modifications: Matthew (Souldoll Harace)

Originally posted: March 18, 2012, 18:50
Last night I stayed up really late for a variety of reasons so this morning when I woke up I drank some coffee to kickstart my day. When I don't eat enough, coffee makes me shaky and manic to the point of delirium. But if I have enough food it's like some sort of miracle drug. I have tons of inspiration and patience and I'm really hard to discourage. It's hard to bring me down when I've had coffee. (Oddly enough, other forms of caffeine ingestion do not have this effect.)
So, high off my coffee and semi-success with fixing Esyrlon's outfit, I decided it was time to do some mod work on Matthew. For those who haven't been keeping up, I found a smaller head for him that will be more in scale with everyone else and my main criteria was that I wanted a similar shape and expression to his old face. Well I found something but there were a couple things that I felt were slightly off. (The most major of those being that his upper lip stuck out way too far)
So I wiped off his hastily applied arrival faceup and grabbed my handy dandy zillion grit sandpaper and went out to my lovely lawn chair I acquired when it was abandoned by moving neighbors.
Then I set to work on several hours of sanding. Most of that was bringing in the upper lip but I also did some work on his eye shape. I ended up having to re-carve in his lips because the mouth was kind of shallow so it was kind of lost in the process so half of it has been reconstructed. I made the tear ducts more obvious and opened the eyes more and sanded down the eyelids in the center.

There's a before and after pic. It's kind of hard to see some of the changes but I feel like it adequately shows the upper lip change. At least somewhat. I wish I'd gotten a profile shot of the before.
Here's how the profile looks now:

You can see that the upper lip still sticks out further than the bottom but it's not as pronounced as before.
I'm quite happy with how he looks in person. I don't think the pictures captured it super well but that's not really a huge deal! It makes me happy that I can look at him and not feel like something's off. (No offense to the original sculptor. His default look would work just fine if I didn't have a really specific thing in mind for Matthew).

ramble about body switching and Id's mods (Volks SwD Piccolo)

Originally posted: March 1, 2012, 18:14
Where to begin...
Well it probably all started when I decided Defliel's original head didn't mesh well with Ezsphrein's. After that I began this move toward getting less stylized heads for most of my bjds. And you all know this already so I don't really need to go on about that, but I will say that I was left with one head in need of replacing. And that was Matthew's. And I really liked his head but it just didn't fit with anyone else he would be likely to hang out with so I was hoping to replace it at some point.
Anyway, that's difficult when one isn't exactly rolling on dough. There's a trade involved with a head I've been trying to sell for like ... forever now. And a lot of forum browsing for a head with a similar expression and such.
Anyway, Matthew got a new head today. Which I think is going to work out well. The expression and eye shape are almost identical to his previous head (which is stupdendous) and it's from Souldoll so it's about 1/10 the size. Okay not really. But it's a lot smaller. But it was in white skin. And Matthew's body is not white skin. Such minor details don't really deter me for some reason.
I decided that the head I was using for Iyrilaeth (which has never been mentioned here) wasn't really working for me. It wasn't quite perfect and I felt like I was settling for it just because I had it in hand and wanted something new and exciting. So I took that off the body it was occupying and tried Matthew's new head on there, and that was not working because that body is 70cm and a little too broad in the shoulders for the new head. So I stole Esyrlon's body and tried him on there and that was a much better fit, but Esyrlon is supposed to be slender and small and he wasn't really working that image on a 70cm body either.
So that left me in a bit of a pickle. I wanted something that worked well for Matthew, but I have a limited selection of white skin bodies. After a series of aggravated heavy sighs and staring around the room helplessly, I finally noticed Ezsphrein, who also has the whole white skin thing going on.
I popped his head on the 70cm body, and was a little iffy at first. But once he had his hair and clothes back on I rather liked it. I think he seems happy with the height increase, and now his clothes aren't way too big on him (because they were intended for a 70cm body but I liked them too much and they were too good a deal so I got them even though they didn't fit perfectly). Anyway, that allowed me to put Esyrlon back on his original body and put Matthew on Ezsphrein's old body. Which I think is a good fit.
I modded his lips a little and gave him a quick face up. And then trimmed his hair down some because it was too long for his significantly smaller head. I also modded his lips some but I think I'll work on that more another time. They're still not exactly where I want them to be, but they'll do for now. The lower lip was a bit too full and the upper lip sticks out a bit too much. He also needs smaller eyes (like the ones that go in the sockets) but I'll worry about that when I have more funds.
This all actually worked out great in the end though as now I can sell Iyrilaeth's head and Matthew's old body.
This entry seems kinda naked without a couple pictures and I have talked a lot about heads and such.. let me go get a picture of Matthew's new head so we can do a before and after.

Before (left) and After (right). 

Also, after um.. 9 zillion years I finished my mods on Id's head. I don't think I posted about this. I know I didn't post pictures. He was a sleeping head when I got him and I decided I wanted him to have open eyes, but I kind of stopped partway through and decided that was good enough. I was really new to modding and didn't know exactly where I was planning to go with it.
But armed with a definite vision, I decided to finish the job. It involved carving in eyelids and obviously cutting out the rest of the eye shape. And reshaping the eyewells because they were meant to hold eyes in a completely different position, if at all.
Here is a picture of Id now: