few weeks so we might as well make it everyone else's problem ENJOY IT TO THE FULLEST!!

[aureliosinistrum]

One of my friends dared me to make a temple for Poseidon/Neptune, and I did it. It took like 2 days and about 15~ hours to produce this.

So, this temple is the largest I have ever built. It's so massive, that the game thought it was a cave, and started playing cave sounds lol.

The temple is dedicated to Poseidon, and so I decided to put in some very ocean centric design. Namely, the fact that the main symbol for Poseidon is within an aquarium inside the temple, with various fish and marine wildlife surrounding it (also, one of the turtles is named Jackson, and one of the axolotls is name Percy lol).

I also used this special raytracing shader, SEUS PTGI HRR, to create the nice blue effect inside the temple, which gives it this nice deep sea feel to it, regardless if it's day or night.

The palm trees are pretty self explanatory. I wanted some greenery and didn't want to just paste in cypress trees. I wanted something more ocean themed, and behold, palm trees.

I also learned that Poseidon is also a god of horses as well, so I decorated the top with some cool equestrian statues, holding up tridents. I actually put lightning rods on top of the tridents, so when lightning strikes (IE, Zeus is feeling a little silly), it'll hit the tip of one of the tridents.

Oh, and the villager house. That belongs to Greg, the villager I kidnapped enlisted to help maintain the temple while I'm gone. His house also shows just how large this big boi is.

Overall, despite this being a long project, I had a ton of fun with it, and loved how it turned out. Hopefully you guys like it too!

[caffstrink]

do you have any tips on how to live off as artist professionally?

First of all art isn't always a viable option depending where you live. The only reason ive been able to live off art is because the american dollar is worth 5x more than the brazilian real so even if i didn't get many comms i could still get by with the few i had. and if that wasn't the case I'd pretty much be eating breadcrumbs off the floor like a pigeon.

1. Whore yourself out and draw fanart of every popular or trending thing to gather attention to youe art

2. Learn your platforms: learn how each websites algorithm works, learn what are the best hours to post, etc

3. I cannot stress enough how important it is to find your niche

4. Everyone is fake no one wants to be your friend, other popular artists will start following you the moment your following becomes good enough. They'll start to interact with you too and want to become mutuals in order to share followings/traction. If you can play into that you can get them to share your stuff as well, but honestly don't fall for it bc most of them shittalk other artists on their privs or personal servers and the stress isnt worth it

5. Draw nsfw if possible/if you're comfortable with. People who commission porn pay well and they often have very few options when commissioning stuff bc most artists don't accept porn commissions.

6. Accept being an artist is a hard job that doesn't pay really well. If you're freelancing on comms life's always going to be a tightrope, so i suggest trying to do professional work once in a while so you can at least have the security of a salary. Draw backgrounds, gestures, scenes, studies, and the likes, bc those are what companies will want in your portfolio

7. Depending where you live it's extremely hard to live off as an artist, and being an artist is often means a very difficult struggle with finances. It's a job that requires passion, and more often than not turning art in a job causes creative burnout and complete loss of spark for it. Ask yourself: why do you want to be a professional artist? Isn't it better to keep it as a hobby? Maybe a side gig if you need money? You can still pursue art even if you don't do it to earn money, and it doesn't make you any less of an artist. It's a difficult job, and you need to understand its not going to be viable at all times and sometimes you'll have to throw in the towel and do something else to survive and there's 0 shame in that.

8. Be professional and courteous with your clients. Don't be a doormat, but don't go around ghosting people or being passive aggressive or taking them for granted and never deliver any product. Doing art for money is a JOB. Treat it like such. Inform your clients about delays, or any issues that may come up.

9. Take care of yourself and by that i mean eat decent food, exercise your arms, get 8 hours of sleep and get some sun (or take vitamin D periodically if youre a basement dweller). This isn't some self care uwu shit, it's actual science that your body is a machine and not providing what it needs to function leads to issues, and some of those issues include affecting your mental health, and mental health issues include and are not limited to: anxiety, depression, burnout, loneliness, feeling like your art sucks, feeling unmotivated, feeling like you're a failure, etc. Same with physical: for the love of GOD you DON'T want wrist issues. You dont want carpal or ulnar nerve entrapment. Don't draw 24/7. Don't push yourself either. If youre feeling shitty its time to STOP. Just picture a shitty graphics card trying to run minecraft with 5 shaders and 10 mods at once on fullscreen with 60 fps. Thats you. Youre the graphics card

10. Don't be a bitch, don't get involved with drama. Can't be an internet artist if you get cancelled so don't try to start shit at any point in time. Don't be a shit person.

And from the top of my head thats it, hope you like eating plain bread 🍞

[gemini-twinz]

Legend one: Braindance Angel

This is part of a Cyberpunk 2077 AU for Durarara!! I will be writing a fic soon titled Memory Reboot, but before I started, I wanted to write some small tests/warmups to get me comfortable writing for it. Here is the first one. Small disclaimer that this is self contained and Memory Reboot will not be in first person.

------------🚹💖----------------

Good evening Setton. This experience has been modified specifically for your unique interface. Please enter your terminal password.

User: Setton

Password: *********|

-#(LOADING…)#-

D=#$%&&, (compiling shaders)&&7**~

R*%^&&(tuning emotional triggers)#$@@

R*%!!~+(synthesizing physical sensations)&***_=

R3^7**-(recalling memory)%--#$&--.--..--.*

Thank you for waiting! Enjoy your braindance…

_+-=_

I am seeing through the eyes of a man who seems oddly familiar in a way I can't place.

The man stands on the top of the tower of Arasaka and looks blankly out onto the city, blinded by the halo flashing a lovely memory into his eyes. He pays no mind to the flickering advertisements hovering above Night City's denizens, or the smog creating a fog over the damp and dimly lit streets. Teetering on the edge, he laughs, arms out as he blindly walks the edge. His movements are flighty and off tilt, almost as if he is in a drunken state, but I taste no alcohol on his breath.

It isn't until the city flickers and fries below him that I realize he’s not simply watching a braindance, he is inside of one. Somehow his BD wreath is still visible in his eyes, though it may be part of the BD as well. How does someone even record a virtue of a virtue? … Wait..

**&476(Amygdala not found. Switching to alternative method)&&$*2**

&%#3(Possible method found. Initiating)&<#**

A sorrow I have never felt before starts at the top of my neck and washes over my entire body, coldness in it's wake. I'm convinced my fingers may turn blue. My nerves feel like ice.

The man looks at his shaking hands.

I'm shaking with him.

The call of the void overtakes my senses as he looks listlessly over the edge of the building. There is no drop in the pit of his stomach, no nausea. There is no fear in him of falling, as if replaced by the invincible feeling of knowing he can fly. As he holds his arms in close to hug his body, I feel a smirk stretch across his face to reveal his chattering teeth.

With a flash like a nebula forming, great digital wings emerge from his back, flickering like a distorted hologram. Colorful glitches dance on each feather like sunlight reflecting on the ocean’s horizon. He opens his arms and looks wide-eyed to the moon with a sardonic laugh..

“Am I truly equal..?” He talks to no-one, tipping his head to look back down at the city streets. "Equal to them before you.. Or too wretched.." Silent contemplation takes him for a moment.. then he speaks up once more. “Try as I may, I.. have no place in heaven..”

And he tips over the edge with open arms.

He doesn't fly.

Thank god he closes his eyes, and all I hear is a wet, horrid crunch before awakening as if from a nightmare. Tuning credits roll on my visor, and I hear a voice memo, stark and cold as an AI.

_+-=_

“We at A.B. Virtue inc. hope your experience was an exhilarating one, and..

We urge you to consider challenging your biases..

Have a pleasant evening, Setton”

[thefirstknife]

The funniest/most annoying thing about Destiny sweats bithcing about the game needing to be harder and that they shouldn't be forced to do self imposed challenges is:

Like literally no other gaming community is.like this. Self imposesd difficulty challenges is a tried & true & beloved asoect of many game communities.

From Pokemons Nuzlocke challenge, so many WoE, Runescape, and other MMOs, even notoriously hard games like FromSoftware projects to Cuphead and Celeste like

Those communities not only love self imposed difficulty but the ones that achieve it and master it are celebrated!

Like I'd be more impressed with Streamers choosing a stupid loadout and taking on a Raid and winning then some Career gamer having the most optimal load out

Yeah, literally. Same.

At the end of the day, no matter how much they want to deny it, these people just want to keep their place on the top and to retain their prestige and power. They want things nerfed because they have infinite time, professional gaming rigs and their pro buddies and it doesn't affect them. They don't want an even playing field and they don't want anyone else to have fun or get achievements. They mald over more people getting an emblem. Who give a shit. Grow up.

To me, Day 1 races are just completely off-putting to watch at this point. They all just mute streams, blur half of their screens and there's literally no content. To me, these events should be us watching the best players mess around, trying to figure out how to solve puzzles and entertain us while they go through content that's too hard for most other players. lt should be a light-hearted contest that's fun to watch. But no. Now it's just sweats basically streaming nothing while they read datamined guides and run full god roll meta loadouts that they later complain about making things easy.

Bro. That same loadout doesn't make the game easy for 99% of us. I'm glad you can do solo flawless Ghosts of the Deep in 40 minutes with bonk Titan, I can't. It took me three days and 60 deaths per run and a 3 hour run to just do the solo. I copied the "god roll" loadout. It didn't make shit easy. It doesn't need to be nerfed. And if that's easy to you, do it with a different loudout. It being "easy" literally only affects 50 people.

These guys would never survive playing any other game tbh. I guess Bungie should just give them difficulty options, but no special rewards for them, that would defeat the purpose. If you put a beautiful shader or adept weapon behind the hardest difficulty option, then people will want it and it will be deliberately gatekept and the gap between the pros and the rest of us will just widen. If you truly just care about the gameplay experience and experiencing super hard content, then simply experiencing that content is your reward. I've ran GMs for fun for zero rewards before because I just enjoy the challenge. I ran duo GMs for fun only. I've re-run master raids to help others despite there being nothing in it for me. Literally it's so easy to not be a babyman gamer bro. You guys play games for a living, you scored a jackpot, take your privilege and shut up.

[crossdressingdeath]

hi!! would you happen to have any mod recs for bg3? :з going though the nexus mods page for the game right now and feeling kinda overwhelmed lmao

Yeah, there are... so many. Let me see... First off, you're almost certainly going to need the Mod Fixer, most mods require it. Also the mod manager if you didn't get it already. Unique Tav (and the required Old Shader Pack that goes with it) is really good for character design stuff; I use it for Kyvir, that's where his tattoos come from. You can look through the requirements list to see all the mods that use it too, I think most body tattoo mods and things along those lines use Unique Tav. There's also the Leathery Garb mod which just adds some fun additional camp clothes (also what I use for Kyvir). For Durge specifically I've got an autopsy scar mod that's really good, and of course the Strangely Familiar Ring mod my beloved.

In terms of gameplay, first off you should absolutely get the Camp Events Notification mod. It does exactly what it says on the tin and it's netted me so much dialogue that I would've missed without it. Then I've got a mod that lets you buy all the camp clothes and underwear in act 1 so you can get all the fancy act 3 stuff right away and another mod that adds boots as camp footwear (both of them give their respective stock to merchants in act 1; Arron in the grove will have everything). Then there's Deity For All and the associated Deity Tag Activator if you want your character to have a deity without having to be a cleric (although keep in mind that if you use these everyone except Shadowheart—and your character if you change their deity—will be a Selûnite due to her being first in the deity list). There's also this one which adds more gods to choose from; the vast majority of additional gods are just for flavour, but from what I can tell gods who could be selected and had dialogue associated with them in EA but were later scrapped (eg the Dead Three) have that dialogue restored by this mod. Although I can't currently confirm that everything works properly together; side note, if anyone knows of a point where clerics of Bane got unique dialogue in EA act 1 please let me know, I'd love to be able to confirm if it'll show up for Kyvir. And of course if you're playing Durge Better Dark Urge is always fun; it basically adds some additional features that you can toggle on and off to give more of a sense in gameplay that you're not Just Some Guy.

That's everything from my list, but if anyone has any additional recs feel free to chime in!

[boggsart]

EXCUSE ME who told you you’re talking too much about your art?? Dude that’s the part I love most!! I like hearing about how you struggled to get it where you wanted, or how much the tools you’re working with frustrated you, but you got to a place you were happy with anyway.

I don’t know anything about 3d animation, and I know even less about game design. So it’s really important for me that you describe your process and how much work you had to do because it your work context. I’m sorry anybody made you feel like that wasn’t valuable. I’d argue that’s more valuable than the finished work itself!!

I always love seeing your posts pop up on my dash. And Wolffe and the 104th look absolutely fantastic in the newest one!! If you don’t mind me asking, what were some of the weird issues you ran into in the 104th’s one, and what makes them different issues from the ones you ran into before?

Thank you so much for all the kind words, but to be completely honest, they are kinda right. I think any artist can relate to the feeling of being too critical towards your own work. I tend to overexaggerate mistakes, or point out issues that aren't even really noticable to someone that knows little about this field. But at the same time, i always have a vision of how i'd like my current work to look like, and when i don't meet my own expectations (which i rarely do), that's when i start yapping. Well there were some minor ones, like noticing how some of the armors were not modeled accurately( like around the shoulder part of the chest piece, it's completely missing that part where it connects the front to the back, elbow pieces are way too big, helmets were also not modeled accurately, etc). I also completely messed up the rigging process, thus giving myself so much more work when animating. There are always certain body parts that just go into eachother (lower arm going into the upper arm when it's bent, feet going into the floor, hands going into the chest, etc) that could have been easily avoidable if i took the time to make a proper rig for my models.

There are also always some texturing mistakes, or wrongly placed focal points i notice once the final render is done. In this one, once all of the characters come up, and the camera starts zooming in on their faces, the focal point was placed too far, resulting in some parts of the helmets looking blurrier, than they should look. Since renders take a whole lot of time, i always try to fix this by putting the final renders into a 3rd party AI upscaling program, instead of going back to place it correctly, then re render it. That's probably a crappy workflow, but if this project wouldn't have a deadline that's approaching WAY TOO QUICKLY, and i wouldn't have a lot more stuff to model and animate, i would do the latter. At the same time, i probably should just pay more attention before hitting the render button lol. Also, the movements of the characters sometimes look way too stiff, and don't have that fluidity to them. I haven't been animating for long, so here's the reason for that, at the same time tho, i'm noticing some impovements when comparing the recent piece to my first animation. These are the problems i'm running into most of the time. In the recent one though, if you look closely, once Wolffe goes into his stance (after the commander Wolffe text disappeares) there's some weird black flickering going on around his chest/belly area, that for the love of God, i could not fix. Sometimes the particle system can cause some really interesting issues, that most of the time can be fixed by baking the dynamics. Since i did that (multiple times, deleting them, then re baking) and the issue persisted, i started to think either the shaders, or the particle system+volumetric fog combo was causing this problem. I also use a s*** ton of REALLY powerful lights, with the power constantly changing throughout the entire animation, that could also be causing this issue (i think?) I tried re-placing the cube that's making the volumetric fog, tried placing the lights and camera slightly elsewhere, but nothing worked, so i just decided to leave it as it is. The super slow mo parts are being made in the Non Linear Animation editor, which is... just as confusing as it sounds lol. Making the slow mo parts sometimes causes the blasters to disappear then reappear at the wrong time. The way grabbing the blasters then putting them away works is by having one blaster that's always parented to one hand, and one, that's always parented to the holster, and you change the visibility accordingly. (the moment the character pulls the blaster out of the holster, both blasters have to be perfectly alligned so the change in visibility doesn't have a weird jump in it) The visibility itself gets an action strip on its own, and it's hard to line them up correctly once you chopped up all your other strips and scaled them to make them slow motion. Because if the armature's action strip gets chopped up and scaled to make the movement slow motion, then everything else that has movement linked to it has to as well. So lights, the camera, the empty axes that the camera is parented to, and the blasters as well. This could be achieved by just placing the keyframes further apart from eachother, but i found this method to be somewhat simpler.

I'm probably doing this the wrong way though and could just place the keyframes accordingly without pushing the blaster action down to the NLA editor (cuz after all it's just visibility, not slow motion movement the blaster has). Though i have some really cool ideas with blasters in the upcoming animations, that would probably require to have them as NLA strips. Or maybe not, and everything i'm doing and talking about is bullshit, and isn't the way it should be done, and i really hope someone, that's in the industry doesn't read this and go "what the f is this woman talking about" lol. Basically everything about animating confuses the hell out of me, and i'm always doing stuff on the trial and error basis. So i hope one day i'll be able to learn it properly haha See, i'm yapping way too much after all. And i'm sorry for the long answer, but i'm really really passionate about this. And it actually feels so nice to know that there are people out there that care. 💖💖

[islib]

I finally finished Phil's VOD and oh gods the birdhouse

It's fucking brilliant environmental storytelling, both in-universe by the Federation and in meta by the admins.

Like, you come up to it and it's spruce and kinda reminiscent of O!Phil's house, so you get to say 'yeah Tallulah would build this, it's like Wilbur's and Phil's style combined'

but the windows are dark, but in a way you can excuse by 'there are no torches inside' - especially if you're looking through shaders which make shadows deeper and light brighter

and you walk in and it's filled with birds and pets in cages - because both the kids love their pets and have tons of them in the bunker

and there's bushes and flowers, because that's how the bunker's decorated

and it's clearly built for flying, there are places to perch on and things you can't easily reach if you can't launch yourself in the air or glide a little, following the 'hatching/fledging' idea planted by the book Phil got

but you have to turn the corner to actually notice what is wrong (because the Federation needs Phil to walk fully inside so they can trap him)

I wish I could watch it back for more detail because I had more thoughts *while* I was watching, but it hurts way too much, I think I'll have to wait until Phil's freed...

[becca4leafclover]

New Creative World Build!

Something new on the other side of the valley, Keima's Alchemy Lab!

(oh my god new shaders make it look SO pretty!)

In the lore of my stuff, this world is a popular settling spot for the people of the multiverse after milennia of strife. It's full of different species, abilities, knowledge and culture. Keima is no exception: she is an individual who was ejected from her homeworld in a freak incident between warring deities and ended up in the multiverse. She rebuilt her alchemy lab in the world she settled in and started teaching her discipline to anyone interested.

(AKA, Keima was the character I played on a dead SMP, and I'm deciding she deserves to keep her story going.)

The waiting room to the lab: mostly a place where friends and family impatiently wait for their loved one to check the time. The front desk has an ID swipe and intercom to control who can go into the workspace of the lab, and someone working at the front desk could check in new people.

The locker room, just a place to put your stuff while you're in the lab! Jewerly not allowed (unless you physically can't take it off.)

The main body of the lab! They keep some unique specimens on hand and have some leftover remnants of past experiments that can't be scrubbed out. In the back is the lab's water reservoir, filled with collected rainwater and heated by lava.

"Alchemy" is a pretty broad term for ultimately, studying the makeup and "truth" of the Universe. It starts in the basics with discovering the properties of life that can be infused into potions, and becomes more complicated when you start tampering with the rules of reality. That dark spot on the ground is bedrock. Keima's current project is trying to ignite the deepslate portal in hopes it can give her clues to finding her old world.

Up the main lift is the potion brewing stations! (...I forgot to add potion bottles for the photo. Oops.) The pipe running across the ceiling supplies the heated water to the stands that need it- a simple drip infusion, and a more complex setup for experiments. And the station in the middle is manual, for potions that don't need heat and don't take too long to brew.

There's a second lift in the tower, one that remains up at the top floor during opening hours of the lab. No one that been up there has lived to tell the tale- at least, that's what Keima says.

Why? Because that's her bedroom, damn it! Can't a woman have her privacy?

Keima is a person who does not care for emotional connections. However, in her bedroom she's allowed herself reminders of where she came from: armor similar to her most powerful set (for that was darkmetal and she was the only person to aquire it), a plant similar to the ones that were grown in her town (where the trees were so tall they touched the sky), a flower from her dead lover (a soulmate she was trying to save), a lantern for her goddess (in a past life not remembered.) She does not want to go back to her homeworld exactly, but she does not want to forget what she left behind if she is the sole survivor of her original world.

Aaaaaaaaand that's it! If you want to see me building more in this world and ask any questions about its lore or my multiverse stories, stop by my streams! I try to stream at least once a weekend and I post here when I'm going live :D

[cheatingexploitation]

would love to hear abt your made up strident crisis lore! especially anything pertaining to hellbreaker

not the hugest stridenthead any more but i will say what i have because why not.. lets a go

REMEMBER! IF YOU MIDDLE CLICK, YOU CAN SCROLL REALLY FAST!

in other words im not putting a read more thing on this post cz i dont feel like it... however! if theres an issue with this i havent anticipated lmk and ill edit the post. i might be trying to be funny in a slightly obnoxious manner but i do not mean to create a real nuisance...

so while witnessing the mod for. technically the second time but the first time after figuring out what was going on with those daves and bambis i was a bit surprised to see that the mod where the wiki says "it actually has a story" had 0 dialogue or anything so i was like. ok. ill make one up in my head

the gist: classic dave bambi lore Except bambi is not a nice wisdom god he's actually a mean war god. hence why everything surrounding him is much more.. aggressive

when pissed off he doesnt just throw his stupid phone at you. his body contorts and shakes and catches fire like some freak of nature. scary

here i have decided bambi is just a vessel of sorts to contain a dormant god and boyfriend hopping into his farm specifically to piss him off somehow wakes up the god Just a little (probably not entirely though? not enough trolling)

lord bambi being a fucked up tyrant here is also inspired by the title of the song "thearchy", which is a word meaning like. you know a monarchy. imagine that but with a god. rule of god. badass word actually. also i think it's funny to interpret mods where expunged is probably supposed to be a god as them like... not being one (im evil)

i did make some kind of design for him based on that opposition form... never really finalized it (i think it looks Too modern blah blah) but here

anyway expunged is actually not the worst guy ever they're just taking bambis form because (???i forgot) anyway they figure out that Hey actually lord bambi was pretty cringe (horrific and bad and scary) and so phonophobia is them having a Strident Crisis about this ROLL CREDITS THEY SAID THE NAME OF THE MOD

also! heebie. hellbreakie. minesweeper. probably the reason you sent this ask it's ok shes cute and fun i get it. i thought it would be funny if shes madden here so she's madden here. specifically she was an executioner for lord bambi because even though he could do it himself it would be worse if he made someone else do it and for some reason this is his goal i forgot why sorry but this is actually where the name hellbreaker comes from here. that's her title... the hellbreaker. after lord bambi dips no one likes her so for one reason or another (i don't think i decided?) she goes to the void and goes funny 3d mode and Actually i think i made her and expungie friends because that would give expunged a reason to freak out during phonophobia because wow how could i be so mean to this guy i respect. or something. yeah

heres stident maddis Which i have certainly put here before probably but for the big post. yeah

dave also had some part in this whole thing, mainly for the sake of justifying Why the Expunged Is Different, but also i have 0 recollection of what that part Was exactly. i just remember saying something like "wouldnt it be funny if strident crisis dave was emo" (which i said meaning he wears like a darker blue shirt as i think it's very funny when people call any dark clothing emo though sometimes i worry i am only contributing to the watering down of the complexities of alt fashion ? sorry)

anyway i also made designs for strident crisis beef nd geef because i thought it would be cool to base them on the colours they get from hellbreaker's shader. fits the tone better i think !

the plot here would probably be less of a mess if i like, cleaned it up and made something out of it, but also i don't really want to soooo for now all you get is this jumble of words. still think the mod is pretty cool even though i just prefer not to interact with it Too much for Reasons I Forgot but are most likely not important to the general public so don't worry about it

maybe i should do the same thing for spamtrap since i dont plan on finishing it even though spamfriend is one of my favourite children? find out next time on cheat's blog i suppose...

[dreamywakes]

all of ur sims are so beautiful uwaa.. do u have any tips on how u make such amazing and diverse and just. visual treats of simmies??

Oh my god, thank you so much Anon 💙

This is a hard question. Reshade does wonders. I believe I use Pearl by Miiko. I personally like how it looks with berry sims.

Mostly, I believe a crap ton of CC is what really helps my sims look good. On most if not all of my sims I use cc presets i've found over the years. Faaeish skin details are used on all of my sims. Specifically their Chubby Cheeks, Structure, and Nose shaders.

I have a big assortment of skin overlays. I tend to use different ones depending on what I like for the sim I'm making. This really helps make sims look different as I'm not using just the same two overlays over and over. Don't get me wrong, I have my favorites, but I tend to more than just one favorite.

Sliders. Honestly, at this point I forget what is base game and what is a mod. I really love the ear point slider. I probably wouldn't be able to live without it at this point. I know there is a lot more I use, but it really is difficult for me to remember which ones aren't base game.

Lastly, time is a big factor. I have suck way too much into my sims and I know it. I started tumblr in 2021 and I believe I had been playing berry sims for a couple of months or maybe a year at that point. Before that I didn't really play TS4 that often. I will say I've gotten much better with making sims over the past couple of years. One thing I've noticed is that I like the sims that I spend more time on. So I think overall time is a big part of it. Which is also why I only really make sims on the weekend when I have all the time in the world.

That is basically all I can think of right now. Thank you for liking my sims ❤ Hopefully my blabbering helps somehow.

I put a random thought below. It's completely off topic but I got an idea that made me a bit excited.

So I had to look back into my blog to see when I first start tumblr. This reminded me of some of my old sims that I really love. Well really only one sim.

Eclipse. Oh my god, I loved and still love Eclipse.

When I saw her again I wished I still had her so I could give her a make over.

I don't have her, but that doesn't mean I can't make her again in my currently style.

Maybe, maybe I'll remake a couple of my older sims.

Not including Foxglove and Lilac (whom I don't think I named back then) they have already been done. Perks of Lilac being a based on a favorite OC of mine and Fox being accidently? paired with her.

[illdothehotvoice]

Not to keep complaining about Project Sekai changes to all of you (people who I assume do not care about Project Sekai) but GOD do I not like the updated MVa they doing dndnxndbnsf. The MVs don't NEED and update and we're losing a LOT of details with the new shaders. I don't HATE the new shaders but they're way too intense and would look way better if turned down a bit. Already vibrant MVs like Love Ka and Samsa are going to look horrible with the new shaders and I REALLY hope there's and option to turn them off like in Mega Mix+ because SPEAKING of Mega Mix, those shaders remind me a LOT of the Mega Mix ones and if I had a nickel for every time a vocaloid game suddenly added bad shaders over the perfectly good existing visuals and all that fhdhxhshdf.

Anyways some POSITIVES I am VERY excited for the SANRIO collab event!!! Apparently ALL THE CHARACTERS are getting a Sanrio card!!! I'm so excited to see who Mizuki gets and also who gets Pompompurin qwq. I don't see Mizuki getting him though fjdhxhdhdf.

ALSO New Stage is giving us all the vocaloid's Sekai outfits so you KNOW Kaito is never changing out of his N25 module on my account lol.

Anyways I'm more okay with the new designs (because they seem to be optional) and still hate the UI changes if you were wondering

[whmp]

I just wanted to say that your video game looks really cool! I'm a (fairly beginner) game developer and overall it just looks really great. I love the graphics and style. I do not consider myself a sadistic person and I can confidently say I have never had any urge to hurt somebody, but I'm still super hyped to play your game.

Anyways, I guess I'm just curious on how you're making it/ any details of the process so far you'd like to share.

hehe thank you so much anon!!! don't worry, the "have you ever wanted to keep someone in your basement" was (mostly) a joke, being a sadist is by no means a prerequisite. : ) the process itself is a bit chaotic - such is life of a solo developer. i'm spread a bit thin between animation, modelling and programming so when making the game i'm trying my best to stick to my strengths: for example, when you look at characters and items, most of them have only very basic textures, but they do have a neat little shader on top which makes them look cel shaded. there's also a hefty dose of VHSesque post processing on top of everything! i left for a bit of a vacation recently, hence the lack of updates, but i YEARN to go back to work. on top of the to-do list is to finish up the time-simulation system. originally i wanted the game to be in real-time like animal crossing or something, but i've since shifted focus to a different approach with a simulated time, kind of like in stardew valley or minecraft or pretty much any game with a day/night cycle. the two tasks i dread the most are going to be fixing whumpees hair and his skeleton. god. take a look at how this smug fucker's hair look like:

if you know anything 3d you're probably getting a headache just from looking at this terrifying thing. stop. stop looking at it now, please, avert your gaze and don't make fun of my topology skills. if you don't - on the left there's a wire frame of polygons that when painted gives us the poor little meow meow on the right. as you can see, his hair is SUPER DENSE when it comes to polygon distribution. basically, a good 95% of whumpee's geometry is concentrated in his hair. i have since changed it (it's an old screenshot) but his hair still is a bit too dense for my liking - this is the sort of thing that WILL cause performance issues further down the line. i should just shave him bald i swear.

the second thing is his skeleton (or rig, or armature or """avatar""" if you go by unity's terminology). there's no nice way of putting it, his bones are fucked up. i rigged him in blender and upon being transported to the game engine environment, his spine just sort of left his torso. i managed to shove it back in, but it's far from ideal. here's how he looked like prior to the Bone Surgery:

scary. think of the back pain.

to summarize, gamedev is hard, bones are bad, but i really want to get back to work. hopefully i'll post a major update post within a week or so! no taglist on this post since it's not really an update, but @fanboy-enby-undead mentioned wanting to see bloopers/glitches so here's an @. : )

[strawberryamanita]

ℝ𝕀𝕊𝔼 𝕆𝔽 𝔻𝕆𝕆𝕄𝕀ℙ𝕃𝕀𝔼ℝ

This one was a long time coming, but I’m glad I finally got these head sprites of Mark as Doomslayer done! I made them as consistent and accurate as I could, and then made the sprite sheet as small as I could before the heads became illegible; I’m not the best shader (pixelated or otherwise), so if anyone wants to give a crack at pixel-shading these, I’d love to see what you come up with. Additionally, if someone pops these heads into a DOOM mod, I’d love to see that too!

(Before you say anything about the hair for the 0% damage heads, it’s just really bad helmet-hair. I had to start somewhere at least remotely coiffed in order to get really wild with the hair askdjfhlakshdflkshf)

Oh, and Warfstache is the God Mode head, because why wouldn’t he be

[canmom]

asgard's wraff too (immediate impression)

I had a brief go at Asgard's Wrath 2, one of the flagship games of the Quest 2/3, published by Meta themselves through their 'Oculus Studios'. This game is provided free to every Quest 3 owner so I figured I'd give it a shot lol. Though I didn't play for all that long before I got a headache and had to stop. (I think the headset was a bit tight, it's very finicky to get this right even with a better strap, and games that demand more movement tend to be worse for it.)

Asgard's Wrath is not to be confused with Asura's Wrath, the fascinatingly odd QTE-based game featuring animation by Studio 4°C. No, what we have is a first-person action game based on Norse mythology. Actually this new game seems to be broadening the mythological palette a bit, but the prologue/recap segment keeps things Norse.

tbh I wasn't particularly sold, but this game's been getting rave reviews everywhere, so maybe it gets better.

When I booted the game it had to compile some 4500 shaders - kinda odd, every Quest is the same so surely it could come with the shaders precompiled? Nevertheless, once that was done the game could get going. What I found was... kinda awkward, if I'm honest.

Broadly speaking Asgard's Wrath II features thumbstick movement with a directional iframe dash, and you can swing your sword and hit stuff. The opening level sees you fight a giant gryphon-like monster which flies around you and shoots laser beams. Credit where it's due, I think it's about as decent an implementation of this kind of thing as you could hope for... but in that very respect it really starkly shows the limitations of VR for action games.

Standing up and playing this game did not, fundamentally, feel more ~immersive~ than sitting at my desk playing an FPS game. If anything it felt less so. It felt sort of like I was piloting a mech rather than standing there as a Norse goddess. Especially when your character is flung bodily around: you look down and see your character's body near-prone, but your proprioception tells you exactly where your feet are, and it isn't there.

Movement generally feels quite glidy - no doubt too much up-and-down camera movement would be a motion sickness trigger, but also you can feel that you're physically standing on the floor, and somehow that is more noticeable when you're supposed to be walking than when you're supposed to be flying in a game like Rez Infinite. If you try to physically move around, the world sorta slides away from you in a weird way. I honestly think I would have preferred the teleportation based movement used in games like Half Life Alyx.

The whole thing felt like it was constantly calling attention to the difference between my physical body and virtual body.

Still, all that aside...

The game throws you in to a recap of the previous game. You get a little controls tutorial in a mysterious mystical space by disembodied arms belonging to the Norns, then you ride a giant bird through a series of vignettes from the previous game; then you get to wander around a tavern that is supposedly a prison where Loki used to be contained (always up to his tricks), encountering sort of phantasms of almost all the Norse gods telling you off for trusting Loki. Plus a little band playing tunes with a centaur in it, that part was cute.

This story, where a nameless player character is just sort of crowbarred into Norse mythology, feels incredibly 'videogames excuse plot'. From the way the recap was told, it was pretty evidently the kind of game where you're led around through a series of setpieces, while being told that you're powerful and important and a big deal. It's a story that's hard to take seriously in its own right.

I don't love the character designs. They look like a Marvel movie crashed into a truck full of concept art, full of ostentatious armour and huge horns. The way they talk, as well, feels very much like 'I am trying to get this exposition over as efficiently as possible'.

Things picked up a bit when a gryphon shows up and attacks you. The big bird here looks great and movies really well. The mechanics involved a few types of attack pattern to respond to - it's a tutorial boss so nothing too complicated.

The main weak point is the actual act of swing the sword at the big bird when it's down. It felt sort of like I was just waggling at it with a foam sword - there is no way to disguise the fact that you are swinging a small plastic controller which isn't actually hitting anything. But it was also hard to tell how much damage I was doing.

After you beat the gryphon you fall in a lake. Here, you're floating back-first into the gloom, but in practice you're falling horizontally, so again it has that disconnect.

OK, now let's talk about rendering. You knew it was coming x3

A lot of the materials in this game have that sort of smooth, noticeably low-poly look you see on the Quest. The game does try pretty hard with baked lighting and what appeared to be some envmapped specular reflections, and one point in the opening sequence had a dynamic light playing across the hands of the Norns - that was neat. I was also impressed by the rope physics while you're riding the giant bird. Certainly those 4500 shaders are doing some work in here. The main issue is, as with every Quest game, the lack of any dynamic shadows.

The tavern scene seems to be running into some kind of limit with showing skinned meshes, since most characters only appear when you move near to them, and they're all rendered with this Fresnel glow shader that hides any actual lighting information. But the characters rendered more normally generally look good. The animations at least are solid and abundant. Expressive body language is vital in a game.

I'll give it a bit more time at some point, but overall this feels very much like a game that was made as 'flagship action game to prove an AAA-style game is viable in VR', and on that front I feel like I'll take some convincing still - everything so far feels like it would work a lot better on a flat screen. It doesn't really have much identity as a game so far either - its interpretation of Norse mythology is gaudy and not particularly original, and it really feels like it's taking itself way too seriously. I think a dash of humour and weirdness would help tremendously. But maybe the Egyptian and Aztec sections will be more appealing, Norse shit is kinda played out these days.

iunno, are people still interested in reading about these VR adventures? I know most people don't have these platforms so I may as well be discussing the fauna of the moon

[lawain-dimensional-heroes]

after showing Rin the latest artpiece

"--OKAY OKAY I totally get it now-- just, don't waste too much time on making a whole new model, okay? Can't you just T-Pose him and edit things on his end so he can get back to it without spending too much time?"

Oh so now your tune is different, huh?

"I-It's not like my cool guy loving side of me is going off-- I-I just understand that this is really important-- yes!! Totally just a normal reaction and not me gushing about his coolness at all!"

Well if you say so... Also, I'm still looking through my folders which model type I should use for you, but that might be hard considering none thus far really matches your type. Most of your models either are too drastic of a difference between the styles or makes you look too mature

"Wait really?! YYB-style?" Too tall-- for both versions.

"Project Sekai-style?" I was considering that and maybe I still will, but I might have to edit the model first to make it shader friendly.

"Tsumidango-style?" You look like a god damn flat ara-ara nee-san.

"Project Diva-style?" Too drastic of a difference.

"LAT-style?" I always liked how they made that mouth thing, but sadly that's honestly a bit outdated for that.

"DigitrevX-style?" No way, Hosé. There's some model styles I can't stand, that's that and TDA.

"OKAY, so SOUR-style?" That's damn close to your age, but while I need to edit the skintone and eyes a bit, are you fine with wearing that outfit even though you may look like a kid--

"I wore so many god damn frilly dresses that I am totally fine with that-- I might not look exactly like how I normally look, but fuck it, WE BALL!"