the (essentially) government raised super weapon needs a little help realizing he also wants to blow shit up in the parking lot out back but luckily cub is here to support <3
snippet below the cut
Idly, from the crack of his ajar bedroom door, Cub watched Scar through gentle eyes, the other sitting at the couch, ever so slightly slumped as he watched the news, or maybe watch was a strong word, because it looked a bit more like he was sleeping. An awake Scar was never so still, so relaxed, the rise and fall of his shoulders never so slow. An awake Scar typically knew when he was being watched, a strong internal sense, and he would turn around, arm draped over the back of the sofa with a lazy smile, and Cub might greet him, or he might just shut the door, the observation not nearly as fun when the other knew he was there. Cub smiled, basking in the opportunity to simply look without being known. Scar’s hair was a certified mess, more than it usually was, the funny little cowlick at the back of his head completely out of control. Not that Scar ever tried very hard to tame it anyway. But today he didn’t have to try at all, because today he was here, and there were no cameras, no scrutiny. Well, maybe there was a little scrutiny, but Grian wasn’t home right now. Just Cub. Just Cub.
Scar’s legs were in the shop today, routine maintenance and things, but instead of spending the day in town as he typically did on these types of off days, he asked to spend it here, to just hang out, relax. Take off the mask and not think at all. And who would Cub be to deny him?
There was something so deeply satisfying seeing him here, out of uniform. He had arrived in it out of necessity; very few people had no legs and wheelchairs decked out in HotGuy merchandise, but Scar had changed once inside, visibly reveling in the luxury of being Here. In a place with people he trusted. No mask. No legs. No uniform. Being.. Scar. Given the nuclear identity crises Scar had been experiencing lately, this was nothing short of the ultimate freedom. And what an honor to be able to provide that, to be trusted enough that even a man so deeply insecure of his place in the world could find it in himself to just relax around you. To be himself. To fall asleep on the sofa without the fear of sharp edges.
Cub ducked out of his room, tip-toeing over to shut off the news. He didn’t care to hear it, and didn’t think it was too good for Scar either, not today. The scene reimagined to his liking, Cub slunk back to his room then walked from it again, normally, and draped his arms around Scar’s neck, humming. Scar roused, and Cub got the pleasure of seeing him blink away sleep.
“Ello,” Scar mumbled, leaning back to hit Cub’s chest with his head, and Cub closed his eyes, a small smile forming across his lips (maybe. Sometimes when he thought he was smiling, he didn’t look any different at all, his mind’s eye only playing tricks on his physical sense of self).
“Hi. You tired?”
Scar gave the question a moment of thought, endearingly, trying to push back further into the couch, like the barrier between them was a great frustration. Cub didn’t make any move to be closer, internally amused. Scar sighed, “Not really. Just got a bit bored, closed my eyes. Was still listening.”
Cub very much doubted that. He didn’t think Scar was lying or anything, just that he simply didn’t know how asleep he really was. No point addressing it though. “That’s good. I was thinking about you, y’know.” Cub snaked around the side of the couch, settling himself half on top of Scar, probably with far less grace than he was imagining. Whatever the case, Scar didn’t seem to care, looking more delighted than anything to have Cub so close.
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Hey! I love your gposes, and I was wondering if you had any tips on how to get better at making them.
Oh, thank you! You're kind to say so!
I'm gonna approach this like you're super new to it, so I'm sorry if I'm telling you shit you already know! And if you have other questions about something specific, you can DM me if you like, I don't mind. Honestly, that goes for anyone reading this!
I can sense this is going to be stupid long, so I'm also gonna hide a bunch of it behind a cut.
So starting off with vanilla gpose advice, in a general sense I'd say play around with lighting a lot. I usually try to get at least some light spilling onto people from the side (ideally where a light source would be anyway) in order to give them more definition. I know there's gpose lighting tutorials out there that can probably explain it so much better than I can (like this one? maybe?), but it really makes such a huge difference overall. Even when you're taking a picture outside in the sun, a little bit of extra lighting can make stuff look more interesting.
(I might be a little biased, I was a theatrical electrician for a while. I think lighting is neat.)
Another vanilla-applicable thing I'd say is get really, really, really embarrassingly familiar with the in-game emotes, and practice your timing for when you want to freeze them. And don't forget that the 'expression' emotes will override an emote's usual face, which can change the vibe in some fun ways:
And the third piece of vanilla gpose advice I'd give is to mess around with the filters the game has on the 'general settings' tab. Honestly, you've probably done this, but mess around with ALL the things in the gpose menu. Push every button, waggle every slider, just to see what they do.
I'm currently loitering at an art party, so let me show you a little bit what I mean.
So to start, I go into gpose and see what's what. I let all the background people stop facing the camera, and move the camera a bit to an angle I like. I'm sitting in a corner, which is going to mess with the camera more than usual, but in this case, it's messing with it in a way I like, getting me nice and close to Dusk:
Dusk could stand to look friendlier, right? So I head to the emotes tab in the menu, and pick 'beam' for his expression, because it's the smile I like best on him:
Still kinda bleh. Things look a touch murky, and flatter than I like. Before I do ANYTHING with the lighting though, I go here:
And then I save the hell out of the camera position. Saving the camera position has saved me so much pain. This is because placing lights in gpose requires you moving the camera, since they drop exactly where your camera is. But I like this angle, and I don't want to lose it. So I save it! It'll also save lighting settings, which I find handy occasionally, but not nearly as often (it's a lifesaver when I accidentally hit the hotkey that turns off lights though).
I've taken a lot of pictures in this venue, and the pink/white color scheme is uh ... tricky for me, sometimes. But on the upside, white walls and floors bounce light really well! For this picture, I think I want some light coming from the left of the frame to give Dusk slightly more interesting shadows, and a blue light much further away and above to soften the harshness of the white and pink:
My next step is to use the gpose-provided color filters to see if there's anything I like, just in case:
Bright 1 is one I've wound up using a lot, even though it ruins my eyes and makes everything look dark as hell once I come out of gpose.
Now, the white coming from the left is hitting Dusk pretty much exactly how I want it to, but it's lighting up his moogle sundae more than I'd prefer. The way I usually deal with this is using the 'limb darkening' slider. What it does is darken the edge of the picture, to varying degrees. It even has different colors, although I use black pretty much always:
I only used one tick, but it's made me much happier about the sundae! My one complaint now is that I had to turn off depth of field in order to keep Dusk from being blurry (it's a slider, but by the time Dusk looked focus, it might as well have been shut off anyway), but it's something I can live with for a vanilla gpose.
I have reShade installed though, so let's mess with that for fun. I tend to stick to presets that don't stray too far from what the game itself does unless I'm doing dumb vampire artsy things:
But honestly, in this case I don't think it was really necessary.
As for getting better with crimes, I would again stress getting familiar with the game's emotes and attack animations, because they are often a fantastic starting point to modify into something you're wanting to see. Also, this sounds weird (probably) but when I first started out, I did a lot of throw away pictures that no one besides my Discord knitting circle will ever see because everyone is naked in them. I did this for two reasons. Wait, no, three:
I was high when this idea came to me and therefore I lacked my usual shame.
Clothes clipping was driving me crazy and I wasn't good enough to handle it yet. Stripping everyone naked took that out of the equation, so I could focus on actually moving the dollies in peace.
However! It also meant I couldn't depend on clothes to mask some of my worst shortcut sins as far as moving limbs and what it did to their joints went. This meant I got a lot better at knowing how to move the dollies I was working with in the way the models want to be moved and still look right.
Obviously a saner thing to do would be ~beach pictures~ with everyone in swimsuits. Good thing Dawntrail is coming!
Some of the things I learned during this naked process:
While I try to make a pose look good from multiple angles, because I rarely know what angle I'm going to ACTUALLY want until stuff is at least roughed in, if I know for absolute certain I'm only going to take it from one particular angle, it is best for one's sanity to make sure it looks good from that angle and ignore everything you can't see otherwise.
If you ARE taking more than one angle of the same pose, it is not a crime to make little adjustments after you change the angle! This is extra true when you're doing something like a kiss, because noses are the worst. Go ahead and nudge something that looked right from Angle A but a little off from Angle B. No one will know your dark secret.
Somewhat related, sometimes little tweaks are really all you need! This is especially true when it comes to faces. Try not to overthink what you're doing too much.
Very often, if you want to move, say, an arm from position A to position B, you should start by adjusting the clavicle and work your way down. At first this was kinda slow and annoying and required a bunch of passes, but it resulted in way more natural looking results without asking people to politely ignore wonky elbows and such. Like everything else in the world, this gets a lot faster with practice and is 1000% worth getting halfway decent at.
Hands are the devil, but they also really make or break a pose for me a lot of the time. The more natural you can make hands and fingers look when touching something, the better, I feel. On the whole, I find FFXIV hands are a lot better at gentle-looking touches than rough-looking ones, but that may be my own limitations talking here. Spend time just messing with hands to get familiar with them, just like the rest of the skeleton. Eventually it'll start to get easier and easier to move stuff to where you want it without having to do a million little adjustments on the way to where you're aiming (I'm down to about half a million these days).
Eye contact is fucking hard too. I try to get the models to do as much of the work for me as possible as I go into gpose. For example, I'll make sure Dusk has Farron targeted, so he'll already looking down at him, but most of the time I'm going to be moving their heads or bodies too much for that eye contact to still look right. The way I usually do it is put the camera behind the person being looked at, and then make that person disappear and adjust the looker's eyes from there. Then I check from the angle I actually want to shoot from and make tiny adjustments to make it look more 'correct' to my eyes. Sometimes when I post Camera A/Camera B angles? It's because the eye contact only looked right from those angles no matter what I did and I'm making you all just have to deal with it.
Double check everything! It's easy to rough something in and then go blind to it being not-quite-right.
It takes me about 5 minutes to stop noticing nakedness because I am too busy swearing about elezen necks or something.
Once you start letting your dolls wear clothes and armor again, you have to start thinking about clipping and physics and such, which will also take practice, but I feel like people on the whole are a lot more subconsciously forgiving about that, because we all play this game and we all got trained to ignore a certain amount of clothes being weird because of it (this goes for most clipping, really). Which is good! I try to minimize clipping without actually having to touch any of the clothing bones if at all possible and only really mess with those if I absolutely have to because, say, the entire tail of Dusk's coat is clipping through the chair he's sitting on.
I suppose that's another thing, sometimes ... sometimes a glam is just a nightmare to work around and you just wear something else.
I hope this was ... helpful at all, I know it's long but hopefully not full of shit you knew already, or overwhelming to read. But I wanted to say more than just 'practice,' since that's hard to do if you don't even know what you should be practicing! And again, if you have a more specific question (or follow up questions?), definitely send a DM or something!
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Hey! I told you a while ago that a friend of mine will be at DoKomi and I could have her give you something from me, but she informed me it might be hard to find you since it's very big :// so I was stalking your socials to admire your art and console myself
ANYWAY, my ask is, can we know the backstory of Minkus' name ? And tell him good boi from me bcs he's just so fk cute 🙇🏼
Hey!
Once I know my booth number, I will post it on here! Dokomi now has an app that you can download that let's you find booths more easily in case your friend would like to try that! It helped me out a lot when I tried to find my friends last year, haha.
And of course! I adopted her about two years ago. I found a listing for a young bengal cat on ebay, so I started talking to the owner. I honestly just sent a message to any listing that showed up cos I was very desperate, haha. At first I checked my local shelters, of course, but there was no cat that fit what I had to offer (most of them were outdoor cats and could only be adopted in pairs. I was looking for an indoor cat that was fine with being on their own)
The woman on ebay informed me that the bengal was already taken, but we somehow ended up talking some more and she told me that she had an elderly cat at home that she adopted after her grandma passed, and she wasn't getting along with the bengals. They had to keep her in a separte, tiny room, because the bengals would constantly gang up on her. Her name was already Minka! This was the very first picture she sent me:
This moment made me believe in love at first sight. I told her right away that I'd love to adopt her, so I got to meet her a few days after.
I was told that she's very shy and anxious. The first time I tried to pet her she immediately hissed at me. But I wanted her anyways, so just a few days afterwards she was mine! The first cat I ever had.
The funny thing is, she's not shy or anxious at all. She's super affectionate and talkative! You can hold full conversatiosn with her and I can't go anywhere without her wanting to sit in my lap. She doesn't scratch or bite either which is a fun bonus. She's just a ball full of love!
But yes, sorry for giving you the full backstory instead of just the story about her name. I just really love talking about her, she's my everything :')
I didn't change her name cos she listens to the name Minka, but I usually just called her Minkus or Minkus Binkus Stinkus!
take another picture of my child, thanks for letting em talk about her!
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Am I a bad person for saying mean things about my friends?
[cw for gaslighting and manipulation]
I just feel really really super-bad about this, but everyone says it wasn't my fault and I don't need to apologize but it's messing me up and I dunno what to think about it anymore…
I (14F) was having a really bad day the other day. Y'know, the kind where you make the dumbest mistakes and the things people say get at you a lot more than they normally do? And on my way home I found this cute-looking doll and it said it wanted to be my new friend to help cheer me up (which I'm always in favor of, I love making new friends!!), and said that if I be its friend, it would help me be luckier, and that nobody would make fun of me again, just as long as I always kept her with me. It sounded good to me, so I agreed and took it home with me!
And, things were going great! Like the doll said, I was so much luckier, and my magic was getting so much stronger from it! S(14M) and L(14F) were totally wowed, too! But um, then I think I got a little fat-headed and started gloating at R(14F) and K(14M) and kept beating them in magic duels.
Later the doll kept saying that they would all definitely think better of me now, and that it was because we had gotten to be such good friends and. She was kinda loud about it an that was scary, but she was really making me feel good and better and lucky and… even though she was saying that my other friends were horrible and that I was wonderful and that she was my only real friend. It seemed so nice.
And then and then the next day, K and R and S and L were all asking about how much better with magic I had gotten and what had changed. And I wasn't sure what to do or say. So the doll told me that I should tell all of them to shut up, and that I didn't want to pretend at being friends anymore if they were gonna keep picking on me, and all these other horrible things. And I wanted to trust my friend, so I did what she said.
And to make it worse, I accidentally dropped the doll and all I could think of was "I need to keep her with me! She's the only one that understands me! She said so herself" and I pushed poor L away! And when R tried taking her away I just panicked and ran off.
I don't remember much of what happened for the next while. My head was hurting, but the Doll said I'd done well, so I just kept going, and she kept telling me she was my friend. And I just. Kept believing her, because it was getting hard to believe anything else, with my head being as fuzzy as it was…
Then S and L and K and R caught up with me and started trying to take my friend the Doll away again and calling her a liar and I was so scared for her, and for losing her, when she had been so helpful to me. I just couldn't think, so I kept casting spells at them and telling them all to go away and leave us alone.
But then, R and K started saying that they'd miss me if I was gone, because we really were friends and that they liked having me and my usual positivity around. L and S were saying everyone was worried about me, and wanted me to be friends with them again. I was so shaken, I ended up losing the duel I started.
And then it all came rushing back to me. All those awful things I said and did to the people who had been so nice and supportive of me, even if they're not always the best at showing it (K and R are especially really stubborn like that, but I know they meant it). And I just. I just still feel so AWFUL about it!!! There's no way that S and L and K and R would just forgive me, just like that, for being so mean, right?? I must be the bad person here, right???
EDIT: Someone asked what happened to the doll. My homeroom teacher showed up right after that and said something like, the doll puppets people with their hearts and take their powers? I dunno what that has to do with anything, though. Anyway, she took it somewhere else, but I didn't really listen much when she said where she was taking it. Honestly, that just goes to show, I really need to be better about listening too!!
EDIT 2: And now people keep asking why I didn't think it was weird the doll was talking. But why would it be weird? I thought it was kinda like the talking cat plushie my homeroom teacher carries with her, or the old teddy bear that runs the museum.
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