[ Please ZOOM to see details! ] Yes, I'm trying to crank up the Araneé story again! I don't know if you guys were in cahoots or not, but I had three people in a week's span ask me about returning to this story. Considering it's been TWO YEARS since I posted the last episode, this really floored me. My creative muse is still MIA but I decided to reread the story just to reminisce. With the requests and a reread, a curious thing happened: I got the bug again. I actually have the next five episodes already outlined. As I've done in the past, if I make significant progress in my learning curve, or improve my tools, I rework the characters to the new state of the art. The first time was changing over from Daz Studio to Carrara. The second time was after working through Phil Wilkes' excellent Carrara tutorial series over at Infinite Skills. When I last worked Araneé, I used Carrara 7 - now I'm using Carrara 8.5, and I'd *like* to think I've learned a few new things in the last two years too LOL! So I'm reworking the characters - Kuila is the first. He was based on Daz Mil Big Cat and I was shocked to learn Carrara 8.x builds don't handle this product properly. Applying morphs and poses breaks and distorts the mesh! (Oddly, MBC still works fine in Daz Studio.) I saw Daz MBC 2 on sale and decided to try it. It works great, but the builtin morphs and skin tex are WAY different than what I used to create Kuila. After MUCH fiddling around, I finally got the body and face morphs close to the original, and added Kuila characteristics to the skin tex. So here he is. This is Kuila after the near-fatal Greener ambush in which he nearly lost his sight, hence the scar. I suggest story followers go back and reread the early episodes to refresh, just as I did. The first episode can be found HERE and links take you through the rest of the story. Have a good laugh at the primitive look of the early episodes: I posted my first 3d pic ever on April 4, 2008 and the first Araneé episode on April 18, 2008! I used Daz Studio 2.0, had almost nothing in my runtime, and had to paint in as much as 25-30% of the details in these early images to make up for lack of 3D skill and props LOL! I purely enjoyed revisiting this story, I hope you do too. * * * MORE TO COME: I'll post portraits of the updated cast as I finish them... Larry

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Image © 2014 by Larry Hodge