Happy people identifying themselves

Check out this photo series by Sarah Deragon, "The Identity Project." She takes pictures of people and tags them according to how they identify. They all face the camera squarely, some hamming it up, dressing and posturing in ways that they feel reveals who they are. As a bonus, their proud, challenging expressions [for example, the person in portrait 1, who appears to be thinking, "It's too early in the morning for this heteronormative bullshit!"] also serve as a critique of narrow, rigid identity categories at use in broader society. I would like 1:6 scale populations with all of those skin colors, body shapes, hairstyles and expressions, please...

Genius discovers levels of detail [LOD] for V4 and M4!

To anyone who is not savvy in Daz speak, this means that I just learned how to use an option in Daz Studio to reduce the resolution of Victoria 4 and Michael 4, thus generating figures of a smaller file size appropriate for backgrounds. This is great news because I need some diner patrons and amusement park patrons that don't hog resources. This is basically like using cheap dolls for crowd filler and saving the expensive, exquisitely detailed ones for the closeups.

In other news, I also discovered the polygon editor, which means that I can delete parts of models I don't want. For example, I wanted to make a cyborg with partial flesh-mimicking plating [like winston1984's Fembot]. Looks really cool, but takes a very long time to render, as the skeleton has all the same joints and rigging [= articulation] as the human model. Thus a cyborg with partial cladding ends up requiring as much power to render as two human models.

Solution: Select only certain areas of the cyborg to be open and delete all parts of the robo-skeleton that will not be seen. For simplicity's sake, I chose to open up the abdomen of the human figure. Thus I only needed the robo-skeleton from about chest to thighs. Everything else, including the demanding and complex articulation of hands and feet, disappeared, thanks to the polygon editor. Result: A robot that is less of a resource hog.

I love the polygon editor. It allows me to perform one of my favorite tasks -- hacking things up, reassembling them and taking sloppy, effective shortcuts -- in digital space.

Speaking of hacking things up, Andrea recently referred to sticking on one of her dolls' heads as "the ModernWizard 'hot glue can fix everything' approach." Hee hee hee! Hot glue -- it holds the universe together...or at least my corner of it. ^_^