Ramping up for Halloween!
And, well, John Lennon's birthday tomorrow.
Legends of Purgatory has made its debut on GTAForums, and I'll now be dedicating a portion of my time to development and further updates.
I've let it monopolize my time for the past month or so, aside from work on some commissions (of which i should really add info for on this site!) i decided it was time to work on something i'd last worked on back in... February? THis model was actually the very reason I got my ass in gear with Shirtless/Summer '08 Niko to the point of finally being able to release it... BUNNY NIKO!
Okay yeah so maybe this is the only purpose of this post. but can you blame me? he looks great. (open images in new tabs to see full size!!!)
I need to make sure everything black is the same shade of black and everything white is the same shade of white, yadda yadda, the worst part is i'll have to rebake shirtless Niko to a new UV in order to make this work. but uhhh whatever! maybe i can make a new funny youtube video with this. I GUESS I'll make a chippendales outfit too.
Stay tuned!
- marty
And Yet, We Prevail
I'm going to be real with you guys. I had covid SO bad in August and it led me to not updating the website, not finishing any mods, feeling absolutely terrible about not getting anything done... Then, not getting anything done for even longer. And then when I DID get something done, Bridal Lingerie Kate, I was so dejected over how it turned out that I never even felt any accomplishment when I did finish it.
The only thing that got me out of my horrible funk was to work on something for myself... Going back to an entirely different project that has stalled nearly exactly a year prior. This project being, hair, for Gerry, in 1997, for my overarching personal project, Legends of Purgatory. Unlike the time i was making hair for his friend Tobias, I did not have robust photo reference for hair to paint by hand. God, i did NOT want to paint hair by hand again. I STILL need to invest in a drawing tablet for texture painting, doing it with a mouse is murder on my hands.
With help from a friend, i went on a search for pictures to use for the photo-scanned look! I already had the back of his hair, but i needed everything else... We went looking for wigs! Nobody has hair like this anymroe! Men worldwide had hair like this for at least 30 years, and then suddenly, it was all gone! They all became so allergic to volume! We went looking for period accurate wigs, everything came up so wrong, then we went to Etsy--- If anybody in anyplace knew what a year actually looked like, it was Etsy. This was the result.
I was very happy with this. So I began to chase that happiness. I was now set out a way to make Gerry Niko-sized and still stay faithful to his design... And after all the grief and dread of this task, it turns out, Niko is just 10% smaller than Gerry. Straight up. If you make Niko 10% larger all around, he's Gerry sized! So after all this time, I finally had a playerped of Gerry.
In the midst of this, I made a Denim Jacket I textured from photo reference, specifically for Gerry. I'm very fond of it, but after seeing it in action, I realized there were some things to fix before I released it (with plans to give it to all three of GTA IV's protaganists, and an open variant with different inner shirts) but something new entirely came up...
I've been given the greatest privelege of testing out i/o addons for Blender. The very first custom object to be exported with it??? I think you already know.
Is it Packie for a fake screenshot in the meantime while we wait for pedestrial model and animation tools? Of course it is. Packie, and other faked little cutscene screenshots, i believe I may finally be able to make a big overarching thread about the Legends of Purgatory DLC concept after three years of development. I do have plans to release these models, (Gerry, Packie, Colin, Toby...) in the meantime, at the very least, for patrons.
- marty
the Summer '08 Collection continues!
Quite the week!!! After a lot of grief and vertex color complications that made me have to vertex color from scratch, I released Summer '08 Packie, which at least ended up including some nice fixes to Packie compared to his state in vanilla, where his mouth and teeth seemed to be illumated at all times... Thanks to my annoying vertex coloring situation, i ended up fixing this issue!
I recorded a funny clip (or two) and uploaded it to Youtube, i feel like posting more casual silly brief videos would be a nice change instead of only the yearly polished one. You can see THAT in my right sidebar with my bright new edits to my homepage! added a "latest video" and "song of the moment" section which took up all the blank space i've had for a while... And even moreso, finally put in the pixel graphic there underneath that i made before i got started on this site in july! maybe I'll rotate it out?
i'm thinking of adding a gallery with my original blender work (of which there is... very little. LOL) so that's something to look forward to... as well as my next release, "Peeled" Kate McReary. I love my "Peeled" Collection. Getting this one out of the way before i finally make IG versions of her Bridal Lingerie and her two swimsuit variations I'm making for Summer '08! Then I'll see about finishing Roman, and getting started on Johnny and Luis... (Or maybe I'll be BAD and finish my shirtless models i started ages ago of Tony and Ray first? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) Whatever. Stay tuned!
SPACE
SPACE
SPACE
- marty
ouuugghhhh
Misty seems to be feeling better for REAL this time. which is a relief. I had to really get my ass in gear with the Summer '08 Collection, and with any great emotional hardship, it almost always results in more of Packie.
So I started out with green swimshorts because, of course I did, that's his typical color, right? but I shook things up and gave him the TBOGT gradient. I'm obsessed, it looks amazing. Even if a bit oversaturated. I gotta think of more. maybe the Hokusai wave? And of course, standard solid colors.
I'm just bummed the same way i was bummed with that saucy Kate model i was (and still am) making because I'll have to destroy the canonical cutscene body proportions and turn them into their IG counterparts to actually be used in-game. I'll get over it if I want to release a new piece of the collection before July's out. But yeah. Stay tuned.
SPACE
SPACE
- marty
More Updates!
life updates... misty kept throwing up yesterday and it was so sad. she was so visibly slower but then she felt better at night and kept her tiny bits of food we were feeding her throughout the day down. she went CRAZY she was trotting all around the house and jumping up on all of the things for fun. so we thought things were okay. but then she threw up foam *again* this morning before breakfast and then, after making the SADDEST crying sound in the world, running to the bathroom, she threw up a second time AFTER breakfast (but she'd digested since so at least she wasnt going hungry) we think its those furball control treats not fully doing their job or that she just had a normal fever yesterday shes been getting over because she was sneezing (and so were we all, actually) but if anything shes her usual self right now, and i'm glad.
website updates... added a little link to my blog archive at the bottom of my index, and I FINALLY got activated at status cafe only to figure out that any neocities accounts made in 2024 cant use the status cafe widget??? which i do NOT get because the clock widget i have there in the left sidebar seems to work exactly the same way??? i dont get it man. anyways, i added a little link to my blog archive, finished the Johnny, Luis, and Other Characters pages, and i have two whole pages of my Niko mods done! (i didnt put up fast food Niko because i was too lazy to make a gif of it going thru all the outfits... i will eventually. ugh)
i need to finish two commissions and then i need to FULLY dedicate myself to the Summer '08 collection (Swimsuit Packie, One-Piece Swimsuit Kate, a Patron exclusive Two-Piece Swimsuit Kate, Swimsuit Roman, more Summer attire for Niko...) and hope i get them all out before the end of August, which in my mind sounds IMPOSSIBLE when my mind is as frazzled as it is, but I'm extremely psyched because since i made my Mods page with my Patron crawl, i got THREE new patrons... I'm incredibly thankful. I don't even know what to say. I wouldn't be here without you. With this, i'm also opening up my guestbook for people to leave messages. Stay tuned for more website updates.
- marty
We're getting there!
You may or may not have noticed, but I've gone on an absolute rampage making buttons, including my own, since my last update. But importantly, I've finally got marquees working with the help of ColdCalzone at deep-freezer.neocities.org, and if anybody else is having as much trouble as I did, the codepen is right here! All I really have left to do is to set up my Mods page, which was really the whole reason i made this site. LOL! and maybe edit my About me. I think I got too soul bearing. Ugh.
- marty
I declare this website open!
...Partially.
It is July the 9th, 2024 at 12:29am in the beautiful but currently muggy and oppressively warm New England, and here I am, trying to put together the homepage for the first website ive made since i was maybe 14? the first was probably when i was 7. i sure loved iWeb, and all my rounded boxes. I'm just beginning to get everything up and running, and I havent even finished my funny 404 page yet, that's how new this all is, after over a year (or maybe two!) of just trying to figure out where to begin here on neocities... anyways, enjoy your stay.
- marty
