neomance

[EN] The beginning of avatar introductions - January 2023

Published: February 6th 2023, 9:44:22 pm

This marks the start of the Patreon!   

I've yet to fully decide on what exactly these articles will contain, it's bouncing around between something like a monthly recap of what I've been working on during the month, talking about plans for the future or maybe even talking about myself. Truly it'll be whimsical article of sorts for a few months.   

But let me get right into it!

The Yoyogimori Commission

At the beginning of this month or rather near the end of the previous year I was commissioned to take photos of the lovely girls of Yoyogimori (A famous avatar creator on BOOTH)

Doing this shoot made me realise a few things. that being, I really enjoyed trying to embody the characters and reflecting their personalities within their poses and expressions. Unknowingly this would be one of the main influences for the decision to start branching out into shooting more avatars.

My first Gumroad Commission

I actually also did my first ever shoot of a western model from Gumroad. Though since my Twitter audience is mainly from Japan, I didn't end up posting most of the photos as I felt they wouldn't be very well received. 

The photos actually came out much better than expected, however editing them really took quite a bit of time, It actually takes me twice or three times as long to edit avatar photos versus landscapes. (Most of the time taken comes from adding subtle lighting to the avatar bodies making them seem like they're in the world itself)

Overall it was a great experience and I'd like to do more but I don't think I will be receiving many of these requests as I charge quite an expensive amount due to the time taken. Also many Gumroad creators aren't based on Twitter but rather on their individual discords.

I'm actually always looking for more opportunities to work with BOOTH avatar creators on shooting product showcases for their new/upcoming works. However I feel that it's difficult for quite a few reasons.

One of the main ones being I'm known for being a landscape photographer rather than an avatar one, this is mainly due to myself only shooting landscapes for a good year or so, my old followers will know I used to be quite the large breasted cool fox girl.

Another reason being my grasp of Japanese still being quite weak which may make me uncomfortable to work with, especially for BOOTH creators who are mainly Japanese. This is really something I can only remedy with time as it'll take me a while before I can become fluent.

And so until then I've decided to slowly branch out into Avatar introductions where I introduce avatars from BOOTH on a daily basis. This is just to build a solid foundation of experience for the future.

Enter Yoll The Dragon!

Chosen by a community vote on my Twitter page, she's the first one to ever be featured. Actually out of 546 votes she beat QuQu's "U" avatar by only 0.6%, which was extremely surprising to me as I thought the cool image of Yoll would win by a landslide. At least I wont have much trouble choosing the next avatar.

I was quite happy when Yoll was selected as I already knew how to play a cool sort of character. However I was also sort of sad that I didn't get to try shooting a new style of character, as QuQu's model is more of a beauty.

One of my other goals with trying out many new avatars was to learn how to pose them in various ways, I wanted to break out of many of the stiff poses and close ups I always shoot when I do avatar photography. This lead to the amazing image above. There were also tons of poses which I never ended up using below!

Remember no matter how strange you look, the best way to find new poses is just to try them out!

It was also a chance for me to practice with artificial light in my shooting and editing process, I believe that this step is crucial to helping an avatar fit into the scene. This means I added some lighting either in the game or during the editing process. Some examples below!

Here I used an in game lighting system on my avatar to create the red light on the left half of the character (Everything is usually blue), here is the process from the base image > basic edit > lighting edit

For this one I didn't use any in game lighting system, normally I would increase the exposure in game to reduce the noise when adding exposure in the editing program but I guess this time I mainly just forgot to do so. Here's the process from base image > basic edit > lighting edit

Lighting really does make a huge difference but It also requires an understanding on how the shadows work!

I'm also still deciding on various things such as a booth introduction hashtag, how long to introduce each avatar for, whether to make alterations or stay with the base model. I didn't want to adjust the look of the base model as I'm planning to turn this into more of a introduction where I try to bring out the most of the base avatar.

I'm am however doing some research on different shaders, easier ways to make toggles, making expressions and even different hand gestures as normally I'm locked to using the index fingers which can't make certain hand gestures.

I'm planning on adding in different clothing or props to help enhance the look and personality of the avatars but at the moment I can't really justify buying props for shooting avatars that only would be displayed for a week or so. To make this a possibility, I decided to start up this Patreon.

Patreon

Due to wanting to hopefully branch out into many avatars/products on BOOTH I decided to start up this Patreon to fund that endeavour. But if you're reading this, you've already become a fan or supporter and so I'd like to express my sincerest thanks.

As for my plans for the Patreon, I'm sure many of my followers follow me, mainly for my world introduction tweets and so that became the main tier of support covering the many worlds that I don't get to introduce on my Twitter page. I hope you enjoy reading that article as well, as I throw in a few tidbits of knowledge I know about world creators as well!

I also really wanted another way to connect with my followers. I don't actually post many personal things on my Twitter so I'm not really known for more than just my name alone. So I'd like to use this Patreon and this article as a way for you all to get to know me better and see the things I get up to behind the scenes.

Whenever I meet new people, they always greet me with "You're that guy on twitter who takes really amazing photos!" followed by "Every time I visit your world introductions, they always look completely different!". Sometimes this makes me think that I'm deceiving people in a way however I've sort of come to terms with this. I'd like to think that when some people look at my photos and enter the world after, their world view is enhanced by the fact that they've seen my vision of the world.

Future plans

Lets see, in the month of February I'll start introducing the avatar QuQu's "U". I might pick up some of her cute clothes as well. One of my main goals is to take a picture of her doing a high kick, which means I'll need to be able to do a high kick.

I'll also be analysing the response on Patreon and slowly refining the type of content I want to provide on this platform. There's a bunch of things I can provide but I want to see whether I can even maintain the current bonus content I'm providing. But expect some more things to show up in the further future!

Lastly I'll be looking to setting up a discord server to more closely communicate with some of my followers but that's the lowest on the priority list.

Thank you all once again, you've reached the end of the article! Whether or not it was what you were expecting, I hope you enjoyed reading it nonetheless!