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:
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.
Good morning fellows and fawns!!
Got an experiment I wanna conduct with yas. We'll call it Experiment #1. To participate, you will need to load THIS card, and her face and body appear fuuuu-king GRAY.
View attachment 2003644
If that happens in your game, come back here and download this MEGA package. We call it
BAN THE HAN.
You must be registered to see the links
When you have it, yank the [Hanmen] NEXT-GEN Textures.zipmod from the rar and place it inside your "mods" folder. Then load THIS card:
View attachment 2003646
This card has "virtually" the same character, but with ONE variance. The Hanmen Skin Shader(and super hard to fiddle with F5 graphical settings) ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED. She DOES use Hanmen skin textures for her face and body. But this is DHH, not F5 graphics. You can then load the much simpler DHH-based preset (in the MEGA pack) so the graphics look more like how THIS guy, Mr. 69, does his cards in Photoshop
so they look much better than they actually are--which brings us to Experiment #2!
View attachment 2003651
Isn't Rita lovely?? She's not come by it honest, unfortunately. Her creator, Mr. 69, had some fun with her using his student copy of the Adobe Creative Suite from 2010.
This is how Rita loaded for me, at first... then after some tweaking of my own.
View attachment 2003654
Using the MEGA pack's files;
and sharing the link whenever you do a new card using Hanmen's skin textures, you can not only
ban the han,
eliminate the gray skin BS, you can get ALMOST(or better if you know more about DHH settings!) the same quality in your DHH-graphics-driven Honey2 game that Mr. 69 pulls with Photoshop!
Here's another diagram showing how you can use just Hanmen's textures, just like Nyaacho or Kito/Kitn's, to have ultra res skin for your favorite honey... AND NO MORE HANMEN GRAY SKIN SHADER BULLSHIT.
View attachment 2003657
PS: The softer "more endowed" version of Rita can be found in the MEGA pack, also. Now get out there and BAN THE HAN!
PPS: If you are one of the Hanmen converts, but now wish to renounce, simply delete the [Hanmen] NEXT-GEN Shader v2.0.zipmod from your mods folder--bye bye! Then load your InitSetting.exe and change the graphics enhancement back to DHH! Seriously, with that high contrast "Mr.69" DHH preset and the ultra textures, the girls look a million time better using just DHH.
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.
