#take your time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ahollowgrave]

Hey! I love your screenshots so much! Do you have a guide on how you take them? Which mods, if any, do you use? How do you get the camera parallel to the ground at different heights etc? Any help would be amazing. Thank you!

Hey! Thank you! I love them, as well, and it’s always lovely to hear when others do!

Unfortunately, I am not much of a technical writer so I don’t have any guides.The reality is I spend hours and hours taking screenshots and I often feel like I luck into things looking nice.

But I can give you the same tips I give to my friends who have said it’s helpful advice:

Vanilla gpose is very good! You can do a lot in it without the need for 3rd party tools and I’ve found having a good, solid understanding of how gpose works is what really rockets shots into ‘oh wow’ territory. You really just have to touch all the buttons and see what they do and how they interact with each other.

The main thing is, for re/g-shade users: If it doesn’t look good in vanilla lighting, the preset isn’t going to make it suddenly stunning.

The second thing, for everyone, is: Play. Play is very important. If you’re not having fun you’re probably not gonna love the final result. If it feels like a chore, come back to it later! Play a different game!

The third thing, for everyone, is: These are not rules, these are not laws. Just because I do something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the ‘right’ way to do it. Your eye is what makes your art beautiful.

I'm putting the rest under a cut because this wound up being three pages without the pictures because I ramble.

The parts of vanilla gpose I touch with every shot:

Camera Position: The first slider is your field of view. For portraits I set it to 200, but I tend to fiddle with it in all other shots until I get something I like. The second slider is rotation, very helpful to get to exactly 45 degrees or 90 degrees for shots. But you should also be able to use Q and E to rotate and this is fun to get neat angles on shots! Play with it!!

Depth of Field: I’ll be honest, I turn this sucker off because Reshade has ADOF which I think is better! But, I still suggest playing with this a little bit.

Lighting settings: You have three lights, each with three levels and each able to be a unique color. USE THEM. Find lighting objects in your setting that you can use to base the colors and directions off of. Is the moon full and above? Use a pale blue light as a rim light. 3a. Also, highly recommend looking at RL photography lighting set ups. This has been the most helpful. You can do a lot with three lights!!!!! 3b. Typically, I am mostly using two lights at type 1 or type 2. Sometimes I’ll use a third light, or that type 3 lighting, but it depends heavily upon the vibes. 3c. On this page there is ‘Character Lighting’ this makes your character brighter. I don’t use this at all because it tends to wash out shadows and shadows are an important part of lighting. I DO suggest that YOU use this to see how it works! A little is a lot, you know? 3d. THE MAIN THING IS TO PLAY WITH IT. Get weird with the lighting. Do really intense close up lights! Do funky colors! Cover them in bi lighting!!!!

Lighting Round Two: The one thing that my friends have said is the most helpful is telling them to use the Manual Birghtness Adjustment. This is on the general tab, not with your other lighting settings (circled in red). This controls the light of the WHOLE setting, including the brightness of your three lights. This is what really makes me go OH WOW. Turn it on, wiggle it around, be amazed. (Say it with me: Play with it!)

ADJUST YOUR LIGHTING.

Vanilla Gpose has a Motion Settings tab. This is what I use for my expressions but also a lot of ‘poses’ are just well captured emotes. A lot of this tab should be self explanatory.

The Eyes: The first eye has your subject turn to face the camera. You can have them look in a direction, turn it off, and freely move your camera around. The second eye is eye tracking. This is your friend! The head will stay stationary and the eyes will follow the camera.

Movement: Walk, run, sprint. Forward, left, right, back. Pause, play, reset.

Lip Movements: This, in junction with expression emotes, is very handy! Type 1 is minimal, type 3 is a lot more head movement. Pause, play, reset buttons.

Emotes: You already know what I’m gonna say. PLAY WITH THIS. Almost every emote can have an expression emote overlaid it and have lip movement added.

A personal favorite is /aback, /beam, lip movement 2, eye tracking.

Now. When you enter Gpose your subject is gonna be doing the animation they were last doing. To stop this, ground sit and stand before you enter gpose to start with a clean slate. However, this is also how you can get cool action shots. Using a dummy you can use an attack, reset the dummy, and enter gpose and your subject will be flailing wildly.

Some of the emotes and actions can move very quickly! To move things frame by frame we’re going to use the Disable/Enable Motion buttons. You have two of these at the top of the gpose settings.

Disable/Enable All Motion - This will pause or start all the motion of all the targets in your gpose! My Keybinding for this is 1 and I think this is the default for PC users. Disable/Enable Target Motion - This will pause or start the motion of your current target. (Tab cycles through the characters caught in your gpose.) My Keybinding for this is 2 and I think this is the default for PC users.

To go frame by frame by frame through an emote or action you’re going to freeze the character (1) and then, rapidly, you’re going to hit 1 then 2. (1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2) this unfreezes your subject and then refreezes them. Be mindful of your eye tracking and camera! One last thing: Take a LOT of shots. From all sorts of angles, with all sorts of lighting, with different expression. For every 1 screenshot I post there are about a 100 others that I didn't like as much.

Whew, okay, I think that covers the stuff I tell my friends. Sorry this got kinda long and it might be confusing because, again, I am no technical writer!

Now, I do use 3rd party tools but I’m only comfortable talking about those off anon! Other than Reshade. I understand social anxiety might keep folks from asking directly but I am a nervous person myself and just do not feel comfy talking about that stuff so publicly. But I try to be helpful where and when I can!

Apologies, anon, if this isn’t what you were hoping for in a reply but if anyone else reads this maybe they’ll learn a new trick or idea of idk something!!!

If you read the all thing that's fucking WILD and the only reward I have for you is my love !!

[viorhysealberia]

pokemon fans when they have to wait another year for the next big game with no major releases in-between

[spacedace]

What is it about laying on the floor when you're overwhelmed that makes everything feel so much better?

[kedreeva]

There's some dude (derogatory) on FB who is PISSED people are pricing their farm fresh eggs at $2 and $3 a dozen instead of $4+, saying it's "disrespectful" and "undignified" and "I'm trying to feed my kids" like Sir, you are on a Facebook group page bitching about your neighbors egg prices because your pet chickens aren't earning you a living wage and you think it's your neighbors' fault, you do not have a leg to stand on here wrt dignity.

Also half the answers are like "I give them to friends and family free" or "I donate them to food banks" or "I'm making them affordable to folks who might not otherwise be able to get them now that they're so expensive in the store" and "if you think you're going to turn a profit keeping backyard chickens you have been wildly misled" and so on, and so forth, and I'm so living for it.

and I can tell you right now, he did NOT like my answer of "if you're trying to feed your kids, I hear eggs are edible."

[fanficmemes]

Love when writers do an insane amount of unnecessary research for their fics. I follow an author that did like 8 months of intense research into 14th century Scotland so they could write smut about it, and guess what. It was some fucking incredible porn AND I learned about old Scottish politics

[selfhealingmoments]

[notbrucewayne48]

"aphobia doesn't exist"

bitch literally not that long ago an aroace youtuber animator was insulted by almost half of its community for being it

[toasteaa]

Everyone loves the Boyfriend Jacket, but what about the Husband Coat?

Diluc draping his coat across your shoulders because you forgot your own? Immediately looking the other direction to hide the heat coming to his cheeks when you settle into it?

Zhongli's thinly veiled swell of pride when he sees his coat around your shoulders? Savoring the scent of your perfume as long as he can for days after you've returned it to him?

Wriothesley's little half complaints about the chill in his office after you've taken his coat? Hiding how much he actively enjoys the sight of you utterly swamped in the fur and bulk of fabric?

Neuvillette having removed his mantle and stole in order to drape his robes across your sleeping form? His inability to completely focus back on his work after he sees how immediately you curl into it with that satisfied little hum he's come to enjoy so dearly?

Just...husband coats...

[egophiliac]

don't think I'm not still deep in the episode 7 brainrot. because OH BOY AM I

(also one more extremely, obnoxiously self-referential thing, I'm -- I'm so sorry)

[saltpepperbeard]

Stede + Being a Wonderful Dad Captain for @stedebonnets

[why-is-it-always-autumn]

It's good and cool to give your characters a single simple, straightforward, non-urgent, super-achievable goal that shouldn't really cost anything or hurt anyone, make that the driving factor for most of their decisions, and then have the Plot do everything in its power to stop them.

[devicecontact]

Did a little meme redraw thing. Og under the cut

[mobius-m-mobius]

Sometimes our emotions get the better of us. You can say that again.

[vashievoidz]

I'm pissed off to see that Palestine is not trending on here. I know that we all have interests we want to talk about, but this week is another global strike, Palestine should be the number one trending, and it's not even number 10. You can put aside your interests for one week. Bisan and so many others are begging us to use our voices to pressure our governments to put an end to this genocide. MILLIONS of people are counting on us, PLEASE don't look away no matter how upset and tired you are. We have the luxury of being able to just put our phones down and going off to do something to feel better. But just this once, for ONE WEEK, you can put aside your discomfort and SPEAK UP. How many people have to die for you to care.

[selfhealingmoments]