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Description
Damn it's cold.

To those of you who still Watch me here on DA - it's been a while.

A lot's happened since my last post - lockdowns got extended, I graduated college in my living room, I got a stressful job that went almost fully remote - a whole lot of fun stuff.

With my last GMod poster (April 2020... wow) I thought I'd use it to get back into posing in GMod but... that didn't happen. I feel like I've reached a bit of a ceiling with the quality of what I'm personally capable of doing in GMod. It's an old piece of software running on an even older engine that I started playing with as a kid back in 2011. And it's a game I felt I always had to fight with to push its lighting and rendering where I wanted it to go. Of course, it is certainly capable of outputting some fantastic pieces of art as evident by those on this site - but that level of quality requires an amount of post-production editing/lighting and reading of Soft Lamps documentation that I'm not really interested in putting the time and effort into anymore. I had started learning that whole process a long time ago, but between real world stuff going on, my expanding responsibilities, and my continuously dwindling motivation to keep playing GMod, that all came to a halt.

So what's changed?

A while back I dropped GIMP for Photoshop, which is a much smoother user experience. I think GIMP's intimidating UI was another point on the list of things that kept me from improving my renders.

More recently, I started getting emails about activity on my posts here on DA. It's been a long time since I've been back on here, but I thought it was interesting going through my Gallery and watching how I improved over the years, however small (for example, my first DA post , posed entirely with the physgun btw, compared to one of my personal favorites or my most popular ). That and finding some familiar faces still chugging along the GMod train was nice to see.

Then last night I downloaded SFM and decided to give it another shot. Gotta say, it's a marked improvement over GMod in regards to lighting and rendering. This deviation is the product of an entire morning figuring out SFM and playing around in Photoshop. It's rushed and unpolished but it was fun to make.

I'm not sure I'll be getting back into creating posters with any real frequency any time soon. This was a fun little throwback but I rarely have the time that I used to to dedicate to these. And GMod's/Source's age is getting to me. But who knows? Maybe I'll stick with SFM or even reinstall GMod.

Sorry for the novel... Anyway, for the first time, made with SFM and edited in Photoshop.

Description
Damn it's cold.

To those of you who still Watch me here on DA - it's been a while.

A lot's happened since my last post - lockdowns got extended, I graduated college in my living room, I got a stressful job that went almost fully remote - a whole lot of fun stuff.

With my last GMod poster (April 2020... wow) I thought I'd use it to get back into posing in GMod but... that didn't happen. I feel like I've reached a bit of a ceiling with the quality of what I'm personally capable of doing in GMod. It's an old piece of software running on an even older engine that I started playing with as a kid back in 2011. And it's a game I felt I always had to fight with to push its lighting and rendering where I wanted it to go. Of course, it is certainly capable of outputting some fantastic pieces of art as evident by those on this site - but that level of quality requires an amount of post-production editing/lighting and reading of Soft Lamps documentation that I'm not really interested in putting the time and effort into anymore. I had started learning that whole process a long time ago, but between real world stuff going on, my expanding responsibilities, and my continuously dwindling motivation to keep playing GMod, that all came to a halt.

So what's changed?

A while back I dropped GIMP for Photoshop, which is a much smoother user experience. I think GIMP's intimidating UI was another point on the list of things that kept me from improving my renders.

More recently, I started getting emails about activity on my posts here on DA. It's been a long time since I've been back on here, but I thought it was interesting going through my Gallery and watching how I improved over the years, however small (for example, my first DA post , posed entirely with the physgun btw, compared to one of my personal favorites or my most popular ). That and finding some familiar faces still chugging along the GMod train was nice to see.

Then last night I downloaded SFM and decided to give it another shot. Gotta say, it's a marked improvement over GMod in regards to lighting and rendering. This deviation is the product of an entire morning figuring out SFM and playing around in Photoshop. It's rushed and unpolished but it was fun to make.

I'm not sure I'll be getting back into creating posters with any real frequency any time soon. This was a fun little throwback but I rarely have the time that I used to to dedicate to these. And GMod's/Source's age is getting to me. But who knows? Maybe I'll stick with SFM or even reinstall GMod.

Sorry for the novel... Anyway, for the first time, made with SFM and edited in Photoshop.