Photoshoot - Christie in Mandarin dress 6

Method: Take extracted models by others and load in XNALara, take a pose file and apply it to the relevant model, adjust various aspects of the pose to my liking, take image using XNALara's built in option, crop picture in Photo app, upload, write a ton of waffle you (yes, you) are reading.

Commentary: This was a peculiar pose piece - easy in some aspects but difficult in others. The difficulty is mainly the dress and it is this aspect of posing where my contributions and efforts are. The actual pose of the model wearing the outfit is created by someone else. Minor tweaks are made to the base pose so I get the look I want from it. At some point I anticipate taking different poses, selecting elements of them and using them for the model. Not at that point yet though as the poses I've used so far have suited my needs. Besides, look how pretty she is! *Cough*

Once again I've tried to position the dress so it looks correct in such a pose. The back of the dress worked well enough. The front of the dress was much trickier. As can be seen there are jagged lines at the bottom hem of the dress which is quite grating. However, the combination of rotate and move just couldn't quite smooth it out enough for my liking. It's not too bad but it still annoys me. There was a sense of "if only there was another bone tree there just so I can tweak this dress a little bit more..." going through my mind. Maybe I need to be able to use Blender to tinker with the armature and do just that at some point in the (distant) future. As is, it's... okay, I guess. Certainly feels like an effort for something so seemingly simple... Playing around with XNALara certainly makes me appreciate the work which prompted me to give it a go in the first place. Those people know what they're doing.

With this pose I believe some limits of the base model has been reached. It isn't clear from this angle, which I purposefully chose to hide the flaw as much as possible, but the left elbow does exhibit a fair amount of distortion - it looks like it's dislocated when visible. This angle hides it by not showing it at all! I don't think we're missing much through this visual sleight of hand. I quite like this angle as this gives us a decent view of the... important things.

The base pose I am rather pleased with. Taking XNA44's original pose and tweaking various aspects. Hopefully the wink comes through as it baffled me as to how to tinker with the eyelids initially. Facial expressions are really difficult, especially the subtle touches. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've come across that many facial pose packs - I could certainly use a few more to get the right look I want. As is I think it looks okay, perhaps even playful. At least that was what I was going for here.

Credits: 
Pose by XNA44 (adjustments by me)
Model via DragonLord720
Setting via JhonyHebert
Chair via MoogleOutFitters
XNALara Posing Studio 11.8
Windows 10 Photo app
Assets: EA, Koei Tecmo

11th May 2017