Sleepy Hollow's back!

I finally got to watch the first ep of season 2 this morning. Overall I feel a sense of relief that all significant characters introduced in the previous season remain in action.

Nicole Beharie as Abby and Tom Mison as Ichabod re-establish their easy, sympathetic chemistry. Their characters each have equal opportunity to rescue and be rescued by each other, a refreshing change from other male/female TV pairs in which the man does all the rescuing of the woman.

Jenny, Abby's sister, has survived so far, giving Lyndie Greenwood a chance to play an important auxiliary to Abby and Ichabod. Even more unflinching and martial than Abby, Jenny contributes a satisfying level of physical ass-kicking, as well as great affection for Abby. Grounded by her relationship with her sister, Abby escapes the Exceptional Woman trope/trap.

John Cho and John Noble return to bolster the main characters with some stellar supporting performances. Cho's sniveling, pathetic Andy, who alternates between helping and betraying Abby, decides to do the former in this episode. I hope he recurs, as I find his status as regretful servant of evil, who nevertheless performs good acts, interesting. Noble's Horseman of War, also Ichabod and Katrina's son [?!], lurks ominously, threatening people in the plummy tones of a classically trained actor, while picking scenery from between his teeth. I'm having a very, very hard time dissociating Noble from his 5 seasons as Walter in Fringe.

All that said, I do have some reservations. First of all, where was Captain Irving?!?!?!?! How dare you deprive us of Orlando Jones for an episode, especially right after he gave himself up to law enforcement? He'd better show up soon, along with his family too. Sleepy Hollow can't just not show a whole third of the characters of color like that!

I particularly want to see Irving's daughter Macey return and get some development. As a wheelchair user since getting into a car crash with her dad and then as a temporary vessel for some demon, she smacked a little too much of the Tragic Tabula Rasa Cripple last season. However, I think her brush with demonic possession could provide a chance for some character development. Maybe she could link up to the demon realm and give Abby and Ichabod some guidance therefrom? Of course, this will probably not happen.

Second of all, Katia Winter as Katrina, Ichabod's wife, just gets the raw end of things. Despite billing Katrina as a main character, the show grievously underwrites her. For example, her fascinating past as a powerful witch who joined a coven dedicated to protecting the town -- this aspect of her character dwindles over the first season as her status as pawn in the struggle between Ichabod and the Headless Horseman grows. Furthermore, where a person with more acting skills, like Nicole Beharie, Lyndie Greenwood or, heck, even Amandla Stenberg [who plays Macey], might add something to the role, Winter can't even muster that. The stereotyped nature of her character just shows up how untalented she is. 

I eagerly await further episodes, however!

Monster Mash update: now featuring Pinin's Satyress!

While conceptualizing my Monster Mash picture, I struggled with the problem of how to render satyrs using a G2F base and freebies. I found bat wings, horns and a devil tail without difficulty, but the hooved legs -- and their particular digitigrade shape -- stymied me. Some free hooves for plantigrade human figures exist, but they tend not to create a true digitigrade shape by elongating the feet. But I want anatomically convincing satyrs!

Well, it turns out that Pinin over on Poser Outer Zone offers a Satyress figure for free. She is more cartoony than super realistic [bulky shoulders, four-fingered hands, alarmingly round and symmetrical breasts, thighs out of a James Bond novel, long legs], but she has plausibly shaped digitigrade legs with hooves. Come to think of it, she reminds me of Kim Goossen's toony Girl, one of my favorite digital models. I decided that the adorable Satyress should be my base for all my Monster Mash satyrs.

I immediately confronted two problems: 1) no morphs and 2) no clothes.  Since I'm an advanced beginner at D-Forms, problem 1 proved no match for a half-day's work, during which I cranked out a variety of partial head and body morphs. I lavished the most energy on bulking the figure up, not with muscle, but with fat, especially since the central figure, the dancer, is a fat woman. I never expected that a mesh originally sculpted to be wiry and muscular would deform so well into pear-shaped fatness, but it did. Pictures later...

Satyress' empty wardrobe required some more labor. I started off by, first off, converting Satyress from a Poser native [.cr2] figure to a Daz-compatible figure with Daz' proprietary Triax weight mapping so that Daz tools would work on her. I then began loading up freebie clothes and scaling, translating and D-Forming them until they fit her in zero position, exporting the items as OBJs, then reimporting and using Transfer Utility, with her as the source, to rerig them. Since I was resculpting the clothing meshes pretty crudely, the modified items didn't fit well.

I then got the genius idea of using the Autofit function and G2F to do most of the sculpting for me. I overlaid Satyress and G2F, making G2F partly transparent. I then translated, scaled and morphed G2F so that her core [torso, arms, hips, upper legs] shape matched Satyress'. Then, when I Autofit clothes to G2F, they ended up resculpting to fit Satyress' shape with 95% accuracy. After minor tweaks of the clothing wtih D-Forms, I exported the OBJs, reimported and used Transfer Utility to rerig.

Voila! Satyress gained instant access to closets' worth of clothing. In fact, with the help of Autofit, she could now wear V4, M4 or K4 clothes [Autofit to Genesis, then Autofit a second time to G2F], as well as Genesis clothing, G2F clothing and/or G2M clothing. I have hand-converted some V3 and M3 items for her -- short-sleeved V3 dresses seem to reconfigure particularly well, probably because V3's shape, like Satyress', features blocky shoulders and hips -- but mostly just breezed through a bunch of V4, Genesis and G2F stuff. I don't bother with pants because I don't want to deal with Satyress' hooves, but short-sleeved shirts, long-sleeved shirts, above-the-knee shorts, above-the-knee skirts and above-the-knee dresses convert with [relative] ease. At this rate, I will have outfits for all five of my satyrs, each with unique pieces. 

Lee-el Selena: 85cm of awesomeness!

Lee-el started off by releasing some super-jacked 90cm dudes with oddly sculpted breast areas, but I did not find them interesting. Now they've finally released a female doll in the same scale, Selena. For some reason, she's only 85cm, but, despite that, she's super cool looking! Lee-el decided not to overexaggerate the muscular bulk, so she just looks really solid. The breast area shows an improvement over whatever the heck was going on with the dudes, although the antigrav effect only works with certain tops. She has a lovely, strongly marked face with harmonious cheekbones and jawline, a nifty skijump nose and a slightly open mouth with teefs!!!

Pushy satyrs start differentiating themselves.

There are five satyrs planned in my Monster Mash picture: the dancer, audience 1, audience 2, drummer and piper. They are all women.

Dancer: dramatic and ebullient. Tall, fat, white, spiky blond hair [Aliza!]. Flowing outfit shows movement.

Audience 1: short and wiry [more default shape, but with longer arms], dark brown WOC, dreadlock mohawk. Pastels, floral dress, flowers in hair.

Audience 2: neat and formal. Narrow, flat, slim build, Japanese, square glasses, Most tailored outfit of the five.

Drummer: sharp and intense. Small build, muscular upper body, uses manual wheelchair. Athletic wear.

Piper: carried away by the music. Plump but not as fat as dancer, messy ponytail [Wild Tail2]. Slouchy clothes, messy hair.

Two Satyresses: one default, one tall and fat, both really cute!

Below is a quick render of Pinin's default Satyress on left and one on the right with some of my custom body morphs and scaling. [Pay no attention to her unrealistic lack of body hair.] Much to my surprise, arm poses for Genesis [Body Talk Arms by katfeete in this case] work pretty well on her. I see that I need to make some more face morphs, especially to change the distinctive angular shape of the default's head.

Holy crap, she's adorable. [She's also naked, in case you're sensitive about that sort of thing.]
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