Owen 8 and Friends

So a little while back, it occurred to me that I hadn't really looked at Owen's friends from his bundle, so I set out to remedy that.

Chance, to the left of Owen in the top image, is frankly aDORable. If he were a real person, grandmothers would come from far-away places, just to pinch his cheeks. Made him a redhead because that's where he really seemed to look best, and where he was "tuned' so to speak.

Kaspar, to the right of Owen in the top image ... Hmm. In this image, he's more or less his default. I really don't like his default shader setup; it makes him look rather gray. Most people don't look too gray unless they're unwell. So I set out tinkering with his shader, about which more will be said later; let's just say that it was a textbook definition of the Law of Unintended Consequences, Texture and Shader version.

In between when I did the top image and now, DarwinsMishap came out with the LIE Tattoos 2. I'd seen them in his forum thread, and was waiting for them. Hipster Owen was very very clear that he wouldn't consider himself a proper hipster without a giant tree and birds on his side. Thus the lower image. (The tree itself only comes in a right side version. However, you can go into the LIE editor for the individual surface area and image, check a box, and flip it to the other side, no problem. For tattoos, you do need to remember to do both the diffuse and the translucency images.)

This also seemed like the sort of situation where a reasonable tattoo artist might look at the collection of tats on Owen, as they were adding the tree, and then say, "So you realize that these all don't ... go, right?" And after further conversation, a plan would be hatched, resulting in birds along the arm and neck (from Neikdian's set), echoing the birds from the tree. (Of course, this also results in it looking like birds are flying out of the burning heart, which may or may not be intended.)

Interesting bit: I discovered along the way that the PNG and TIF files for most tattoo packages will work as diffuse overlays. This -- in theory -- saves having to deal with the translucency texture. That said, the very real downside is that you can't see what's going on, so after verifying most of it, I just went back to regular LIE tattoos.

You'll note that his armband has moved. I rotated that 180 degrees in GIMP so that it could go onto the other arm (rotate, NOT flip; you need to keep it on the right part of the arm).