In Miss Simiverse, I had to create an ad. I wanted to do something kind of risque so I went with his ad. I was so happy with it and was just uploading it to Flickr when I remembered that the ad was supposed to be a household item that was named after Abby. So, I couldn't use this shot but hey, a little extra editing practice doesn't hurt, right?
This probably looks edited but other than the usual edits to change the color, shading, etc. this photo is taken in game. I downloaded a mod that replaces the moon and sun with bigger, better ones. The moon is absolutely humongous, and beyond gorgeous, when it rises and sets, so I had to take advantage of that. I plopped Valentine into Aurora Skies, waited for the moon to make its appearance, waited for the Aurora Borealis to start and the rest was just camera angling and manuvering. Still, this is now one of my favorite shots and is the current background on my computer. :D Another in game shot courtesy of the sun, moon mod. The sunsets are more colorful and more realistic with this mod, so while Valentine and I were waiting for the moon to rise, I took a shot of her looking out over the water at sunrise. With her being in her wedding dress, it reminds me of one of those old ghost stories where a would-be brides haunts a coast waiting for her love to return from sea. Below is a slideshow of photos that I took during this process. These are straight from my game so these have not been edited at all....yet :) As I've gotten older, I've discovered that I'm much more cynical than I used to be. It's probably just experience. So as upset as I got from my meeting at Baruch today, I'm really trying not to let it eat at me. it appears that I have to take a pre-calculus class before I can be accepted in Baruch...and I can't take pre-calculus in my current school without first taking college algebra, which I don't have time for. Rather than stress out about it, I'm just going to meet with an advisor at my current school next week and see if there is anything that can be done. For now, I'm going to relax and have some simmy time. :) Toodles.
Since Baruch is so close to my job, I decided to head over at lunch time to meet with the transfer advisor. So I get here and the building is closed for a fire drill! May not have enough time now to actually do this and I do not want to come back later. We'll see I guess.
If all goes as planned, I should be graduating with an Associate's in Business Administration in June. I desperately want to transfer to Baruch for my Bachelor's degree because it's one of the top schools in the world for business majors and it also happens to be located about three blocks away from my office. I would be able to go to school after work and still get home at a decent hour. I'm heading over after work today to meet with a transfer advisor and I'm nervous! When it comes to my academics, nothing has ever worked out as planned. There has always been miscommunications, last minute issues, etc. since I was in third grade. Just a lot of trouble with them keeping my records straight between skipping grades and bumping me up to advanced classes and then bumping me back when the classes were too full. By the time I reached college, I was so sick of it that I dropped out. Well, that isn't the only reason. I also dropped out in part due to a lack of motivation and in part due to an uncertainty of who or what I wanted to be. Well, after years of working in healthcare administration, it only made sense to go back to college for a degree in healthcare administration. Although I'm proud of myself for beginning this venture at 27, when most people my age have left school in their past, I have to admit that it's hard. It's hard sitting in a classroom with people ten years your junior knowing that I should have done this already. Although I'm not the only one my age in my classes, it's still a downer sometimes. I feel less accomplished or that maybe I missed out on the true college experience when I was college-aged. Then again, I have a good career now and I have experience in the field, so when I get my diploma (finally) I will have time and experience on my side and hopefully can advance from where I am rather than having to run around brandishing my diploma begging someone to give me a chance to prove myself with just a diploma and no field experience. So, there's pros and cons to my situation, I suppose. Why am I nervous? Well, I'm nervous that they will find some big hole in my transcript that will mean I can't transfer to Baruch. I'm nervous that my GPA won't be high enough to impress. It's 3.85 right now but it SHOULD be 4.0! It was 4.0 until that horrible hurricane came to NY and wiped out my whole apartment and everything in it. So I suffered quite a bit that semester and try as I might, I couldn't get two of my professors to work with me enough to bump my B+ to an A-. For one of those classes, I knew I didn't really deserve the A- so I can't complain. For the other class, I definitely did deserve the A, but the teacher just didn't care for me too much. Must be something wrong with her because I am awesome, actually. True story. So, anyway, I guess it all boils down to me feeling inadequate to be accepted into Baruch. The acceptance rate is pathetically low, with something like only 4% of applicants granted admission. So here I am, a woman of 30 (31 at the time of graduation) headed to Baruch to ask for tips on how to increase my chances of acceptance. I know I need letters of recommendation and I'll have no issue there but I'm still. I have a lot riding on this opportunity. A degree from Baruch is highly valued and the fact that it's so close to work will greatly reduce the current strain I am under regarding time management. Now I get home twice a week around midnight and I spend all day Saturday in classes. It's exhausting. I have no energy to do anything most times. I guess I'm nervous because I really want this and all I can think of are all of the reasons why I may not get it. I guess I will have to wait and see what happens today. Maybe this transfer advisor will give me a few reasons why I may just get it ag
Well, I had planned to keep this blog for sim stuff only but what the heck. I just discovered the weebly app on my new phone, the Galaxy S4 (hence the title) and although I can blog from my phone, I cant create a new page...well not from the app anyway. Soooo I'll post here for the moment. Super excited about my new phone! Actually, I'm totally exhausted so this is more of an internal super excitement. The screen is huge, the colors are incredible, the sound is amazing, but what I am most impressed with is the lighting! hard to explain but the way the phone is lit makes it really easy on the eyes. So important for gadget-loving headache - sufferers such as myself. Worth the cost so far bur I have only had the phone since last night so give me a chance to discover the flaws once we pass the honeymoon phase. One thing I really love is that I can actually see the screen even when in direct sunlight! Awesome stuff. Now I need to get the 64 gb sd card so I can max the crap outta this thing! I also love that I can blog from anywhere because the keyboard isn't too bunched together that I hit the wrong key every other letter. This phone also supposedly has faster processor and internet speed but if that's true, it's too subtle of a difference for me to notice. Well, that's it for now. I'm almost home from work and it's time to decide how I want to spend my evening. It's beautiful out but too tired to do anything. I have some simmy stuff to do but too tired for that too. Oooh! I just signed up for a new comp that looks really cool! It's based on the show Pretty Little Liars which I love! It's a great concept but so far there aren't a lot of sign ups so the comp may not get off the ground. If it does, I'll open a blog for it on the comp page. Ta-ta!
Is this GORGEOUS piece of editing mine? Why, yes! Yes, it is! Now, granted, all it appears I have done is cut Valentine out and paste her here, and that is true enough.....but wait, there's more! I used shading techniques on her skin to smooth her out, shadow some areas, and highlight others. Then I cut her off of the black background she was originally on which required quite a bit of work due to all of her fly aways and curls. I then darkened some of her strands with black streaks to account for any uneditable black spaces. All in all, this was a lot of fun and a lot of work but well worth it in the end! I'm super proud of this one. Now there are only a couple of questions that remain...
Is she too tall for the shot? I'm trying to figure out if she truly is proportioned to the shot. In some ways, it looks like she should be smaller but when I scaled her down, even a little, she looked too small! Does she blend in properly? I don't know if she really looks like she's there. I understand there is some sort of color filter in Epic that makes these sorts of photos look more realistic. Is that true? Must find out! I'm still not great with editing but I have come a loooong way from where I was! Little by little, I'm learning the basics. I'm still not great at cutouts but that's not an issue of skill, really. It's an issue of patience. Usually by the time I reach the halfway point of mapping my path, I grow impatient and start haphazardly clicking. If only things like smart scissors really worked! If I could cut out a Sim with a click of a button, I'd be creating a LOT more pics. As it stands, I'm forced to deal with the path tool which is just annoying when cutting out a full body shot. Shading...I knew nothing of shading. I always see photos on the forums that just look incredible. I knew it was because of shading...but I had no idea how to actually do it! Well today someone posted a tutorial on the forums and I jumped right to work! It was really pretty cool! So here is a before and after edit. The picture is glitched, I know, but I was just practicing with editing so I didn't much care. So, here's the in-game before pic: So then I performed my edits. I was playing around with the eyelash brushes. Fun stuff! Something else I knew nothing of until yesterday. I downloaded them and got right to work. So after playing around with my normal editing settings and then adding the eyelash brushes, I started playing around with the shading. Here's the after: Definitely a difference. Truth be told, the shading didn't offer a drastic difference but then again, i didn't have a wide area to work with so I'll be practicing on my next few shots and see how it looks. For now, any improvements to my shots are a plus. So, I'm off to score the mock assignment on my first competition now. See ya!
Before I discovered the sims forums, my game was very private. I never shared anything online, never did anything with my sims for anyone other than myself. I basically built lots and played with my different families, all who had the same family dynamic...married couple with a few kids. Think Brady Bunch. Yeah, that's basically how all the families in my sim world were. I very rarely strayed from that. When I wasn't playing house, I was building homes. All the same...master bedroom, couple of kids rooms, decked out kitchen...you get my drift. It would get pretty boring. So, I'd stop playing the sims for a while and then would find my way back, and start playing with my Brady Bunch families, and building their Brady Bunch homes. *yawn*
So when I found the forums, I thought it was pretty interesting how people would spend days and even weeks on homes and then share them with the sims community. I would look through the galleries of homes and find myself awed by the amazing homes that were there. Well, I thought, I could do this! I built a home in Monte Vista and shared it. Not many people downloaded it, maybe 100 or so if I remember correctly, possibly less. I then built and shared a community lot, Wedding Bells, a wedding venue and then a pool and sports bar. I then grew bored. Browsing the other forums, I found a modeling forum. So I went in and looked around. I was astonished at the images! Never being one for fashion or modeling, I didn't think I'd be into it but wow! I started lurking a couple of competitions and thought "I would LOVE to do this!" I knew I would never be good enough though. I didn't know anything about poses or pose player and I had never downloaded a stitch of custom content. I was terrified to download anything like that because I had heard such horror stories! I got over that real fast and now I have folders upon folders of custom content that I swap in and out depending on my needs. Well, I decided to jump into a competition and I wasn't the worst surprisingly but I wasn't the best either....not by a looong long way. Before I was eliminated in that competition (making it far more along than I expected, more than halfway through the competition) I had joined several others and was juggling many. I learned from my many many mistakes and took the judge's feedback seriously. I learned from my fellow contestants, all whom were so generous to share some of their secrets...and I began to improve. I knew that any further improvement would require something I hadn't done before....editing. So I downloaded Gimp and found myself immediately intimidated. What does this button do? What is this for? What the heck is a Gaussian blur? Layers? Layers of what? Frustrated, I quickly closed the program. I tried reading tutorials but they were kinda useless to me when I really had no idea of the basics. So, when a competition came up that involved advertisements, I decided to enter in the hope that I would be able to once again learn from my mistakes. I was terrible. I mean, really terrible. Each assignment, each week I found myself at the bottom. So many mistakes, so many issues. Ugh, just horrible. What I realized though was that I was actually doing it, albeit not well. I was editing! So I practiced some more and I played with lighting, hue, curves, sharpness, paths, layers, etc. Now I find that I'm decent and I'm usually in the top tier when scores are posted and I even ended up winning that advertisement competition by a very narrow margin! Now it's time for a new endeavor. Gimp brushes. So often I can't find CC for eyelashes, eyeshadow, or hair that matches my vision for a particular assignment. How wonderful if I could just take care of it myself! Or perhaps even create my own CC! Well, that's an endeavor that I may wait for. So that's where I find myself these sim days. Trying to sharpen my modeling and editing skills for these fabulous competitions in the forums. They're a lot of fun and really allow you to kinda push the world away while you're focusing on the tweaks of pictures. Do I still play with my Brady Bunch families? Yes, yes, I do but far more rarely than I once did. What can I say? I like that kind of family dynamic and although there are many aspects of the game that I may be missing "werewolves, vampires and witches, oh my" that part of it just isn't for me, I guess. :) Happy simming! |