Kitbashing (BTS #17) (Patreon)

Back in June I showed off a render for a house. It was in a mostly default configuration with a smattering of extra props placed by me. This was originally going to be the Best Friend's family's house as I looked for something else for MC. As it turns out, this house fits the bill for both households.

One of the many steps I've taken to avoid "cookie cutter Daz syndrome" is to redecorate the house for MC's household. Since MC and her BFF both live near each other, having a house with a similar floor plan is quite common (in the USA at least). I figured a splash of paint would be enough to differentiate. However, I'm not a decorator so my first attempt was a bit... colorful:

Yeah, intense right? I liked the roof and the reworked concrete, but the house itself wasn't as appealing once the render finished.

My second attempt. This is almost what the finished house will look like. I replaced the pool tiles with concrete (who has tiles lining a pool?) and used the same bricks for the walls and the grill. The pool water looks super grey, but I've now fixed that too.

If you didn't notice from the previous pic, I also added security cameras along the roof's overhang. I will also be changing the ground floor windows to further enhance security of the property (MC is a stickler for those kinds of things).

The largest part left to finish is the interior and boy does it need a lot of work. I'll leave the interior design and redecoration to whole other BTS post.

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Blah blah set design, blah blah decoration, blah blah smartly reusing assets. A bit boring I know, but the boring stuff is what I'm doing a lot of at the moment. I am working on character design too, but it's not ready yet.

However, I do have some slightly older test renders:

Remember her? She's had few upgrades. I want the characters of Motherhood to be visually distinctive. And while the prosthetic leg certainly is different, the hair wasn't.

I'll bet you've seen the hairstyle before in dozens of other games and comics. Like I said in BTS 14: "While no one dev can "claim" a hairstyle as their own, I still want to avoid having too similar of a look to other game's characters." When this render came out, and the prosthetic isn't visible, she looked like almost any other white female DAZ model with that overused hairstyle.

As such, this character's hair is going to change. But this time around I've found ways to make hair look unique without having to completely pick something else entirely. I'm still working on it for the above character, so nothing to show at the moment. But I can give you a good idea of what I'm experimenting with.

By mirroring hair, I've been able to change hair assets into something they originally weren't. Look above for example. Back in BTS 14 this hair had only one ponytail. I managed to make it into a twin ponytail.

This one is a very common hairstyle that is actually shaved on one side. I mirrored it and created a completely different style. (Note, this is a test model, not a character in MH.)

How about an afro? With mirroring it is quite easy to make half one color. (Note, this is a test model, not a character in MH.)

How about something really out there? This hairstyle should look vaguely familiar and not at the same time. The reason is this is a combination of two very common hairstyles. I used shaders to make the hair assets the same color and look like they fit together. In addition, I used a hat clip plane (the same one I used for Ehrlynn) to expose the shaved part. (Note, this is a test model, not a character in MH.)

While I won't be using these above experimental hairstyles, they are helping me learn how to create unique aesthetic choices for characters. Note that not all characters are going to have their hair customized to this level as it's not always necessary.

I hope you found this process interesting. Or at least understand why I'm not really posting that many render previews as of late. A lot of what I'm doing is trying stuff out and a good portion of that will be sets for a while. The general public doesn't much care for pictures of architecture, it's all about the (female/futa) pinups. But, as you can see, where I'm at now is a bit too soon for public display quite yet.