vinhallen replied to your photo: New pattern is coming along. Think I’ve finally...
Looks really good, did you design the pattern yourself? : )
Thanks, I used the Zevran Romance image from the Dragon Age Keep, and turned it into a pattern that could be stitched.
I’m probably going to do a few other characters as well when this one is finished.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
chyrstis said: Sending you lots of good thoughts and luck right now!
guerrin said: Good luck! Everything will be fine!
block-of-writers said: D: D: D: *hugs* things will be okay! You can get through this!
vinhallen said: Yes, good luck! Stay strong and all will be fine *hugs*
joasakura said: Good luck ! You’re gonna get thru this just fine!!!
Thank you! My mom bought me sushi today, and I bet she did because she knew it’d be the last thing I’d get to eat normally for a while. It’s her way of pitying the pain I’ll have to feel for the next few days xD
Wow! I'm constantly amazed how good your photos look. What is you secret please?
Heya. Thanks very much! I’m assuming you’re talking about TS3, since that’s what I’ve been posting lately. I tried to write up everything I do with my pictures and this turned out super long, so it’s under the cut. If you don’t want to read the whole big thing, the main points are: I crank up edge smoothing, use a nice lighting mod plus Gelina’s tweaks, and edit my pictures individually to adjust color balance and handpaint shadows and highlights.
In Game
I use the same graphics settings for picture-taking as I do for my regular gameplay. This is basically it:
lighting/shadows and texture detail all the way up
visual effects, high detail lots and draw distance all the way down
tree detail high
advanced rendering enabled
The most important thing is to turn on edge smoothing before taking pictures. It makes a big difference, and you don’t need to restart the game when you turn it on.
I always use one of brntwaffles’s lighting mods, with Gelina’s lighting tweaks. I usually use Cloud 9, but it’s too sunny for Eltham’s Drift. Those recent pictures were taken with Moonrise Kingdom and Dream Dimension.
Editing
So that’s all I do in game. Now on to editing… TS3 has this really weird thing whereby things look great when you’re actually in-game, but when you close it and look at your screenshots it turns out they’re dark as all hell. (Maybe this is just a Mac thing? If so, my fellow Mac peoples will know about that thing where you have to go into windowed mode and back to full screen sometimes to get rid of the gross darkness.)
So anyway, I use GIMP to edit my pictures individually. I largely subscribe to the @farfallesims method really, the major feature of that being I handpaint shadows when I’m trying to be fancy. But first of all, the very first thing I do is fix the weird darkness. I use Curves, and select the setting I always use—it’s just a curve barely above the baseline, to make everything a tiny bit brighter. That’s problem #1 solved.
Problem #2 is that horrible yellow-green cast that every Sims game has—regardless of which beautiful lighting mod you use—and which drives me UP. THE. FUCKING. WALL. That’s the next thing I fix, because I hate it with the PASSION OF A THOUSAND SUNS. In GIMP, I use Color Balance and in Midtones I set them to Red 3 and Blue 3, and in Shadows Blue 3. It’s a tiny difference, but it just cuts the sickly yellow-green tinge. I really don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, so I made a shitty video of just this color adjusting step to prove that I’m totally NOT a crazy person. It starts with the unedited picture, then jumps to what it looks like after color balance, then switches back and forth a few times.
Ok, onward: for random WIP pictures, interiors, or shots of houses I’ve just slightly edited and not spent much time on (plus for everything in TS4) at this point I will slap a filter or two on, sharpen that shit and be done. For this purpose I use the Beautify plug-in for GIMP.
Handpainting Shadows
But for lovely, lovely TS3 exteriors of houses I have spent quite a lot of time on, I usually like to spend more time editing them further. This is when I handpaint shadows à la farfallesims—with a large, very low opacity black brush. After that, if I haven’t gotten bored yet I’ll also paint in some highlights with a similar white brush. I do this in a new layer so I can toggle its visibility to see how much I’ve actually painted and if I’ve gone too far. Gelina’s lighting tweaks greatly enhance the intensity of the shadows and the contrast between sunlight and shadow, so this is basically an extension of that effect. Plus I just like the softer shadows you get with this method.
Here’s an example of a picture where I painted in shadows and highlights with irresponsibly reckless abandon to get that soft, glowy look. This picture is an example of the same handpainted shadows, but done way more subtly. I can be pretty heavy handed with the shadows when I’m just sharing individual exterior pictures, but when editing pictures of a house for download I keep it lighter (in the interest of not getting bitched at): for example, look at the first, unedited picture in this post and compare with the picture I edited for the download post.
And I think that’s just about everything I do regarding my pictures. Hope it helps.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
It's you Birthday today? aaa, Happy Birthday Chenria! :) I hope the upcoming year in your life will be filled with great days full of smiles and inspirations! *hug* \^^/
Haha, yes. And another year to pretend to be all grown up at work and continue to play silly video games at home XD
Thank you for the birthday wishes.
Off I go to another hopefully successful tour around the sun ;)