3D Custom Girl recently got an expansion pack, which adds in a few extra features. A few extra features, mind; there aren't very many changes from the base game (or whatever you want to call it; dress-up doll simulator? Hentai dress-up doll simulator?) itself.

The major change, and about the only major change I can see, is a new "pose mode". This gives you plenty of freedom to pose the model yourself. And when I say "plenty of freedom", I mean "without any failsafes or realism restrictions". In other words, you can twist, turn, and move just about every aspect of the model to the point of grotesque deformity. Oh, and the game still doesn't care about clipping.

I'm still trying to figure out if I want to bother with it, since to do so would mean spending hours on end trying to get everything perfectly right, or at least not horribly Uncanny Valley.

I'm not really up to being as loquacious as per usual, since I apparently truly have close to zero tolerance for alcohol. I celebrated Christmas dinner with a third of a glass of cognac, which I promptly diluted with half a glass of water. I went to bed that night at around nine, and woke up the next morning at eleven, with what seems to be a head cold that has lasted until now with no signs of abating. I'm pretty sure it's not a hangover, since I don't have a headache or anything, but there's this constant feeling of dehydration that just will not go away despite drinking enough water to make me wander into the little geek's room every ten minutes.

Tags: 3dcg

Like the Curse of Alt-itis that plagues me in City of Heroes/Villains, I'm worried that November will be spent not so much on actual writing, but just fiddling with costumes in 3D Custom Girl.

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Of the three magical girl candidates thus far introduced, Ellie is the strongest (or at least has the most potential), followed closely by Rebecca, and Karen is a very distant third. Sally, being an inherently magical being, can probably trounce all three of them easily, but if we're talking about fully-trained and highly-experienced versions, Ellie's still better (Sally gets to be number two, just above Rebecca).

I've got two more characters to go, not counting any others I might invent later (I still need to come up with a good non-clipping look for a tsundere). Power-level-wise, Emi is significantly below fully-trained Rebecca, and slightly below Sally right now. Celica is several scary orders of magnitude better than anyone, fully-trained or not.

EDIT: "Erica" renamed to "Ellie", just for kalium.

Tags: 3dcg, nano 2008

Yes, this is a series.

The apparently titular (no sniggering from the peanut gallery) model of 3D Custom Girl has a total of one personality, which is cheerful, bouncy (I said no sniggering), and significantly cutesy. This is not going into her eagerness to Get Down To It, despite the utter lack of interest I have (at least at the moment) in It, or the getting down thereof.

She also technically only has the one voice, but there's a significant change between both extremes of the age slider, sounding like what you'd expect. It's a bit impressive what sound modulation can do, perception-wise.

There's some sort of ponderings to be had on the idea that a certain appearance of a character has its own associated personality type, such that the 3DCG model's static personality can actually seem jarring. There is, to take a well-known idea, no real reason why twin ponytails and thigh-high socks should automatically mean tsundere, yet we as anime fans seem to expect as much.

My personal dislike for the tsundere archetype is not the reason for the lack of twintails in these 3DCG creations. Believe me, I tried, since a Standard Harem Comedy Story should have the Standard Harem Comedy Character Types. No, it's all due to my ever-present nemesis of clipping, which makes every attempt at twin ponytails clip through just about everything.

Maybe I need to sleep on it for a while. There has to be some combination of attractive (and not too revealing) clothing options which won't cause so much clipping grief.

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Tags: 3dcg, nano 2008

Another aspect of 3D Custom Girl which emphasizes the NSFW portion of "gameplay" is that almost all the poses in "pose mode" are, well, sexed up. (Also, "pose mode" is grouped together with the rest of the sex modes. I have no idea why.) Not counting fan-created mods, there are basically a total of four types of clothing which don't end up with the model revealing her underwear in pose mode: sports shorts (PE bloomers and spats), swimwear (bikini bottoms and stereotypical school swimsuits), bunnygirl outfits (... yeah), and one pair of Daisy Dukes (colour-tintable, at least).

Even more frustrating are the clipping issues. Everything pokes through everything else, including bits of knees poking through thigh-highs in certain poses. All in all, finding a good screenshot to take in pose mode boils down to getting the right poses (randomized), at just the right angle to hide all (or most of) the clipping and underwear-flashing. This drastically cuts down on the number of usable shots, meaning that I might end up repeating poses after a while.

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Tags: 3dcg, nano 2008

As run through 3D Custom Girl.

It should probably say something about me that I haven't bothered with the "uncensor patch" yet, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time scouring the net for more costume option mods.

In case any of you are thinking of actually getting this game, I should warn you that the primary purpose, to which all the in-game stuff insistently leads you towards, is (simulated) cosplay sex. It gets really annoying, since I'm just trying to dress my cel-shaded 3D anime girl in some nice clothes. Every time I change something, the model goes into what's probably meant to be a sexy pose, which might titillate others, but I'm in the middle of coordinating colours here, dammit.

While fighting through the twin frustrations of this and the unbelievable amount of clipping issues, I took some time to put together what is possibly a beta version of the protagonist of this year's NaNoWriMo effort.

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I find it darkly amusing that while there's not much overlap between 3D Custom Girl and City of Heroes, in both games, the bust slider does not go down far enough. Which is weird, because also in both games, the top end goes past "big" into "grotesque".

Tags: 3dcg, nano 2008