Legend of Krystal Forums

Greetings!

This thread is for a project I'm currently working on. It is currently in the early stages, and I'll post up stuff about it as I go along.

The current working name is Consent, or Age Of Consent. Here's a teaser/ad for it.

NSFW


The game will be built using the RenPy framework, and I'm currently working on the UI framework. Here's the current mockup of the UI.



The current plan is to release the game for free. I have no current plans for a Patreon or any such thing.

The game will be displayed in a POV plus style - I may 'back the camera up slightly' to get a better view of the gal. The protagonist is a rather intelligent young male, who has just turned 18 at the start of the game. He graduated high school early, and has been going to college for the last couple of years. Not being overly handsome, the hot college gals have been avoiding him up to this point (jail bait). He's still a virgin, but his luck may be about to change...

Activities planned:
Lots of teasing, foreplay, and sex.
'Corrupt' various gals into having fun sexy activities with you. This game will be relatively 'tame', as I'm not into the really twisted stuff...
Arranging trysts with multiple partners in the later game.
Multiple locations (Campus, Work, Strip Club, Home, Gym, various stores, etc.).
Various activities will each provide some benefit, and may open the door to random encounters.
Relationships levels will deteriorate over time, as will some stats, so you will need to work to maintain your existing relationships and certain stats (fitness, hygiene).
Possible trip to a brothel? That'll be a ways down the road, though...

Stat system, including the horniness bar you see in the image above. Stats will influence how well you interact with various gals, with different stats being favored by different gals.
Examples: Some gals may value looks more, others may value smarts more...
Vigor decreases as you perform activities during the day, is restored by sleep/resting. Mood affects how well you interact with gals.

This is more of an interactive story than it is a game. There won't be any 'dexterity based' activities in this game, such as clicking to fuck... Making the right dialogue choices will be the order of the day, although my goal isn't to 'punish' players for a couple of bad decisions.

Foreplay will be somewhat important. A gal will (hopefully) become more willing to do sexier stuff with you as you advance your relationships with said gal.

There may be a few simple animations throughout the game, but no videos, etc. are currently planned.

The protagonist's face will not appear in this game (maybe his chin though...), although the rest of his body may appear from time to time (see promo pic above and below).

Five characters have been outlined so far, including his family, a cute college gal, and his new employer... more gals are planned, but the current plan is for those to be minor characters.

I'm using DAZ to do the modeling. Here's a couple of teaser pics I threw together real quick, using two of the gal models I've built in DAZ, to illustrate what I have in mind...

NSFW


The gal below will feature prominently in the first day of the game, but afterwords you may have to do some work to keep her interested. She owed you a favor for something, and as such may be your first...

NSFW


It takes a while for my laptop do do renders, so it'll take a while to 'bank' enough artwork for a workable demo. I have a fairly detailed outline for the characters, and will be coding dialogue for the various encounters over the coming weeks.

I've worked out the basic framework for the game already, which will be based on 2 hour time increments. The 'length' of the game isn't quite worked out yet, and I am thinking of releasing the game in chapters, focusing on whatever the significant encounters for the current chapter will be. I'm pretty happy with my game mechanics already, so there won't be much need to 'rework' earlier chapters.

If anyone has any interesting backgrounds that they'd like to chip in for the cause, I'd love to see them. I've downloaded a few from another (RenPy related) site, and am using some 'placeholders' in the meantime.

With luck, I'll have a demo ready by the end of February, no promises though.

That's it for now. I'll keep everyone posted!
Wee

Just a quick update...



The background is a temporary placeholder (so kindly ignore the fact that it looks a bit wonky at the moment), with a render of the stage that I've been working on placed above it.
I've been focusing on getting the translucent under lighting for the stage to work as I'm envisioning it. It's not quite where I want it at the moment, but it looks cool nonetheless.

I've fleshed out the Day 1 storyline a bit. It looks like I'll have six main characters that will feature prominently throughout the story. I'm still a ways off from having a working demo, but the framework is ready to go at least.

As for the various locations I'm thinking of adding a silly element to this story. Something along the lines the various 80's B 'sexy' movies like Weird Science, Kentucky Fried Movie, Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life, etc., with added silliness. Like getting a ride to work in the Flintstone Mobile, then riding a rocket to work, because you work at the space station in the afternoons, then heading home to the medieval castle, where you live. Just something to break the everyday monotony of the 'usual' settings... Probably not QUITE this over the top, but you get the idea.

Enjoy!
Wee

Always good to see a new renpy user. I like the concept. Lots of lip licking from the looks of it lol

Looks like an interesting project and your character models seem to be pretty nice. Daz3D's got some amazing resources available for renderings and games like these. I like the premise you're working on and it's nice to see someone who's not going to go into any really off the beaten path fetishes in their game. Too many ero game developers these days force a certain type of content on their players. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that per-se, it's better when there's a variety offered to suit all tastes. Everybody who plays adult games is into sex, so you can't go wrong by adding plain old boning!

If I were to offer any advice it would be to have a good handle on how your game is going to function as far as factors. Just looking at your UI (which is nice, by the way, very clean and orderly and doesn't take up too much room) it seems as though you've got a LOT of stats. The more things you have affecting the outcome of encounters, quests, degree of reaction from NPCs, the easier it is to run into complex bugs where players send you messages like, "y wont dis work!?" and "so-in-so wont go down on me even though i bought her the drink!" If you've got that stuff all figured out, more power too you, I'm proud of you, I'll shut up now. Otherwise, I'd caution you to maybe dial down the stats' importance or even get rid of a few of them.

At any rate, seems like a fun game you're working on. I'll be keeping an interested eye on your progress. Best of luck with it!

Sun Quan Wrote:Looks like an interesting project and your character models seem to be pretty nice. Daz3D's got some amazing resources available for renderings and games like these. I like the premise you're working on and it's nice to see someone who's not going to go into any really off the beaten path fetishes in their game. Too many ero game developers these days force a certain type of content on their players. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that per-se, it's better when there's a variety offered to suit all tastes. Everybody who plays adult games is into sex, so you can't go wrong by adding plain old boning!

If I were to offer any advice it would be to have a good handle on how your game is going to function as far as factors. Just looking at your UI (which is nice, by the way, very clean and orderly and doesn't take up too much room) it seems as though you've got a LOT of stats. The more things you have affecting the outcome of encounters, quests, degree of reaction from NPCs, the easier it is to run into complex bugs where players send you messages like, "y wont dis work!?" and "so-in-so wont go down on me even though i bought her the drink!" If you've got that stuff all figured out, more power too you, I'm proud of you, I'll shut up now. Otherwise, I'd caution you to maybe dial down the stats' importance or even get rid of a few of them.

At any rate, seems like a fun game you're working on. I'll be keeping an interested eye on your progress. Best of luck with it!

Hey!

Thanks for the input! Yeah, the stats are more of a 'reward' for doing certain activities than requirements. Except for Vigor, Horniness and Mood, those have more direct effects. The idea for most stats is that they will give you bonuses in encounters, but aren't necessarily required. Your relationship level with the gal will also play a more important part, but if you have stats she likes, this might open up new options a little earlier in the relationship. The only stat I'm still working out really is Taboo (what it does, not how you earn it). The other ones are pretty straightforward. As for multicolored bar at the upper right, that's a holdover from some other project I was playing around with, which helped me get pretty acquainted with RenPy. That space might be handy for something else, but in the meantime it adds color to the right bar at least.

As you can see from my UI, I'm a fan of keeping relevant info within easy reach (as opposed to having to open up some stat window or something). That way people can stay focused on the story, instead of having to open up extra windows.

I've been focusing on the storyline for day one today (while waiting on Daz renders), and now have most of that fleshed out. The first release will revolve around the first 24 hours of the game. Of course, I need to generate a lot more 3d content before I can have a demo that's worthwhile to download. Unfortunately, I pissed Daz off and mistakenly overwrote a save rather than renaming it, so that beautiful stage lighting is lost to me, and I'm needing to rebuild it. Some other glitch creeped into the scene in the more recent save as well, so I'm having to work things out again from an earlier save. I'm new to Daz, so I'm learning as I go along.

My plan is to keep the download size down as much as I can. Not having movies, etc. should help with that. Plus, animations take time to do frame by frame, so I"m looking more at using RenPy's motion options to accomplish some of that, and keeping it simple.

As to your comment about the game focus, I'm not looking to reinvent the wheel here, and am simply designing a game around a story I like. There are other games out there that can cater to the various fetishes, my fetish is looking at pretty women in various states of undress, and maybe arranging for straight up sex, oral action, playing with boobs, etc. when that's an option.

While I'm sure that there will be a few good suggestions from interested people once the game is released, the characters are pretty much writing themselves already. I know their basic motivations, and don't want to deviate too far from those.

I broke down and downloaded Michael and Victoria finally via some Daz special deal yesterday. Everything else I'll be using is free content I've found on a few sites. I have so many morphs now for Genesis 2 and 3 Females that I'm sure I'll end up with some interesting looking characters, as you can see from the first two I've shared (they are 'blends' of several morphs). I'll probably use the 'stock' morphs for secondary characters so that I don't knock myself out too much designing them, but I seem to have a knack for 'following where the morphs take me' and going with the flow, as opposed to trying to 'force' a specific look for a character. So in a way, the characters kind of create themselves too, and the results help give some direction as to personality quirks, etc., based on how the character may turn out.

As for the designs of the the other characters, I'm a fan of B and C cups, so expect some smaller boobs on one or more of my next characters, and maybe some slighly larger ones, but nothing too large... besides, there are other games that focus on humongous boobs, big bodacious asses, etc.

Wardrobe may be an issue, but I think I've found enough content that I can keep that fresh. Plus, mixing and matching stuff to make cool outfits is always an option.

Thanks again for your input. Looking forward to more of it!

evildumdum Wrote:Always good to see a new renpy user. I like the concept. Lots of lip licking from the looks of it lol

Yeah, I've toned down the tongue action in the newer poses, but I wanted to figure out how to do the tongue thing as I was working on those initial models/poses. Now that I've found the 'turn off limits' option, I can probably tweak those so that they are a bit better, but mainly you'll see the tongues as a foreplay thing, and maybe for some cock action...

I've had a few gals give me the 'tongue' as a seductive suggestion over the years, hence my interest in showing that every once in a while..

I'll share more content at appropriate intervals. Glad that you like the concept!

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what else you come up with in terms of character models. I'm pretty new to Daz3D, so allow me to pick your brain about it sometime. A lot of people, especially artists putting out rendered stories and the like, seem a little touchy about answering questions about the stuff they use. Guess they don't want to let slip any trade secrets or what have you. From what I've read and seen Victoria and Michael are pretty much the go-to figures people start with for Genesis 3. I'm glad to hear you're going to be coming up with your own looks through morphing, though. A lot of game devs seem to just use known models straight out of the box, even using the same hairstyle that came with it. It'll be nice to see some new faces.

And B and C cups are fine. All you need is a handful. If every girl in your game has DDs it actually gets a little monotonous. No one should ever accuse boobs of being monotonous.

You may have mentioned it above and I just forgot but, is Consent going to have a linear sort of storyline or will it be more of a sandbox and you come across content as you chance across it? You said you were working on Day 1 for the demo so I imagine it's linear? Either way is fine with me, I'm just curious.

Sun Quan Wrote:Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what else you come up with in terms of character models. I'm pretty new to Daz3D, so allow me to pick your brain about it sometime. A lot of people, especially artists putting out rendered stories and the like, seem a little touchy about answering questions about the stuff they use. Guess they don't want to let slip any trade secrets or what have you. From what I've read and seen Victoria and Michael are pretty much the go-to figures people start with for Genesis 3. I'm glad to hear you're going to be coming up with your own looks through morphing, though. A lot of game devs seem to just use known models straight out of the box, even using the same hairstyle that came with it. It'll be nice to see some new faces.

And B and C cups are fine. All you need is a handful. If every girl in your game has DDs it actually gets a little monotonous. No one should ever accuse boobs of being monotonous.

You may have mentioned it above and I just forgot but, is Consent going to have a linear sort of storyline or will it be more of a sandbox and you come across content as you chance across it? You said you were working on Day 1 for the demo so I imagine it's linear? Either way is fine with me, I'm just curious.

I haven't messed with Victoria or MIchael yet. I can tell you it's been a bit of a pain to find enough free assets for Vanilla Genesis characters, as people seem to like the 'deluxe models', probably because those are models you purchase, hence you are more likely to purchase their addons I'd guess. Compound that with 'path issues' for various freebies I've downloaded, those can be hit or miss affairs. Once you get the hang of 'dragging folders into folders' though, it's been mostly painless on the install end, assuming assets are in place, and in the right locations.

So yeah, both the models featured above are Genesis models (1 G2F, 1 G3F). Genitals are probably the weakest point for vanilla Genesis models. I hear that Victoria has better genital morphing options, but I haven't taken her for a test drive yet. It's pretty cool that most of the 'preset character' morphs are slider based, so that you can dial in bits and pieces of various gals (say 50% Jenny, 10% Sara, 15% Lydia, you get the idea), and then use the other morphs to further 'define' your new gal.

Here's where I've been finding a lot of free stuff, which allows commercial as well as personal use:
Renderosity and ShareCG have a fair amount of free Daz and 3D model resources, and new ones appear on a daily or almost daily basis, so I'd recommend checking there often. You'll need to register, but essentially that's choosing a user name and password, and providing an email addy for your account to catch the registration confirmation email. Which could forward to another account if that's an issue for you. You'll get Renderosity 'spam' emails (they also sell 3D models and related products), but i'ts been not too bad so far.

https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Figures is also a good place to find a bunch of links to free stuff.

I'm sure you are also check the Daz site regularly for freebies as well, although those show up less often after you've downloaded your 'initial batch' of freebies. Google also helps, although you may get dragged off into the darker corners of the web that way... (torrents and such).

As for the story, it's definitely not going to be linear, although I suppose if you complete each gal's story options I suppose that could count as one big long linear story (see Lab Rats for what I'm talking about). Really it'll come down to how much time you invest in each gal as to which 'story options' will be open to you (relationship level is important).

On Day one, I currently have storyline options for 3 characters pretty mapped out, the other two are outlined, and the sixth is loosely outlined. You'll end up choosing a favorite gal or two to pursue, and that'll be the story for that day. Vaginal sex may not be an option for most of these characters (lesser options still open though), although I'm still debating having the option for vaginal sex with the blonde. So there could be a bit of replayability as you try pursuing the different gals while you wait for future releases.

What I DON'T want to do is tease people endlessly. While I have to give Mr Dots kudos for how well he's done with Dating My Daughter on Patreon, that's not my goal. He had enough people subscribed that his Patreon was showing over $11,000/month in income, before the 'monetary total' was removed from his patreon page. And as of 0.0.6 STILL no sex for the Protagonist! We all want to bone the daughter, I"m sure in that game, but he is REALLY dragging that out. Can't fault him though, it's obviously working for him. And I like his storyline overall.

Since I'm not doing this or money, I have no need to drag anything out, but I do want to keep things intersting/not just a wham bam thank you ma'am fest. I want people to feel like they've 'built' relationships with the gals throughout the story, with benefits along the way.

Instead, I'm hoping to have erotic encounters on each day. Sometimes more than one, but I don't want to leave people with blue balls, if you catch my meaning.

I've mostly 'restored' my stage, although I'm still trying to get the underlighting just right, plus I want some light radiating out from the edge of the stage, to illuminate the gals as they sit on the 'substage'. I'm not quite ready to share a render yet (it's coming out grainy) but once I iron that out I'll show off my latest progress with that. Players will be spending some time around that stage as the game progresses (multiple ladies may appear on that stage at some point), so it's worth investing the time now to get it just right lighting wise, so as to make the visual experience more memorable. Remember that the main character has just turned 18, so this'll be his first experience with strip clubs...

FYI, this club doesn't serve alcohol, so that 18 year olds can enter, in whatever state/country the main character is living in, anyways.

I've done my share of live stage lighting over the years, plus like many adult males have spent some time at a variety of pretty cool, and some not so cool, strip clubs. So I have a pretty solid idea as to what I'd like to see, as far as how the colors/lighting should appear on the gals.

The other locations (Work, Campus, Home) will get similar amounts of love, although lighting there is a bit easier to work out. I was originally planning on going with a number of stock backgrounds, but now that I've worked with a few .obj's in DAZ, I may go the 3D environment route for a few of those, using the resulting renders for the backgrounds. I'll probably use various .jpg images backgrounds as fillers until I am able to create the renders I need though. I don't want to hold up the initial demo any longer than I have to, and renders can always be swapped in later.

I Still need to pick out names for my main gals. Once I've developed their dialogue a bit, I'm sure I'll come up with appropriate names that will help 'invoke' the characters voices for me as I write them.

Back to the grindstone!
Wee

Another quick update.

I've been working on a couple of new characters. Meet Mitzi!



Normally she wouldn't dress this provocatively in public (i.e. she'd be wearing a bra), but this being a promo pic and all... she made an exception.

I'm pretty happy with how she's turning out so far.

Mom isn't quite ready for prime time at the moment. I want to tweak her face a bit more before I share. (I have some new morphs that may help with that.)
Here's mom. Reminds me a bit of Moon Bloodgood, actually, which isn't a bad thing I guess.



This is Brooke



And this is Nicole...



The stripper stage is sorta kinda done, unfortunately it takes a LONG time to render scenes using it, due to the complex lighting going on, so I may not put it to use immediately.

That's it for now.

Wee


edit: added Brooke and mom's promo pics

Yay, characters 5 and 6 are good to go!

This is Elise



And this is Angel



That rounds off my six main characters. Now I can get on with the important stuff, i.e. playing dressup and posing the gals for the day 1 dialogue!

Other than Stepmom (her role should be obvious), I'll leave the roles of the other 5 characters as a mystery for now, so that you can discover them in the demo. You'll meet all six of these gals during day one, and may be able to arrange some special sexy fun time with one or more of them...

It's a bit early for polls, but I wouldn't mind hearing which gal most intrigues you so far, based on her looks. If there is a 'fan fave', I can focus on her a bit more for day one.

At the end of day one, you will have earned a set number of 'relationship level' points with the gals, distributed amongst the six gals. As you will end up focusing on one or two of them, this will set the stage for the early chapters in the rest of the story. Think of day 1 as a 'perfect storm' for sexy fun time, based on where the six gals are in their lives at that point. On day 2, things will have 'calmed down', so you'll have to work to earn/keep their affections from that point onwards. Especially if you are shooting for a 7 way reverse gangbang at the end as your goal...

Again, if anyone is interested in pitching in with some rendered background art, let me know. I'd like to have fully rendered backgrounds in this game, as opposed to the 'stock photos' I'll be using for most of this. My rendering machine doesn't have a lot of horsepower, so I'll be focusing on character rendering for now.

Back to the grindstone!
Wee

Based solely on the images you've shown so far I'd say Stepmom and Brooke are about tied for the nicest figures. Nicole probably has the prettiest face out of them but there's just something about her hair that bothers me for reasons I can't explain.

As for focus for Day 1 I'd recommend just going with whatever feels like it fits the game's story the best. Having tried quite a number of these games I can say from experience that the girl's story and / or personality will make me like her more than her looks will.

Quick update:

I'm mixing base model generations a bit (Gen 2 and Gen 3), and some of the gals were optimized for iray while others weren't. In addition, I wasn't entirely happy with stepmom's and Nicole's faces, so I tweaked them a bit. I wanted Nicole to look a bit younger, and Mom looked a bit harsh to me, so I softened her features slightly. I also tweaked their hair a bit, duplicating layers and adding transparency to help give a better look for the hair (some trick I read about on the Daz forum).



Here's a side by side of how the gals look at this moment. Mitzi hasn't been 'irayed' yet.



Part of me really likes Elise with porcelain skin, another part of me wants to color her up a bit. Thoughts?

Also, I can give you basic backgrounds for the four gals on the ends (the two in the middle show up during day one).

Stepmom is, well, your stepmom. She works a lot, and goes on a lot of out of town business trips. She became your stepmom in your early teens, and she kept you as her own after your father disappeared with some other gal a couple of years back. Stepmom is supposed to be in her mid-30's, so I don't mind her having slightly harsher features.

Nicole is your stepsister, and is a little older than you (by a few months). She is going to College, same as you. She's also 'adopted', and is a natural redhead (Your mom has went back and forth between brunette and red).

Brooke is a fellow student, the two of you share a class with... Elise, your professor in that class.

This is all stuff you'll figure out in the game opening, so I'm not really spoiling anything here. As for Angel and Mitzi, you'll meet them once the game gets rolling, during the first day.

Brooke looks a little older to me, depending on the lighting. She's supposed to be in her late teens/early 20's. Do I need to 'youthen' her, or would y'all buy her as around that age?

Because of me spending time figuring out the Iray thing, this has delayed me a bit on getting a demo out the door. I'm probably 1-2 weeks out from having an initial demo. I want to make sure I"m happy enough with how the gals look before I start going crazy with the poses, so it makes sense to dial them in a bit better now, and get them all on the same relative level (that being Iray optimized). Iray renders are a bit slower on my laptop, but I can cancel them mid stream, once the image has rendered enough detail for my tastes, rather than waiting 2-3 hours on each render.

I'm looking forward to buying a Ryzen system once those hit the market, which should work great as a render machine, but unfortunately it'll be a bit before my 'desktop replacement laptop' with a Zen processor hits the market (Q4?). I've been supporting AMD for years, since the K6-III days actually, because I like supporting the little guy. Intel's prices were too high back in the Socket 7 days, and I'd argue are too high again today. I'm sure we'll see some price cuts in the coming months, but we wouldn't have those if AMD wasn't keeping Intel honest so to speak.

But I digress. Thoughts on Elise and Brooke? Also on my tweaks to Stepmom and Nicole?

Wee

Just a quick reply, don't have a lot of time at the moment.

Nicole - Her hair still looks odd to me, probably because it's flying around, not sitting straight. I'd be curious to see how it looks in different poses. Otherwise she's beautiful.
Stepmom - Looking better but her eyes seem like they're a little low on her face. Maybe it's just the angle of your screencaps. Otherwise she looks mature and pretty. Softening her features was a good idea.
Brooke - I think it's her long chin that makes her look a little older than she is. Generally speaking, the rounder one's face is, the more youthful it looks, though not in every case. She doesn't look ancient by any means, so if she looks good in certain situations and you're happy with it, it's cool.
Elise - I'd leave her with the light skin tone. All your other girls have a tanned look, so she provides some nice variety. Wouldn't mind having a professor like her at all.
Mitzi - No real feedback.
Angel - That group picture you posted does not flatter her at all. It's probably because the bright lighting is washing out all of her muscle tone and making really harsh shadows on her face, but she almost looks a little sickly. I like her hair and the petite figure but her face looked much better in the first image you posted. Not saying you should change her but I'd be careful of the type of lighting you use in scenes with her.

That's all I've got for now.

Quick Daz3D question... Since you said you're using a mixture of Genesis 2 and 3 does that limit your poses to certain characters, or do they all use the same ones all right?

Sun Quan Wrote:Just a quick reply, don't have a lot of time at the moment.

Nicole - Her hair still looks odd to me, probably because it's flying around, not sitting straight. I'd be curious to see how it looks in different poses. Otherwise she's beautiful.
Stepmom - Looking better but her eyes seem like they're a little low on her face. Maybe it's just the angle of your screencaps. Otherwise she looks mature and pretty. Softening her features was a good idea.
Brooke - I think it's her long chin that makes her look a little older than she is. Generally speaking, the rounder one's face is, the more youthful it looks, though not in every case. She doesn't look ancient by any means, so if she looks good in certain situations and you're happy with it, it's cool.
Elise - I'd leave her with the light skin tone. All your other girls have a tanned look, so she provides some nice variety. Wouldn't mind having a professor like her at all.
Mitzi - No real feedback.
Angel - That group picture you posted does not flatter her at all. It's probably because the bright lighting is washing out all of her muscle tone and making really harsh shadows on her face, but she almost looks a little sickly. I like her hair and the petite figure but her face looked much better in the first image you posted. Not saying you should change her but I'd be careful of the type of lighting you use in scenes with her.

That's all I've got for now.

Quick Daz3D question... Since you said you're using a mixture of Genesis 2 and 3 does that limit your poses to certain characters, or do they all use the same ones all right?

I have a pretty extensive library of poses thanks to all the freebies I've found, so posing is the one thing that I'm not sweating much. I don't mind at all adjusting poses in Daz, starting with a 'close' pose and going from there. G3F poses can have issues going to G2F poses supposedly, but to be honest I haven't noticed this, mainly because the poses are often 'filed' under G2F or G3F when I go looking for them. Unfortunately, there isn't a 'concensus' on where poses should be installed by various contributors, so I have them in several places, but fortunately most of them are grouped together in the category sort folders.

Nicole's Charm hair likes to 'spread out' when adjusted to cover the shoulders, which is why you see those loose strands floating out in the air. This is something I'll likely have to fix in post editing with Photoshop when the time comes. Other than minor color and size adjustments (except for the group shot, it's currently untweaked color wise), I haven't done any editing of the rendered images so far.

Mom's hair may be sitting too high (not quite a beehive, though), so that may be where the perception issue creeps in. I'll take a closer look at it and the eye level placement.

I didn't have a lot of jaw tweak sliders when I built Brooke, but have since downloaded a number of face related morphs. I don't want to tweak her much (I like her where she's at) but will play with her a bit to see how things shake out. Having her attending college a bit later in her life is always an option as well, although her carefree spirit (as I 'hear' her voice/mannerisms in my head) suggests a younger age to me.

Angel may indeed be the victim of bad lighting in the group shot. She looks better in closeups. I tweaked her eye region pretty heavily to help invoke more Asian-ness when I built her, and she's also a bit older. She's supposed to be a tiny gal, similar in age to Stepmom, so I don't mind slightly harsher/older features for her, but of course it's a fine balance to work out. I haven't messed with her Iray values much as of yet, so there may be some help in that area.

I tend to agree with you on Elise. She looks French to me, so I'll likely go with that as her heritage (French or French Canadian maybe). Her previous render (a couple of posts above) was pretty dark for some reason, so I had to dial her up a bit in Photoshop, and even then she was pretty tan. That was pre-Iray as well; her Iray skin tone is what you see in the groupshot. Her new skin tones came from some custom texture I found somewhere I think, and I don't want to mess with it much. I may try to tweak Elise's skin tone very slightly to dial just a slight bit of 'whiteness' out of it. I also thought of making her a Vampiress, but that would just be silly.

I agree r.e. a mix of skin tones, hence my mixing the skin tones up a bit between the various gals, to keep things more interesting visually, as I appreciate having variety. Daz seems to like more tanned tones, and in fact I had to lighten mom's base Vic textures a bit.I think I have a pretty good range of body types here, even though Daz G2F and G3F don't 'default' to 2x4 body types. I'm a fan of curves, and a bit of stylized proportions 'cuz they are more pleasing visually.

Getting new lights to show up is an ongoing issue in renders. the Daz forums are helpful in this regard, but there's still some trial and error here. I've noticed that glitches creep into scenes ad you add stuff to them, causing these sort of issues, so sometimes starting again from scratch helps with this. I need to figure out how to save individual figures from scenes. I can always delete the other figures, but there should be an easier way. Still learning.

I spent a good part of the day yesterday trying to set up a couch scene, but the lighting hasn't been cooperating. Patience... I must be patient with these issues as I learn this stuff...

The more distant renders aren't as kind to some of the gals.

Thanks for your continued suggestions.

Happy to help, even in the small capacity I've been doing.

Take your time with this, is the best suggestion I can give you. I know once you make up your mind to create something like this you want to see concrete progress as soon as possible, put something out for people to play with and whatnot. The more you fine tune and get both your renders and your story to a place where you're as close to satisfied as possible, though, the better your players will like it. Trust me, when a person really puts a lot of work into a game like this it definitely shows through in the quality. There's no pressure right now besides what you're placing on yourself, so don't worry about taking longer to put out a demo or even screencaps.

Now's the critical time when you're setting your character models (and everything that's associated with them), your backgrounds, and your storyline beginning in place. Once those are done everything that follows will be much easier, so now's when you want to take a lot of time to be creative. Like I said, I'm happy to give any feedback I can, so don't be shy about posting stuff and asking opinions, either. Hopefully other people will start sticking their oars in and giving reactions as well.

Sun Quan,

Just for you, here's a closeup of Stepmom. I made some additional subtle tweaks. I went for a bit of a side profile, so that you could get a better feel for her facial features.



An annoying 'feature' of Vic apparently is that her eyes move in opposite directions when you use the 'both eyes' orientation side to side or up and down parameters, so you end up adjusting each eye individually on the rotation. I expect better from the Daz designers, as that seems like an amateur mistake on the programming end. I've seen this with some of the other gals as well.

I'll be 'living' with these models for a while as the story develops, so I agree that spending extra time on the front end is worthwhile.

Additional suggestions welcome!

Enjoy!
Wee

Her face definitely has a lot of character, which bodes well for when you give her different expressions. I like the shape of her nose and brows a lot. A lot of your models have very defined, distinctive cheek bones and she shows it off in spades. There's still a little weirdness going on with her eyes, I don't know if it's due to the way you have to move them one at a time like you said or what. Her eyelids seem like they're pulling away from her eyes somewhat. Is that part of the model or did you cause it while you were manipulating her features? I pointed out the areas I'm talking about here:


While shopping around on Daz3D's page I've seen a LOT of morphs for eyes and such. Is it possible the poor controls you're talking about are handled by one of those? If it's cheap, it might be worth looking into. Just a suggestion, I don't know for certain.

I do like the texture you chose for Stepmom's eyes, though. Very reflective and pretty.

I started working on Angel. She needed a little makeup, so I used Bree, but I'm not sure how to tweak the skin tones to match using Iray, short of resorting to Photoshop. My attempts to adjust the skin tint so that the face matches the body using various parameters haven't been successful using the surfaces adjustments.



Anyways, that's how she looks so far.

Wee

I tried some tweaks to Brooke, to make her look a bit younger. Here's a side by side comparison of the two faces.



The face on the right was rendered for a bit longer than the one on the left, but we are focusing on the proportions here. Thoughts? Which do you prefer?

Wee

In general the rounder the face the younger they look (think a baby's face compared to an adult). That said - I like the one on the right...