What A Difference A Year Makes

Over the past year, and especially the last month or two, I have been tinkering with the looks of the characters in the sequel.  Since we are in the new year, I thought I’d compare and contrast some of the models as they looked in 2011 to how they look today in 2013.

First up is Ariane, who has undergone quite a few model changes over the last year and a half. To the left is what she looked like in Date Ariane, and to the right is how she currently looks in SITA.  Quite a dramatic difference, and this is mostly due to a change from the old Victoria 3 model to the new Victoria 4 model.  There is now a Victoria 5, but it is not a significant improvement over Victoria 4.  It takes advantage of Daz Studio’s Genesis technology which makes models more versatile, but as of yet there is not much third party support for Genesis figures.

I was going to leave Rebecca alone, especially since she is such a minor character, but after all the things I learned doing Ariane’s transformation, I could not help doing a new version of Rebecca too.  I used the elite “Sylph” shape for her body.  Rebecca has always been skinny, but now she is almost cartoonishly so, which is fine since she is a bit of a character to begin with.

Since I decided to do this expansive visual novel with a lot of characters, I decided to make life simple and just used pre-built characters. One of the characters is sort of a “bad girl” type, and “Angel” from DAZ seemed like the perfect fit for the character.  The character is obviously based off of Angelina Jolie, which is fine, because I could see her playing the character.  The problem is that the face is more of a caricature of Jolie than a real look alike, and was hard to work with.  The thing was that the tattooed skin was perfect, but not the face.  So I changed the Angelina Jolie inspired head with a Meghan Fox inspired head.

As I said, I’m cool prebuilt characters.  Here is a case where I swapped one for another.  This is Wendy, who I have not introduced yet. She is very athletic, and works as a fitness coach at the gym where part of SITA is set.  The original draft gave her a big role, then I decided to lop off her story, then I decided to put part of it back.  I originally picked Gabrielle, because she had an athletic body.  But about the time I decided to put Wendy’s character back in the game, I found Sirena, and had to use her in the game somewhere.  So I gave her some muscles and she became the new Wendy.

Paula is a character that has been problematic from the get go. Her primary character traits are that she is smart, ginger, wears very little makeup, and purposely low maintenance hair.  She is not into fashion or beauty, but she kinda needs to be attractive.  Finding that fine line has been difficult.  I originally went for a freckled skin with a Natalie Portman shaped head, but then when tinkering with celebrity lookalike models, I found that Evangelina Lily’s head shape combined with Cate Blanchette’s skin tone gave me a really good face that would be perfect for Paula.

I’ve tinkered with other characters. Bonnie the bartender got a new hair style and color, when I realized I had too many black haired characters.  I tinkered with others not worth mentioning.  But let me leave you with one more you Date Ariane fans will find interesting:

After changing Ariane and Rebecca, I thought I would get rid of the last Victoria 3 based characters to appear in both games, and create a new version of the Drive-N-Dine waitress.

My resolution for the new year is to finish this game and get it out in 2013.