#DAZ Studio

[melissagt]

"The Admiration of His Majesty"

Baldur's Gate 3 fanart of Astarion with His Majesty. Thank the gods Larian returned him to his hairless glory!

I may or may not totally have it in my head that Astarion insisted on going back for His Majesty at some point. <<

Tools used - Daz Studio Photoshop NO AI EVER

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[dduane]

The Bad Armor Drinking Game

In the digital art dep't...

So, having just sorted out the new figure for Queen Eftgan in the Middle Kingdoms books, I spent most of last week (while continuing to recover from the household upper respiratory infection) doing preliminary planning for the visual of a scene from The Door Into Sunset in which all the MCs are out on the battlefield. The big battle (or the final one of a sequence) will be the next day, and last-minute tweaks are being made to strategy and tactics. Which means putting most of the our-side protagonists together in a command tent, bent over a table covered with maps. (The "sketch" for this scene is over here.)

But sweet Goddess in a bucket, the shopping I had to do to make sure I had those guys' armor the way I wanted nearly drove me around the bend. From the digital artist's POV, the main problem with this is realistically arming the female characters. And the reason for this is simple: Almost all of it that's currently available from Daz is crap.

There are a very few notable exceptions. In Eftgan's case, for example: she's wearing the female-fighter version of the male-fighter harness that Herewiss has on. Sickleyield and Moonscape Graphics have done good work here.

But almost all the other female-use armors available at the moment? Argh. It had been ...a few years, I guess? since I last went armor-shopping. Last week I'd hoped there might at least be some new possibilities in the Daz shop. But instead I found so much more useless crap than before that I was tempted to start day drinking. And by evening, there were enough drink-triggers to start my very own drinking game.

I am not going to illustrate the triggers enumerated below, as I don't want to embarrass the artists. But if you look at the items turned up by this search, you'll have little trouble finding the things that would have left me in a drunken stupor within an hour or two.

My baseline: if I'm going to buy digital armor, either for male or female characters, it has to be something that I myself wouldn't be embarrassed to show up wearing at a swordfight. Otherwise, I start hitting the virtual bottle.

So I'd drink when I see:

Armor that fails to cover or at least protect vital vulnerable areas. Not just vital organs, but seriously important places like the insides of thighs and arms, the throat area, etc. (And yeah, I know and enjoy the various webcomics that illustrate, for humor's sake, the idea that the more bare flesh a female warrior displays, the safer they somehow are. But I'm dealing with the "realistic" side of combat here. Yes, some of my characters are magic workers, but the reason they go out and get themselves armor is so they don't have to waste precious magical ability dealing with something that steel will manage perfectly well without them having to think about it.)

Armor that should serve a useful protective purpose but nonetheless doesn't because it's been twisted by the armor maker, for design purposes, into a shape that means it's now essentially useless. Drink, for example, on seeing an example of "Silly Pauldron Syndrome:" i.e., shoulder pieces that will not only not protect you from a shoulder cut, but will direct it toward the space between neck and shoulder. ...Drink again if the pauldron also somehow blocks your view of what's going on around you. Another drink for pauldrons, gorgets or neck pieces that poke your eye out when you turn your head.

Armor covered with decorative doodads that do nothing but get in your way or serve as something for your adversaries' weapons to catch on. The proper purpose of armor is to deflect blows away from vulnerable areas, not to catch and keep them there. No one is going to waste expensive metal (and armourers' labor time) on decorations that are a liability. Anything that would catch a thrusting sword? Drink. Drink twice if spikes are involved.

Poorly thought-out attachments to armor (loincloths, capes, etc), Drink if these would inevitably trip you or otherwise interfere with you if you tried to run in them: or that would make it easier for an attacker—especially from behind—to pull/knock you down and kill you. Two drinks if the attachments are asymmetrical. (Because, what, this is supposed to help somehow?) And drink for loincloths in general, because, FFS, why.

Boob armor. If you're a woman who's fought with the sword at all, you know that unless you're absolutely dead flat in front, you bind up somehow to get the frontage safely restrained before the action begins. Armor that purports to separate your breasts into two different casings is simply idiotic. All that it does do is signal that you're female. (And you're doing this why, exactly? On a this-world battlefield, this strikes me as nothing but a recipe for trouble.) One drink for boob armor. Another drink for conical boob armor that would make even early!Madonna look askance. Two drinks for boob armor that covers only the tops of the boobs. Honestly, WTF!!

And: Armor that just looks silly. Armor that makes you go "Oh FFS, give me a break now" and look away. Two drinks (or more) for armor that covers hardly any of your character, but for which the designer is possibly charging you even more than for an intricately made and well thought-out piece of work with a lot more protective real estate.

...(sigh) So many drinks. And so little armor worth having. ...Anyway, I got away from that series of shopping sessions with my sobriety intact. Small mercies.

But let me show you something hilarious that came up along the way.

Very, very few of the people making and selling armors on Daz betray any sign of a sense of humor in their marketing images. The rig below, though, popped up suddenly and reduced me to gasps of helpless laughter.

This, I kid you not, will come up in that "armor" search above. Let's be charitable and refer to it for the time being as "fighting gear".

I haven't shown you the best of this, though. These two figures weren't alone. There was another.

This guy should be an example to us all. He's thinking, "They're gonna make me go out there wearing some stick-on leather nipple straps and half a rug from IKEA? Fine. I'm gonna make it work." ...And he not only owns it: he rocks it. This is a badass of some kind or another, and he has my sword, or axe, or whatever.

All I can say is: Good on the product designer for doing something genuinely funny for a change: because at that point, I seriously needed it.

(sigh) And now back to work.

ETA: A quick note per various recommendations of others online doing this kind of analysis: Thanks, but I don't need to go outside the household for more of the same. I'll just yell up the stairs to @petermorwood, who probably has some that's way more acerbic than mine. :)

[elizaviento]

My interpretation of what should have happened between Silco and Jinx during the baptism scene.

[gravecircuit]

[strangefate1]

Hi, first post! I create fantasy quality Daz Studio assets (like these axes) among other things, on Patreon!

[sonicjustbecause]

The quills! Finally!

Once they're done, I'll only have to do the ears (Difficult, but I have the topology planned), the inner mouth with teeth and tongue, pupils and lids.

And then I only have a few things to work on.

Then i can import in DAZ and rig.

[calluna-dekarios-dellamorte]

Playing with Daz to make Gale religious iconography is my passion ✨ 🩷✨

[imaginariumnexus]

I've been meaning to create a simple portrait of Harry in Daz, and have also been wanting to experiment with a more painterly approach to postwork. So here's that experiment.

Not A.I.; this image was posed, lit, and rendered in Daz Studio and then taken into GIMP for some retouching and paintover work.

[shanaraharlyah]

Thank you to @honeyxmooncalves for putting the challenge out there to do our MCs as merpeople! Dragon Age has sucked me in since November and I haven't done much of anything for Hogwarts Legacy since. But here is Hellendil as merman per your prompt. ☺️

[ethanwinterses]

daz studio test

[nightmare01]

Even Commanders need a little morning walk🥰

[countess-dawn]

#daz3d #astarion

Astarion in the lobby. A rendered art y me. You you are interested in getting it as a print let me know and I will add it to my in-print shop.

[dduane]

First light and lighting test on a new Daz 3D set called "Elder Soul."

...Got it on sale some days back. I think my initial intention was to cannibalize it for parts (i.e., use the structure for something else not so temple-like). but then started looking at it and thinking "hmm, what else could this be used for?"

Something Middle Kingdoms-ish, perhaps. The Goddess does have temples here and there. (There's no organized religion, of course: who needs it when you know you're going to meet Her personally one of these days? But in some of the cities people do get together informally to build one for Her, if enough of them feel like it.)

...And right out of the box, it does have that book-cover-ish look to it. Must give this some thought...

[elizaviento]

Happy 2nd Birthday, RE4R!!

[animatedglittergraphics-n-more]

[sonicjustbecause]

Ouside head is done. Now time for inner mouth and pupils!

The shape of the muzzle is a bit cat like...

So the eyes remain round when seen from below and the muzzle will not resempble a plate.

Unsubdivided and subdivided

The quills and the ears are the hardest parts to do.

After Sonic and Shadow I think I will do Amy. But before I'll attempt with humanoid figures (Sonic characters will be free for obvious reasons but the umanoid figures will be on sale).