Post holiday indulgences

Hope everyone had a nice holiday!

Since I acquired a little fun money from various Santas, I knocked a few more things of my wishlists at various stores.

Ali’s annual sale at Mankahoo has started and I picked up several hair props. Also noticed that, in addition to Dawn fits, the newer ones have fits for G3F and G8F. I merrily swap hairs between all sorts of figures, so fit presets are always appreciated to save me a little time and effort.

Hr-178, Hr-188, Hr-201, and Hr-212. A very long, stylized hair style, a retro updo, twists, and messy braids. The various hair shader utilities I have work pretty well on these too.

Over at Hivewire, I picked up the new puppy, its free LAMH preset, and the tack conversion kit for the HW Horse.

I’m not entirely sure yet how the MilHorse parts will work on the DS version of the HW Horse, but I have the readme files to refer to if I get stuck.

I’ll be working on buying more textures for all the HW animals. Just added the calico texture set for the cat to the priority list, to replace the tack conversion.

At Renderosity, I finally picked up the Cat Saddle for the MilCat and Shrouded for V4. I’m not crazy about most of the poses in the shrouded set — sexy nudes and pinups are just not my thing — but I can get something to work more along the lines of weird or spooky, because that is more of my thing. 🙂

I also bought a cute pair of sandals for G3F; Walking Flats 1:

I have a lot of high-heeled sandals that have come with various outfits, but not so many flat heeled ones. It was an impulse buy, but a good deal.

Replacing the Cat Saddle and Shroud V4 are these two products:

Pulp SciFi Spaceship and a Retro LP prop/pose set. I sense a retro theme…

At DAZ, I completely indulged myself and bought Stonemason’s The Gothic Library and also the pose mixer utility. My Holiday Loyalty Reward discount helped a bit…

The pose mixer utility is the more practical of the two, but that library set is gorgeous. It does come with a 3DL version, though only the Iray version has lights/camera presets. Maybe I’ll sit down and create some lights and cameras myself. Other 3DL users might find those a useful freebie.

Also, for non-DS users, an obj option is available. I didn’t download that one, but it’s nice that Stonemason includes it.

And…those two products have now been replaced on my list by these:

The Eastern Dragon is a lot of trouble to pose. I thought I had all of its poses, but I somehow missed this set. And considering how DAZ has been purging older products, I figured I’d better bump it up in the queue.

Why, yes, I did match the dragon texture to her outfit! Not sure where that outfit came from — probably a Mei Lin 6 related bundle I acquired for free or on the cheap — and while it’s not something I would have bought, it is kinda cute.

Posing the dragon was a pain, even though I started with a pose preset. That thing’s got a ton of bones.

As for the outback set, I have zero desert environments. Must rectify that! Also, a post-apocalyptic Santa render idea is still percolating and I’ll want a desert environment like this for it.

I have to finish up my pose conversions first, though. I’m trying to be more organized rather than flitting from project to project as the mood strikes me.

 

Snowy pine trees galore!

The other day the DAZ store offered a Platinum Plus product for “free” if I bought the standard new/still new release. I usually pass on those sales, but I got a pop up banner saying I qualified for another two freebies and I succumbed to temptation.

I recently grumbled about not having enough snowy pines, so I picked up the new Winter Pine Forest. It was already budget-friendly at $10.47, but I paid $7.85 because of the Holiday Reward promo. Thus I ended up with new snowy pine trees and three other products, all for $7.85.

This comes with “snow blobs!” (Meaning drifts or snow piles, but blobs sounds much more exciting. Like they might get up and come after you if you’re wandering around the snowy forest primeval.)

Eliminated from my priority wishlist:

Wild Wind Hair for G8F and Victorian Decor 2 Iray.

Then a bonus texture add-on:

Vintage Noir for Vintage Rose G2F. There’s a G3F version of the outfit as well, I just haven’t gotten around to buying it yet.

I tried out Wild Wind Hair with the new BOSS Pro Light set but because the render was taking forever, and Windows was nagging me to do an update, I canceled it. Maybe I’ll try again. Iray just crawls on my older computer, but maybe if I render something simpler (like, without hair?) it’ll go a bit faster and I can get a better feel for how the lights work.

Moving up into the newest vacated slots:

Rune 7 and Daily Casuals Mega Wardrobe for G3M. I like Rune’s texture and morph and the clothing set offers several practical basics. Not sure why I didn’t pick it up sooner. Especially since my G3M content is sorely lacking in just about everything.

Then I uploaded enough to the gallery and freestuff at Renderosity to get a $5.00 gift certificate, and I bought even more snowy pine trees!

It was on sale for $6.45, so it cost me only a little extra.

On the non-shopping front, today I made five different cookie dough recipes and two sets of brownies.

One of the brownies was a mistake, but by the time I realized what I’d done, I was already committed. I was thinking, “Wow, this cookie dough is kinda runny! Did I mess up the flour? Let’s look at that recipe and…oh crap I just made brownies instead.”

Oh, well. Brownies can be frozen for later munching.

Pulp poses, Genesis

Converted from the M4/V4 set, for original flavor Genesis. Download here.

Made with the base male and female shapes, so adjustments will likely be necessary for larger or smaller figures, bustier figures, more muscled figures, etc.

I’m about halfway through converting the Genesis 2 version. Slowly making progress!

 

Tis the season to be busy and disorganized

I swear, I used to be better at multitasking than I am now. These days, it’s like I binge on rendering, then binge on watching Netflix, then binge on reading books (doesn’t help that library holds always seem to arrive at once.)

This week begins the holiday cookie baking binge. I’m making six or seven different types, most of which I’m giving away or toting off to holiday events. We’re grocery shopping for the ingredients tonight, whee!

Our remaining elderly cat has a persistent UTI, which has been so much fun to deal with. Ugh. She finally seems to be improving, after multiple trips to the vet, howling all the way to and from in her kitty carrier.

On the budget wrecking front, I knocked off a few more items from the DAZ wishlist. Picked up both Kalea 7 and BOSS Pro Lights for Iray for under $15. Good deal!

I’m being cautious about which iray light sets I pick up, since I rolled DS back to 4.9 after the persistent crashes I was getting with 4.10. Since then, I’ve had no issues but new versions of DS have improvements in iray and I’m never sure how all that affects store products.

Hivewire is having a holiday sale as well, and I bought a nice set of poses for the HW House Cat:

It wasn’t on my list of “priorities” but, like the pirate code, my list is more of a guideline anyway. 😉

Just one purchase from the $3.50 Renderosity Clearance sale this year, Nalina for V4. A pretty toasty brown skin texture with nice makeup options.

Don’t mind buying V4 stuff since I still use her, and can use her textures and/or clothing on almost all of my other newer figures as well. Win-Win!

Still waiting to see if ali’s personal store will have its holiday sale. There are a few hair props I’d like to buy. Xurge3D is having his annual holiday sale — there’s a texture add-on I really should pick up — and Fantasies Realm Market too.

Good thing many of these sales are good through the end of the year. That means I can use any Christmas gift money on new stuff.

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Edited to add: Though I picked off a few wishlist items, new ones quickly take their place. Kinda like the mythological hydra, but without the multiples part.

Added these to the DAZ priority list, replacing Kalea 7 and BOSS Pro Lights:

Hexagon tutorial — dammit, I AM going to learn how to use Hex! — and rain gear for the G2M to go with the set I just bought for G3F.

And replacing the HW Foal and Western Tack for the HW Horse:

I need more texture options for the HW Big Dog. While I hadn’t actually noticed the issue with Dawn’s pelvis, now that I have seen it I can’t unsee it and need the fix. I wonder if the fix will improve autofit results, even if only a little.

 

 

Brand new content and old stuff too

Indian Country

 

I used my prize from the contest win to get my grabby hands on the HW Foal and Western Tack for the HW Horse, and got around to rendering them today. The tack is draped over the back of the pickup…and I need to work on my mane posing skills, ha!

Oldest content — and not sure I’ve ever rendered it before now — is the Pickup Truck. There must not have been any extra texture sets for it, or else I never got around to buying them. I ended up using Stonemason’s DAZ Studio Dirty Shaders on the body of the truck and presets from the free Decan’s Paint Shop on everything else. I like the dirt shader, though if there’s a way to handle reflections I didn’t see it.

(I’ve been watching Longmire on Netflix and the Henry Standing Bear character drives an old truck similar to this, so that was my inspiration.)

Figures are original Genesis, as those were the last generation to come with ethnicity morphs. The male is wearing Falcon M4, Streetwear jeans, shirt from Effortless Cool, Hr-074 for V4 hair, and the hat from M4 Cowboy. Female is wearing Dakotah V4 with Tatum Hair G3F, Riot GIrl G3 top, Country Girl G3 boots, and the jeans from Horror Survivor: Cris for G2F.

Grass is Predatron’s Grass One, which isn’t in the store now, skydome from Flink’s Skies, and the barbed wire fence is a freebie from Most Digital Creations.

I didn’t have any barb wire fences with modeled wire; this one is a plane with a transparency map to look like barbed wire. I added deformers to the fence props to bend the “wires” down/up and also used the mesh warp brush on the posts as they looked a little too perfect.

Anybody know if there is barb wire fencing like this elsewhere? The kind you’d find on a farm or ranch, not around a prison or something. I have a lot of that kind.