Hello everybody. This post is a bit long but bear with me.
A long time ago, I think about 2 years ago, Zecon posted an image of a character they made (linked image below):
https://attachments.f95zone.to/2020/07/740100_1.jpg
Though they didn't share the card, there was something beautifully natural about it, and I decided to try and mimic it as best I could.
Since I have zero skill creating faces/bodies from scratch, I relied upon other peoples cards as a base, spent hours upon hours trying different things, making adjustments, learning, and then making further revisions in terms of lighting, presets, skin shaders, and deciding between DHH vs F5 Graphics. I learned quite a bit through trial and error, and even more through postings here and watching the odd tutorial video.
Long story short, the following is an image of what I have created:
View attachment 2009554
I think I did justice in more or less successfully recreating the hair, outfit, pose, and facial expression from Zecon's original work. I did take liberties, however, such as making freckles more pronounced, and not making the face shape an exact 1 for 1.
The most important part of any card, to me at least, is the face. To achieve the above, I started with the Danika-SSS card by Sykosis. I've included that here as a reference. I modified it many, many times, although the shape is more or less the same. At one time I conducted a fusion to modify the shape by about 5%. What took the longest was adjusting the eyes in terms of size, placement, colour, makeup, lashes, etc. Regretably I wasn't paying attention when I fused the face so I didn't remember the name of the other fused card. However, I'm confident in saying that the end result remains at least 80% of what Sykosis originally provided.
The body template I swapped out at least 4 times. Eventually I settled on a card's body as a base, and then went to work modifying it. The body I used came from the card Spider-Gwen, also provided below as a reference. I'm not sure who made the original card, and I wasn't able to identify it based on a quick Google search of the image name (I didn't change it). Thank you to whoever made that card, and if it was you, or if any of you know who it was, please let me know.
What took the most time was learning and ultizing the Hanmen shader (free version). For the longest time I used DHH exclusively and then, after reading someone explain exactly how to use the shader in F5, I was blown away and didn't think I'd ever go back to DHH again. And then, I think a day or so ago, Pathos posted the below.
Dear lordy, Pathos is a genius. I did exactly what Pathos specified, reset the skin shaders on my card which, at that point, was still using Hanmen in F5, and then applied the custom DHH preset that Pathos includes in the quote above to mimic Mr. 69's card lighting. I'm absolutely astounded that Pathos did what Pathos did in DHH.
I did, however, make a very, very minor adjustment to the Mr69 preset that Pathos made, that being to lower the DHH Light Intensity from about 1.89 to about 1.12 (I'm approximating because I didn't write down the exact numbers). To be frank, the main reason I opted to do this was because I found with the light pink of the clothing I made for my card, the brighter light washed the colours out.
I've provided my modified DHH preset as a reference, but full credit for that goes to Pathos.
And that concludes my insanely long post. Let me know what you think, or if I forgot to credit anyone.
Oh, and I truly hope that you don't mind Zecon that I was inspired by your work. Thank you all.
