The Pirate Queen of Spades

May 12, 2023

Captain Adelheid - a respected officer of the fleet and distant relative of the royal family - is appointed as the new governor of the tropical island colony of Port Azure. While Adelheid considers the posting as beneath her, she regards the native population of the island with outright disdain. To make life on the island even more bothersome for her, she finds the local food thoroughly inedible (to one with such a refined taste as her, anyway) - except for a peculiar fruit that she develops quite a fondness for...

By request from... anonymous... But a different "anonymous" this time! I swear, these anonymous people are real, and not voices in my head urging me to turn out 3DX smut and praise Satan... that second part may be voices in my head, but not the first.
Lady Adelheid here is the OC of said anonymous requester - she's an 18th-century-esque sea captain whose adventures take place in a D&D-style Caribbean setting. It's always a strange and wonderful privilege when somebody entrusts you with their precious OC and asks you to trick them out like a hoe...

I don't often do "Blacked/Queen of Spades" stories and characters, but this ended up being a very fun one to design and create, even with such a unusual setting! I was going to trick her out head-to-toe in QoS tats, but (surprisingly!) I could not for the life of me find any QoS/Blacked tattoo packs for Daz studio anywhere! Honest to god, I searched high and low, and there just aren't any around! So, I fell back on the ol' reliable method and did a Google Image search - and let me tell, ya, I found a ton of fantastic "Blacked/QoS" tattoos! Some genuinely awesome designs that I was really excited to use... but manually placing and orientating each tattoo was an extremely time-consuming task. Especially with the way the texture maps for characters are laid out - in one instance, I wanted to place a tattoo on her shoulder. Should be simple, right? Nope; ended up having to take the tattoo, split it in half, find the "seam line" on the texture map where the map folds around the arm and rejoins, take one half of the tattoo and place that juuuuuust at the right angle, then take the other half, turn that at a near-perpendicular angle, and find the other side of the seam line, and place that at juuuuuust the right angle....
Ugh... you get the picture, it was a fucking nightmare, so I scrapped it and use a mix of premade pirate tattoos and custom tats manually placed in easier-to-reach locations.

While chatting with some very lovely folks on Discord, I learned that there's a much easier way to create custom tattoos for difficult-to-reach areas by using Blender - sort of works like stencilling, and then you can port that over to Daz or something. I have actually been thinking of getting into Blender recently - I don't plan to move away from Daz, but I'd like to learn enough of Blender so that I can create my own stuff; tattoos, add extra morphs to things like clothing or shoes, and maybe even create a few simple props and assets myself. There are some amazing QoS/Blacked assets by the very talented StickyBuns for Blender that I love, but unfortunately, they're currently only available in Blender. I had so much fun creating this set that I've already decided to do more Blacked/QoS stuff in future, but I'd love to use some of StickyBuns' assets too. So over the summer I'll take some time to - at the very least - learn how to port them over to Daz.

In the immediate future though, I plan on taking a little time off from Daz and rendering. Going to try and learn a bit of Blender in my own time, catch up on some video games, maybe do some non-3DX stuff just for myself. So you may not see much from me over the summer. Well, I say that, but I could get some whacky fucking idea in my head tomorrow and immediately jump into a new sequence XD

Anyway, enough rambling. As always, I hope you enjoyed, and let me know what you think!