Hey all! As I mentioned before, I am participating in Extra Life again this year. Right now I'm looking to get my friends opinions on what artworks I should offer as prints. I will be giving them away to donors to my hospital, the Janet Weis Children's Hospital at Geisinger. You don't need to donate to vote, I'm just trying to choose about 5 images people really like to offer. I have posted a thread on DeviantArt where you can see the images I'm considering (you can pick others from my gallery as well, these are just some of what I feel are my best that are not copyright characters). Just reply here or on DeviantArt to tell me your choices. Thanks! :)
Last October I participated in the Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon to help raise funds for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. I intend to participate again this year, so I am hoping to get so input from friends for this year.
1. I need to pick out games to play during my marathon gaming session and I am open for ideas. Last year I played ArcheAge for the majority of the time, with a little Devil Survivor and The Evil Within to break it up. Dragon Age Inquisition may be a good pick for this year, but I'd like to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Platforms I can play on are as follows:
Sega Genesis/32X
Gameboy/Color/Advance
PlayStation
Dreamcast
PlayStation 2
Gamecube
Xbox
PSP
Nintendo DS
PlayStation 3
PlayStation Vita
PlayStation 4
PC
2. Since last year I was debating on whether to offer small prints or artwork as gifts for pledges. What do you all think?
By small I was thinking about 3" x 5" for any donation of $10+. Should I raise the donation to $20+ for a gift?
What about a personalized commission-style gift? Maybe $50+? $100+? With or without a small print version? Or should I do a larger print size for a higher pledge instead? (I've never really done commissions before so it's a little intimidating to think about.)
Are there any images you'd like suggest as the choices for the gifts? (My full gallery is at http://shanarah.deviantart.com)
3. I need to choose one Children's Miracle Network Hospital to play for and raise donations. Last year I chose Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital as I am a Penn State graduate and it is close to home. My other option is Geisinger Janet Weis Children's Hospital, which is also a good hospital and very well known in Pennsylvania. Any votes for one or the other?
Any thoughts and suggestions are appreciated! Also, let me know if you will be participating too. :)
I have officially registered for Extra-Life on team Trion and I am 40% to my personal goal! Here is the link to my fundraising page that will allow you to make donations, read about the cause and view my itinerary for the event (which I will update as I go along). All donations on my fundraising page go to the Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. The event starts Saturday, October 25th. If anyone has additional suggestions on what games I should play for the event, you can leave them here, or in a message when donating which can be made visible to me or everyone who visits my page. :)
I have started playing Evil Within, but am only playing chapter 3 at the moment, as I was working on art for my extra-life page (still not sure if I'm finished with it). So far it feels like a combination of mostly Siren: Blood Curse (stealth, limited weapons/ammo and atmosphere), Silent Hill (atmosphere and enemies) and Resident Evil 4/5 (environment, traps). There's even a little Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (drug side effects, flash forward/back?, lack of weapons). I do call BS on Shinji Mikami claiming he'd never play RE5 as a number of it's improvements over RE4 are present in this game. It's okay so far, but some of the elements of RE4 that I hated are here, and I'm not sure yet if its enough for me to say forget it and quit or to stick with it until the end. We shall see.
I am also reading Dragon Age: Asunder right now to catch up on story before Inquisition. It has me really hyped again, as I really did like the setting and the twists on classic fantasy roles and races. I really hope Inquisition is going to be as good as Origins and Awakening, gameplay, story and character wise. I've been trying to avoid most information on it so I can be pleasantly surprised by returning characters/stories. I do recall that they've brought back choosing your race which was probably the first thing that bothered me about DA2, and they claimed it will be more strategy, like the original, than hack and slash, like 2.
On that note, here is one of my Dragon Age renders, which I am now using as my banner. Sarovanya (Dalish Elf origin) hunting some Darkspawn with Alistair and Garm (Dog).
Hello, my GameSpot friends! It's been a while, but I am back for a good cause. Recently, I've gotten a number of invites to join Extra-Life, and marathon game to raise money for Children's Miracle Network on the weekend of October 25. I'd love to do this, so I'm asking my friends if you will help support me and donate, even $1, to this cause if I participate. All donations will go to a chosen Children's Miracle Network Hospital, likely Geisinger's Janet Weis Children's Hospital in Danville, PA. More information about Extra-Life is available at www.extra-life.org.
If I have your support, let me know and I will post a link to my donation page after registering and the name of the team I am playing for. Games I currently plan on playing for this marathon are ArcheAge, Rift and Demon Souls, maybe Evil Within as well. I will be using X-fire and Raptr to track my PC gaming so anyone is welcome to send me messages via those messengers or PSN. I'd also like to invite you to play with me or join Extra-Life as well. :)
I hope you are all doing well, and I think of you guys often. I really miss the old days of GameSpot! And I leave you with a Legacy of Kain render I did some time ago and hope to do more with in the future.
I haven't posted lately since I continue to be very busy with work and other things, but I'm glad to see some of my old friends are still active. :) I have continued to work with my 3D models and I have a few PS3 wallpapers to share with my friends here. I don't like the terms for uploading images to Gamespot, so I offer you the links to the full sized 1920 x 1080 wallpapers on my DeviantArt page. I designed them so the characters would fit nicely in the space below the XMB, but they will work for PC as well. Thanks guys for being my friends. I hope you like them. Your feedback and comments are welcome. :)
After another bad day on friday (this one at work) I spent the whole day Saturday with my computer and 3D art programs. Spent a good amount of time installing 6 months worth of new downloaded content friday night and saturday morning. Afterwards I fired up the latest edition of DAZ Studio.I'd finally given in and bought V4 Morphs ++ and Elite Morphs, so I set to work onmaking my elven character Tarwen. I like the results I got as she looks a lot more like the drawings I've done of her than the previous models. She belongs to the same story/universe as Sarovanya and will likely be seen with him as I do more work.
There would probably be more to show except that I've found a very irritating problem with D|S 3. When trying to load scenes saved in previous versions of the program, it screws up all the character textures which are then unfixable. It's done the same with my Apollo Maximus characters and Aiko 3 characters so I assume it's the same for all. And this brought me to another problem. The previous version of D|S cannot open files that are made with later versions (which I already knew), so saving my newly finished character didn't help. The only way to transfer her to the old version was to run both versions simultaneously, load up a fresh V4 model in version 2.2 and re-enter all the morphs manually. I did do this and now have a copy of her saved for use with my old scenes and characters in version 2.2, but couldn't be arsed after that to mess around with a real scene.
Anyway, here she is as rendered with DAZ Studio 3. Let me know what you think. I may make a wallpaper out of the closeup pic if there's any interest in it. :)
I almost forgot about this image from a few months ago. This is Kaeli (pronounced kay-lee). She is related to Tarwen. Speculation as to how they're related is welcome. :P
Well, I was going to write a nice update blog today, but now I don't feel like it. You see, I had to have my cat Sheva put down today. :( I only got her at the beginning of March. Last month she was diagnosed with FIP, Feline Infectious Peritonitis, a progressive disorder which causes the buildup of protein rich fluid in the abdomen and eventually causes death. I had 1 liter of fluid drained from her abdomen three weeks ago and got her a prescription for prednisone. She seemed to feel a lot better after that, but the fliud quickly built up again until this morning it was so much that she couldn't breathe properly. I couldn't bear to watch her suffer so I let her go. I miss her so much already. :cry:
Apparently I recently overlooked my 100th PS2 game purchase/acquisition, most likely due to the fact that I was missing a few in my collection list here. That 100th game was Growlanser: Heritage of War. And a good one it is. I'd debated on whether or not to pick it up since it was missing the artbook and other bonus items. In the end I caved, because Atlus games are rare enough already. Maybe I can find someone pawning off or giving away the artbook later, but I'm definitely happy to have the game. And yay for having 100+ PS2 games! **throws confetti** Now I just need to find time to play/finish them all. XD
Speaking of Atlus, the Shin Megami Tensei Imagine MMO just went into open beta. Of course I had to download that as soon as I got the email about it. It's another free MMO from Aeria Games. I might actually stick with this one because it's similar to SMT Nocturne in that you can pursuade, bribe, or threaten demons to join your party and then fuse them into another (hopefully stronger) demon. You'll most likely start out with 3 that are standard due to quests then work up from there. I like my Cerberus, but since he's 4 levels behind me I'll probably fuse him with one of the others contracted to me. I really want a Bicorn or Unicorn, but if it's close to Nocturne, that won't be until around 20ish. The last Aeria game I quit was Dream of Mirror Online because I was sick and tired of looking at my characters arse hanging out of her armor. >.> Good job failing at life. I shouldn't have that problem with SMT, though I know I won't be adding an Incubus to my party.
On an art related note, I recently rendered a scene from Sarovanya's story (it needs a name badly XD) with the skin I'd been working on. And holy crap. I haven't finished the massive burns on his back yet, but already the cross-shaped wound looks really nasty. x.x I have a little post-work to finish before I share it though.
I also purchased Poser 6, but I won't be rendering anything with that until I read the entire bloody manual, as it's nowhere near as user friendly as DAZ Studio. Poser's actually really nice for morphing faces and bodies though. But I haven't been able to import my D|S characters for tweaking... and there's no way I'm starting from scratch on Saro since I'm too happy with him already (a little body tweaking would be nice though).
Well, it's my first year working the holidays as assistant manager at Gamestop and let me say it's crazy. During regular daytime hours the place gets crazy busy and destroyed by customers, then after normal close it's dead as a doornail. Seems completely pointless to stay open an extra hour or four for the two or three people who come in only to browse. Plus those people are likely the ones who will show up after close after the holidays and try to get in. >.> Anyway, I'm exhausted from working so many long days. I'm only going to want to sleep on Christmas.
The only extra I've been doing lately is working on the skin textures for my character Sarovanya. He gets tortured badly by dark elves so I've been working on the textures for the wounds. No depth to them yet, just laying out their shapes and positions on his body. I'll get to the fine details and bump maps later. I've only finished one of the scar textures so far, but the result is encouraging. Here's the quick renders of my progress.
Log in to comment