i wanted to make some dinky elevator pitch introductions for my fav ocs because.. i dont talk about them very coherently it seems. or at all! what!!
to finally make up for that i'll put my extended edition under the cut below. love peace taco grease and stay frosty forever
so from what i gather in my notes, razz is the only recognizable one around here who got their lore blasted from a megaphone the second i came up with it. after that i got shy.. i was too busy having thoughts to ever explain who molly and Q were or where they came from. and its been like 2 years. well!
nat and molly are formerly codependent childhood friends and funhouse mirror versions of each other who split paths after high school. theyre like if two besties fated to be a detective duo spat on fate's shoes and ran off in different directions to do the same thing but badly & alone.. molly actually hit the books to become a private investigator, champion of truth and justice, while nat hit the pavement to become a paparazzo, champion of clickbait. they hate each other a lot but given the slightest chance they will attach at the hip again and drain the life from each other.
Q is later to the party, a terminally exhausted college dropout and shut-in with a notable (anonymous) presence in the online music scene. every slight inconvenience in his life is a straw and when the last one hits boy is he ready to just drive into the sunset or maybe the ocean or maybe just live in his car and stop talking to people forever. if the band they joined out of peer pressure makes it big or they get found out for their alter ego its so over..but luckily they started dating the most nosy and paranoid idiot alive & inadvertently pissed off the second most nosy and paranoid idiot alive in the process, so surely nothing like that could ever happen
these goobs run in slightly different circles that overlap juuust enough to be a problem, and its hard not to run into the most annoying eccentrics in their unserious version of LA slightly stuck out of time. if i were reintroducing lore important characters itd include plenty more than just them (eg freddy mysteriously missing from this description of events as if he isnt also there) but imho i have no obligation to pay attention to anything outside the range of my hyperfixation blast. the important thing to me rn is just to let yall know what the hell im talking about when i make stupid jokes everyday about girlies who dont exist <3
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alright. know what? with Secrets of the Obscure right around the corner and plenty of new Mists-related sky island settings coming with it, I'll just bite the bullet and interest-check a little something I've been turning in my head for a long, long while.
would YOU be interested in a Mists-based GW2 roleplay guild that uses a lore compliant multiverse system to allow canon, canon-adjacent, lore-breaking, and otherwise 'contradictory' muses to coexist in the same setting?
simply put: every writer's cast would be set in their own self-contained universe. as such, everyone could bring whatever muses they want with their own personal headcanons, and no one could dictate what is or isn't canon for anyone else. so long as your muses are GW2-based, you're good to go! bring your Commanders, bring your canon-divergent OCs, bring your canon muses-- and yes, even the ones that are 'supposed' to be dead. who can say what might have happened in a strange world far across the Mists, after all?
neutral hubs and in-character safety guardrails would be in place to keep all muses on a relatively even playing field regardless of their power, history, and prestige, too. play hardball if you like, but it might not end quite the way you'd hope. the main rule would be to maintain good OOC etiquette at all times: no godmodding, no metagaming, no theft, don't blend IC and OOC, and so-on.
if that sounds like something you might have interest in, please interact with this post! and if you've got questions or concerns, I'd love to hear them; feel free to send an ask or a DM, or just reply to this post!
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Every time I see your sprite work, it just makes me want to make a sprite edit of Akane with the design I made for her in my "She Was Saved" AU (An AU based on the idea of Akane surviving the events of DRA), but I've never done any sprite work so, do you have any tips?
Ok ok so, first things first, i wanna make it clear that none of my sprites are made from scratch, they're sprite edits, hence why i always tag them as such. Every single one of them used some canon character as a base for the base sprite (that one fitst sprite where the character is just standing there with a simple expression) and a handful even have canon sprites uses as bases for poses. Just figured i should make that clear so there's no confusion here.
While I'm not sure if I'm the best at giving tips n stuff, here's what i could think off;
I think the most important tip i can give anyone who wants to get into sprite editing is MAKE A BUNCH OF LAYERS‼️Save things separately just to be sure rather than merging them because that almost always leads to more time spent later down the line. While the amount of separate things certainly varies from artists to artists here's the one i use for my edits.
The app i use (Ibis paintX) allows me to make folders with a bunch of layers to them so i use them to keep stuff more organized.
On the first pic well have a folder with the base sprite, one for the different poses and in Beni's case two for the different eyes she has (one for the normal eyes and one for the ones that are part of the glasses, normally i only have one layer with all the eye variants)
On the second image I've opened the folder that holds the base sprite, or should i say just sprite since it's in this folder that i organize everything that belongs to one specific sprite when I'm making them as to not get myself confused. Anyways, you can't see in the screenshots but the first layer has her glasses, second has her eyebrows and mouth and the third has the eyes.
Fourth has the main body lineart and fifth has the main body colors, please keep those separated as by doing so you make it easier to add those lil effects onto the character's faces on certain expressions + having the lineart of the main body always helps when sketching and connecting the different arms to the main body.
Lastly you got the arms, but ideally you should make the arms/poses in a way they can be placed over the body layers since that just makes things easier to put together, i just have this habit of placing the no pose arms under everything else.
When editing i make the different arms and eyes in advance so that when i start making the different sprites i can just duplicate the canva with the first one a thousand times and everything will carry along with those. Saves time in the long-run + you don't need to separate all layers on them (lineart, colors, shading) since they're just parts there's no problem in just merging them together.
A very important thing to note tho i that if the character has glasses or any accessories that you plan on removing or moving around in some pose/sprite this accessory should be made in a different layer from the main body, this makes editing easier than if you had to just erase and refill the part where the accessory was in the sprite you don't want it to be in.
A similar rule should be applied to the character's hair, if they have short or mid length hair you can just add the whole thing to the main body sprite, but if the character's hair is long you should make this bluk/back part of the hair in a separate layer placed under the main body layers. This also apllies to any back accessories.
Here's Akira as an example; she has one layer for her glasses, one for the back/bulk of her hair and one for the guitar case she carries.
These are essentially the basics of if, so let's go over to some actual tips.
Make the sprites on a small canvas.
Since the Danganronpa another games are made on game maker the size of the character sprites is surprisingly small, while I don't think you should just do it on the same canvas size as the actual sprite, it's good to have a smaller canvas so that the lower amount of pixels gives it a look similar to the in-game sprites + as you can see by mine, they don't actually look low quality at all.
(if curious, the go-to canvas size i use for most of my edits is 773x1020)
Use other sprites as references/bases
Especially if you're just starting on making sprites, use the canon ones for bases, references or even just straight up trace them. This will make the sprite look closer to canon and will start making you undertand the elements that make up the style of the sprite, do it enough times and soon enough you'll be able to make poses on your own without needing a sprite from the game as a base.
Remember! What's wrong about tracing is not the act of tracing itself, as the act of doing so is a great exercise to help you learn, the problem is when you do it and claim you made it 100% on your own. Since these are sprite edits, there's not a problem in doing so.
Observe and learn what makes up the style you're trying to replicate
This is hard to talk about since it really is something that comes with practice, I've been making sprite edits for like 5 years now so this stuff is like written on the walls of my brain by now. Just try to look and analyse the sprites and slowly you'll start seeing patterns and small onto them that you didn't noitce before, like how Linuj's sprites have a bit if line weight to them but are still on the thinner side, how he tends to make the hands a bit on the smaller side, how when he color the character's skins he makes the area near the top of the head a lighter shade than the rest of the skintone, the way he usually makes the character's mouths, and even some more complex things like how the male characters will have very little to no eyelashes while the female characters tend to have a whole lot of them, etc.
At the same time, there's no shame in deliberately ignoring some of these things. Personality the small hands REALLY bother me in a few cases and i tend to just make mouth shapes on a whim instead of trying to stay 100% close to the style. It's just a question of messing around and figuring stuff out, it won't look perfect on the first go, but overtime you'll start to get the hang of it.
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I adore your sims and the way you create narratives. They're all wonderful and your style is so gorgeous. I was wondering if you had any recommendations for more realistic details, like scars, cuts, burns, just any sort of thing along those lines. Finally gave in to the urge to ask after seeing your post captioned "Family Lineage".
Your sims are so alive, the last sim is so cool and i love how you embrace features.
Do you have go-to creators for those sort of details, or are there any sliders or any specific cc pieces you recommend? I'm not sure what to really call those sort of features, 'imperfections' doesn't feel right to me, they are a part of oneself and they deserve love too! So I hope this makes sense?
I love creating stories and making ocs. I want to bring more diversity into my sims. I hope you have a wonderful day sorry if this is a lot and thankyou so much in advance if you decide to help out, take care <3
first off, thank you for being so kind. i do spend a lot of time toiling away in cas when i'm making sims, so i appreciate you for saying that. just a lot of love from me to you <3
okay, so as for recommendations... i'll just start this off by saying that my skin details folder alone is 45gb... so. there's honestly too much for me to rec everything, but i've got my mods folder open right now so i'll just go through the main contributors here.
this got a little long so i'll put a little read more here to save the mobile users some grief fkhnkfjh
as just like a general baseline for cc, i'd download everything from @obscurus-sims, @sims3melancholic, @ddarkstonee, and @northernsiberiawinds. these are my favorite skin detail creators and i promise you every single sim i make is guaranteed to have at least one piece of their cc on. i won't mention them in the recs from here on out, but they all have some of what you're looking for!!
then i'd download the color slider mod before getting into the actual skin details themselves, because there's still a lot of cc that doesn't have appropriate color swatches for darker skintones and i have to use the color slider mod more than i'd like in order to get scars or other cc of that nature looking right.
now okay, so for realism i'd say you're going to want to download wrinkles, eyebags, veins, body overlays, and facial structure overlays. most of my realism cc is from faaeish....... but well. you know what happened there. i don't know if there's an archive of all their old cc, but if there is you'll want to download decades, chubby cheeks, and structure. nolansims, gerbitshi (nesurii), and simulationcowboy have some good wrinkle cc! and i really like using okruee's misc. skin detail cc for the last few swatches which add wrinkles. nell has some face veins i like to use on my older sims to add to the look of thinning skin as they age. sammi-xox and moonchildlovesthenight are for body overlays—so like, if you have a fat sim with a skin on that you like but the skin is just, like, supernaturally jacked for no reason, you can use one of their overlays to fix that. thank god. my facial structure folder is full of remussirions' blushes and contours as well as goppolsme and nesurii!! marigolde and mari have good stretchmark cc. OH!!! and download acne cc! breezytrait's acne scar cc is actually REALLY good for giving the effect of pores and aging skin. i used it on matthias's father!
as for scars, burns, birthmarks, etc.! with scars i just googled scar cc and downloaded everything even if the previews looked bad lmao. but nell is my main creator for scars. they make the best scar cc hands down and i might be misremembering, but i'm pretty sure their scar cc works very well with the color slider mod. pyxis and redearcat also are all over my scars folder. if you've seen alessandria, she's literally covered in redearcat's scar cc. mintyowls has really good eyebags and birthmark overlays. adelarsims and pinkpatchy have some body prosthetics and limb mesh edits i like, though they're not very functional </3
almost forgot to look at my presets but i believe nv-games will have what you're looking for in terms of any larger scars. WAIT. sorry, i'm only just now looking at this but if you saw my tags on that last post ignore them!! matthias's father actually uses nv-games' eye preset! i totally thought it was [redacted] who made it. but anyway, nv-games also has more presets that you should look into as well. they have really unique cc. love them fr.
onto face sliders!! i don't have a ton so i can just post a pic of the folder for you. just kidding totally didn't realize that the screenshot showed the sliders i have from [redacted] so pretend you didn't see that.
based on the nature of your ask tho, i'm definitely gonna recommend the face asymmetry slider by luumia (i like to use this veeeery subtly but go wild with it if you want), the esotropia and exotropia slider by obscurus as well as their eyebrow slider which allows you to disrupt the symmetry of them, the thicc slider by hiland which adds fat under the chin, the mouth scale slider by teanmoon for bigger and fuller lips bc fr what was ea thinking with their lip slider, and dani-paradise's cheek slider!
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Vagueblogging time!
A lot of nations around the world have an unconscious bias towards at least one certain racial and cultural group. Because there is a social stigma associated with that group -- be it speaking the language, seeing their way of life as "backwards," assuming someone of a certain appearance in that group is uneducated -- it's easy for people within the persecuted group to have a lot of internalized shame.
The most obvious in my case is how Asian Americans tend to distance themselves from their cultures in the US. A lot of us want our eyes to be bigger, our skin to be lighter, our hair to be lighter, and avoid speaking the language.
I think what people never expect, though, are those of us who grow up in enclaves with other Asian Americans and have a healthy relationship with our identity. So we're proud. We speak the language, or at least try to relearn it throughout our lives. We eat our food and tell people to shut up when they start complaining about its smell or appearance. We know what it's like to live at peace with who we are, without having to shrink ourselves for others to fit in, which is why when we meet the people who grew up with shame, we know it can be better, that it doesn't have to be this way.
I'm speaking on the Asian American experience, especially the Chinese American experience, btw, and trying to tell you that it can be better, that if you grew up feeling shame for who you are, I don't think any less of you for not knowing the language or going through a learning curve where you want to break out of that mentality.
This also applies across the board -- if in your country, your culture is stigmatized, and you're struggling to come to terms with your identity and how you can still hold onto that and survive the ways the dominant culture would want to punish you for it -- via racial harassment, hate crimes, denying you a job, discrimination in the workplace or school -- I think you're doing the right thing. If you're Indigenous, African diaspora, or Asian in the west. If you're mixed and figuring yourself out. If you fall under the "mestizo" label. If you grapple with contradictions, holding privilege in one hand and oppression in the other.
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