So I have started testing out the pose player. I've got the updated version now, and it's pretty awesome. You can add poses to a list to be used again and again. And instead of looking for a specific box like in TS2, you just have the one box and you type in the name of the pose you need. Sometimes this can be really handy or really not handy. Many poses do not have any sort of description, so it's hard to know what pose it is until you use it.
Many artists include the picture of a pose with the name beside it, so I've been keeping the pictures that come with the pose files. I've also got a notepad file where I'm putting in the names of poses. If I can, I put in the description too just to help me out.
The other day, I saw this pose pack and I had to use it. (I knew exactly who for too.)
I've been wishing to pose them forever on the floor of the meadow. In my head, they used to meet on the meadow and then just lay side by side. The closet I could imagine were the TS2 animations of sky watching (and later on cuddling under the clouds/stars). Nothing like that at ALL in TS3. Why would they take that detail out among the ones they did take out? Maybe Generations will put it back in?
Anyway, this is what I came up with.
Using the earlier link floor pack from Club Crimsyn. It's not bad, but here's the thing- the artist can mold the faces. And since there is no over lay yet, the face that goes with the pose is just the face with the pose. This isn't really Brandon's face. So that's the main issue I've got with the poses on pose boxes. Even if the pose looks great and natural because of the care an artist took (and these poses were pretty neat), they will still look stiff and unnatural because of the faces.And I really deal with faces.
So I decided to give is another shot with a different pose pack from My Blue Book. Pose Set 003- Couple Poses. She says she worked hard on them, and it really shows. I think she did a great job with it considering how difficult it must be to pose one sim, let alone two and get them to line up!
My favorite picture:
It's adorable, but still those faces frozen like that.
But then I suppose my own attempts at couple posing like this have been the same for the most part. It's why I end up having weird camera angles to hide strange eyes or the fact that two sims may be going through one another. Like the first couple of pictures in this chapter.
But still, my favorite pictures of Pat and Brandon happen to be the standard EA animations. Catch them between animations, move them around a little and you have unique poses with unique faces and they will generally turn their heads to face each other. The Pose Player will also play those standard animations, so I still need to do even more experimenting.
I guess I just don't see myself becoming a major poses downloading whore. Though I do note the good ones I like and see possibility for future reference.
4 comments:
Oh, I think I read that they're putting stargazing on the ground back in Generations! Not cuddling (which is one of my favourite AL interactions) but I'm sure I read about stargazing.
Anyway, this was really interesting to read. I had wondered if anyone had dealt with the issue of facial expressions. There's really still only one box that does that for TS2, so I sort of thought that maybe it might be a very complicated thing.
I actually like the shots a lot but yeah...facial expressions really make the picture, I think. I can't imagine doing posing without being able to change the facial expression!
I heard they were, and I can work with that even if it isn't cuddling. I have other ideas too to get these shots. These aren't the final attempts. I still didn't exactly get my vision here.
Maybe the faces thing is complicated. I just don't exactly like it being tied into the poses. Not being able to adjust is something of a deal breaker. Without the faces, all the poses are the same, still, and not unique.
The faces thing is the one bad thing about the pose player--I can see myself using a lot of them in ways that partially hide the faces, so that you get the overall effect of the positions without seeing the faces as much. I've been using the Liquify tool in Photoshop to tweak the facial features a bit, and make them look more like my people (moving eyebrows and corners of mouths). I swear, that's one of the most useful things! Laura is a genius for using it all this time. :)
Laura and her Photoshop abilities, and now you too, lol! I don't know why, maybe it's laziness on my part, but I have none. If I can't get it done in game, then I can't do it. I might tweak a picture some later on using picnik.com, but that's as far as I can go.
I should post up some of my failed pictures. I did try to use the pose player and just crop the picture the way I normally do, but it still looked weird and stiff even with only the hands in the shot! Maybe it's just my own bias against pose boxes at work?
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