#response crap

[ooberchain]

Hi! I love your art. Could you give us a quick rundown/explanation on how you make it? No pressure though. Keep up the great work!

Thank you, really happy people are enjoying my artwork! For my 3D renders, I use Source Filmmaker for my posing + Photopea/Photoshop for post-processing. I recommend learning Blender if you're getting started instead of SFM: Blender is better in almost every aspect & every bit of creative control, I just use SFM because it's faster to render, easier to get assets for without needing to do as much manual work, and I've learned how to make it look decent. With VALORANT and Overwatch (non-TF2 or Source assets in general), maps aren't ported to SFM. Props are ported sometimes for scene-building but I'm really bad at scene-building and lighting scenes tbh, so this has been my workflow for the past few years:

Export foreground elements: usually object of focus. In this case it's models that I alpha out. In this case, Phoenix & Astra with the table are one element, while KAY/O is another element, which I then put together. They've already been lit and posed within the software

2. Add a background & background elements: in this case I used a screencap of a map from VALORANT in-game, blurred it, and colour corrected it. KAY/O has also been shifted and blurred since he's a background element for this piece (though not as much as the backdrop, which remains simple so my foreground elements stand out)

3. Post-process and do paintover: At this point I make my touchups to the foreground elements. Here you can see Phoenix & Astra get some adjustments here & there, as well as the props on their dishes overgoing some repainting (such as the coins turning into plantains and adding sauce + meat filters on the meat)

This is where I also added some more details such as the front dishes (which was a separate render), giving them some paintover if they needed it, blurring them out to add DOF, and adding shadows to the cutery since my models' in-software shadows weren't casting on the surface as well

4. Edit the lights & colour grading: to make Phoenix & Astra stand out from the background I added some lights behind them as well as started adjusting the lighting & colour grading overall of the elements to make everything look like it belongs

5. Add the final touches: any additional filtering, paintover, colour grading, and VFX that need to be done gets done. In this case, I added some subtle paintover on Phoenix's face, added some dust particles in the back, added a soft filter, and added more warmth & vibrance for the colours.

[uberchain]

don't support pink mercy, as pretty as she may look like. look up thinkbeforeyoupink. tldr; greedy corporate that actually doesn't care about its cause

I did. 

The Susan G. Komen Foundation is the most infamous scandal out of Yoplait and NFL (also part of the pinkwashing controversies) when it involves the pinkwashing incident, including lawsuits on other breast cancer movements that use pink or the word cure, as well as allegations of down to 3% of their money actually being used for cancer research. I made damn sure to see if it linked back to that mess before I let my mahou shoujo-loving weeb ass shamelessly drop the $15 and it didn’t.

Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the charity Blizzard is supporting, has an A+ rating on Charity Watch as well as 4/4 star ratings on Charity Navigator, indicating that 88-91% of their proceeds go towards research for breast cancer, while the additional percentage goes to awareness programs. BCRF is considered the highest rated breast cancer charity in the United States of America. The biggest issue they faced in 2007 is some of the products an investor has sold under Estée Lauder had chemicals that were known to cause cancer.

According to the official blog post, Blizzard has stated that 100% of proceeds from people who purchase the Pink Mercy skin, with a minimum guaranteed donation of $250,000, will be donated directly to BCRF. Additionally, the shirt purchases (it’s a bomb ass tee btw) according to the blog post will also have 100% of their proceeds donated to BCRF*. I will trust Blizzard and I will trust BCRF that they are being transparent about this when I splurge on my magical girl Mercy.

*EDIT: I’ve been made aware of the sales store saying that the shirts’ proceeds to be donated are 50% rather than 100%. While I still think the skin will turn the most proceeds, I’m wondering if a miscommunication occurred between Blizzard’s official blog post and the store page and I hope Blizzard clarify it for transparency. UPDATE: I’ve heard several people explain the 50% is for manufacturing purposes, artist’s royalties, and storefront operation during increased traffic.

**EDIT 2: I’ve also been made aware of Sony in Europe putting a disclaimer about taking a cut of the proceeds for VAT, a European tax, if the skin is purchased on PlayStation console, while whatever they pass to Blizzard is given to BCRF. You can see the situation developing on a Reddit and Twitter megathread here and here. 

[uberchain]

Which miss pauling model do you use?

There’s a few I use that were first modeled by crazyb2000 and Rebbacus, with mild edits by Scurvy Orange (of which both of us individually asked Rebb for the comic version that you see us using). All of them utilize assets that don’t allow public redistribution, so they can’t be released in their current state. 

The current fanmade model can still look closer to the Expiration Date Pauling with different texturing if that’s what you want. These two are the same model from the SFM workshop, with textures swapped and new glasses + new irises being added.

This old skin pack I released is what I use and still use for her face (which also comes with the glasses, here’s how important those glasses are). I use a different texture given to me by Scurvy for her shirt now, as the texture in this pack has pink instead of white trim and is a bit lighter.

This tutorial is how I usually go about playing with the original model to get her to look closer to her ED look; I’ve since stopped using the rescaling of torsos and just play with sliders if I use crazyb’s default model.

[uberchain]

I have a problem -- I require more Mr. Reddy . . .

“I’m a bit busy at the moment. Mr. Hale needs his private plane flown out to the Serengeti within the next five minutes. Says there’s some unfinished business involving an African buffalo, and - well, business is business.”

[uberchain]

h-hewwo

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[uberchain]

sorry to bug but, do you.... have... bananabay that is NOT missing textures and other problems for SFM...? I just spent HOURS trying to make it behave, I even fucked around with file editing shit to try and make it work, I am a broken man and trying to use hammer is just one thing to many just for a goddamn decent beach map ;n;

Have you tried repacking the map in TF2? I don’t know the science of it and people have explained it on the SFM discussions groups if you want to know how/why it works, but this is the command that I put into the TF2 console to first see if I can get a map to load into SFM if it won’t:

bsp_repack -nocompress maps\[MAP GOES HERE].bsp maps\[MAP GOES HERE]_repack.bsp

Note that I put _repack as my suffix but you can put _edit or whatever you need just to differentiate it from your original (e.g. pl_snowycoast becomes pl_snowycoast_repack). Then you’ll take that from your TF2 maps folder and drop it off somewhere in an SFM maps folder. 

Note that you also have to have the map somewhere in your TF2 maps folder already (preferably not your downloads/maps folder).

You want to avoid renaming filenames for maps in Windows Explorer as much as possible, but this above method allows you to change the name without having an issue. A few friends a while back passed me an SFM-converted version of a map that I had renamed before plopping it into SFM but it didn’t like that, nor did it like being changed back, so I redownloaded it and didn’t touch the filename and it worked. 

If the repacking doesn’t work (and I recommend trying the repack method anyway for your own education because SFM is Not Nice) you can download the Jungle Inferno maps from the description of this workshop entry here. 

[uberchain]

Hey uberchain, I'm just curious, but what do you think of the whole 'Ellie' debacle in Overwatch?

Every time I try to talk about it I just get super tired and irritated because it’s just such a fucking mess, no sides walked out of it unscathed, almost everybody else has said what I think already. As somebody who dabbled in esports prod actively at one point (albeit not T1 esports or as a player) there’s a lot I see and hear. But I’ll give it a go:

#fuckpunisher 

Longer thoughts under the cut.

News articles should have reached out to other female players that are already in the T2-T3 Overwatch scenes for their takes in-tandem with their first “Ellie” article. When Eurogamer reached out to me a while back about the TF2 toxicity article, they reached out to others who had spoken up about it. Have real women who are fighting and have fought for their spot in the pro world give their takes, tell their stories, share their words, and inspire others to try for the people that will listen. 

The “see they thought she was a girl and so she got a diversity hire over Punisher” argument to support girls having it easier than guys to get picked up is fucking stupid. The situation with Second Wind’s captain saying some blatantly sexist shit, and then a few days later “Ellie” being picked up, is different and could be interpreted as not good will. I don’t see any way of recovering from this after both Coluge and Punisher, they can claim all they want they didn’t know about Ellie but no matter what, it seems sus. 

I don’t know how fucking old Punisher is but he needs to stay the fuck away from 17-year-old girls like the actual Ellie. Punisher has done this multiple times with other girls and basically used them for his dickhead catfishing social experiments. This is not a new thing, it will not die out, but I hope it gets throttled, bottlenecked, and have consequences that really mean something for it. #fuckpunisher squad rise up

I’m not sure if this one is confirmed but apparently Blizzard KNEW about the Punisher situation due to tips??? I’m just wondering why they didn’t do anything then. The Punisher catfishing situation has not helped Blizzard. The recent firings and Activision shit have not helped blizzard. The former HotS esports employee who came out about racial discrimination, and mentioning that he was in an environment that discouraged him to talk about it, has not helped Blizzard. 

Following the above, the only thing that has been good for Blizzard was S76′s reveal as the second gay hero, but because of how poorly timed it was with the Punisher situation people would push the argument that Blizzard used it as a way to distract from the Punisher situation and the genuine harassment Ellie did face. Additionally, the HotS esports employee said he was upset that Blizzard pushed S76 to encourage diversity in their fiction, when in real life he was not helped or encouraged to talk about his racial discrimination. 

#fuckpunisher 

I’m sure there’s more but I’m sure others have said it already. 

[uberchain]

Wait wasnt it that ellie was a guy who got kicked off a team or was rejected and used a smurf account while using the name ellie to pose as a girl?

The timeline of the “Punisher pretends to be Ellie” events can be found on this thread, every time I want to talk about it I just get really exhausted about what an absolute mess the situation is for all sides involved

#fuckpunisher squad up