Johnstone

As does the Leadership pool, if you have another extra pool choice.

If this surprises you, you haven't been paying attention to the real economy. In real life, it's even worse. People get a little credit and decide they need a High Definition Television. And when they can't pay that back, they decide they need a new car/truck/suv (I really don't understand the "logic" of this, but I've seen it happen too often).

A lot of people make extremely foolish decisions with their money, expecting people to be smart about spending make-believe money is just silly.

Oh, I continued the threadjack... oops. I think the question was pretty much answered anyway.

5 is the max for non-VEATs. Details regarding this were posted in one of the patch notes while i18 was still on test. I can't be arsed to bother finding a link for you right now.

What kills me is the way the character models are rigged. I'm guessing that they're just not high enough poly to work right, but it's disturbing to watch a female toon ninja run. With how much the leg is bent upwards, it makes the butt come to a point at the bend. I see it a bit with Rest too even. The rigging issues are painful to see in some of the other newer animations too.

Most of the animations from when BAB was more active (not gonna say he's gone) did a good job of hiding the rigging/skinning issues, although a few more polys wouldn't hurt the models.

Well, that was a bit of a threadjack, but yeah, I wish everyone who was laid off the best of luck and hope that BAB wasn't amongst their lot.

I love that bio.

As for my own, I like all the stories that I've come up with for my toons. If you want to read more than what I'm about to share, just click the link in my signature (although some of the write-ups aren't up to date or accurate).

So, my favorites... One has to be that of my Villainous Warshade, Worst Mistake. I came up with her and her whole story way before GR, and it felt like forever waiting to be able to make her a real villain, but yeah, here's her little tale:

Another one that I am particularly partial to is my Heroic Night Widow, Kaliska. The character started out as a DB/SR on test when we were testing Dual Blades. And then when the SoAs came out, I wanted to roll one on my home server, and couldn't come up with an idea. So I figured I'd look through all my characters everywhere until one stood out as being a possible Night Widow, and I found her sitting neglected on the Test Server. So I fleshed out a full story for her.

Her bio, which is updated in game, but this is the version from before GR:
And then there's my Demon Summoning MM, Infernus ex Machina. When I got access to DS, I wanted to try to be at least somewhat original in her background; and the last thing I needed at the time was another Magic origin character (probably 80% of my characters are magic). Here's her in-game bio:

Some great reads in this thread.

Yay for learning!

Also, I forgot to put my favorite keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+N for creating a new layer. How could I forget?

But yeah, aside from shortcuts. As was mentioned, soft brushes and masks are very useful. Oh, another shortcut, but not really mentioning it for the shortcut, anyway, F5 brings up the brush options. There's a whole lot of options for brushes and you can get some pretty awesome effects from just the standard brushes. And then there's also a few websites out there with free brush packs that you can download and do even more crazy stuff with.

I think mostly all of my other PS knowledge is only helpful for making textures for 3d models, so I won't bore you with that info (but if you ever find yourself needing to make a tileable texture, Offset is awesome).

You know, you can email in submissions for new tips. I think quite a few of these would be great to see when loading a mish.

And then there's P for Pen tool, X for switching primary and secondary color, then D for Default colors (black primary, white secondary), and then the brackets for brush size ( [ for smaller, ] for larger), and then the number keys for setting opacity, and M for Marquee select, and L for Lasso select, and C for Crop, and tons more. I love all the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop. Once you get all the shortcuts memorized, you can cut out a lot of menu time and focus on doing the art part of art instead of the tool-switching part and you don't lose the creative flow so easily.

Oh yeah, and the best part about Digital art in comparison to traditional art... LAYERS! I love layers. Do any changes on a new layer and you can toggle the visibility on and off to determine if it looks better or worse. Or use adjustment layers to change contrast/hue/anything, and then you don't have to worry about altering the original image and can just play around with options until you get something you like. Layers are freaking awesome.

Haha, Layers! Didn't see this post before, but now I did, so some tips on Layers to follow.

Label every layer, and use groups and subgroups. It's easy to lose track of layers when you start adding a bunch while trying to get the right look. I don't do a whole lot of drawings, I use PS for texture work for my 3D modeling, but the same kind of advice applies. When I'm doing a texture for a character, I start off by making groups for each important piece (like a group for a jacket/shirt, a group for lower body, a group for skin/face, etc), then make layers inside the groups and name them (e.g Face Base Color), and then add new layers on top of that, labeling as I create. Then group all the groups together (group, never merge! merging is bad unless you're just merging to save it as a jpeg/png but always leave a PSD with all layers intact in case of edits) into one main group and call that group Diffuse and then make new groups for Specular and Bump and Illumination or whatever else I need. In the case of traditional art, you won't have all the different kinds(Spec, bump, etc), but if you have multiple characters, keeping each one in their own group can be mighty handy. If you're doing a piece that's a battle between two characters, give each character their own group first, and then make the sub-groups inside those and create the new layers in those groups. It really helps to keep everything on its own layer and in its own group, make a group for background elements, a group for each character, and a group for foreground elements. Organization and naming is key when it comes to managing layers.

Sowing is easy, all you have to do is throw seeds on the ground and hope the birds don't eat them all before they take root. But yeah, sewing is harder than that. :P


Photo manipulation is definitely art imo, if you doubt this just go over to worth100.com and look at some of their contest galleries. Definitely some great art there.

Same here. Just the other day I made a new character named "Green Tease" after being inspired by my mother saying that the one grocery store has the green teas that she likes. Made me laugh when I thought about it and so I made the character, a Plant/Earth Dominator.

Also a lot of my story characters, I know the names first and then come up with the powers.

Truth. Both of my accounts are on the same master account, but I have different payment dates for each. There's no option at all to sync them unless you do it manually, and it would always be two transactions showing up anyway on you credit/bank statement.

It's also worth just crafting a bunch of common generic IOs and throwing them in storage for yourself. Not so easy when you're in a huge SG, but if you're in a small group with good friends or in a personal SG, it's quite easy to have a reserve of generic IOs ready to go for yourself. And then it takes the same amount of time to get them when leveling as SOs.

Ditto here. Somewhere around 30, I slot all generic IOs. Then I usually buy a few cheap sets that the character will use and slot them, then I just slot more generic IOs as I level and sets as I get them. Once I hit the 40's I tend to have enough inf to start buying more sets to use and by 50, they're pretty well set. Well, most of the time, my second account uses mostly generic IOs always.

But yeah, replacing SOs is horribly inefficient. Slotting level 35 generic IOs at 32 instead of SOs saves a bunch of inf over the character's journey to 50, and you don't need to worry about them going red.

Oh, and back to the OP, sort of, I can't really afford all the best sets since I'm a hardcore min-maxer trapped in the life of a casual gamer (I never have enough time to actually play/farm as much as I want to), so a lot of the toons I play only have generic IOs, which aren't too far off from SOs, so I can still kinda relate, but it is hard when someone asks for advice about certain ATs or powersets that I do have expensive builds for.

I think this must be the trick to it, just have to complain that it hasn't happened, and it'll happen.

The poster formerly known as Vitality serves as a second example of this:

Pretty sure only mods can actually attach images, you'll have to upload them somewhere else online (like photobucket or a similar site) and then use img tags to display it in your post here.

Priceless, this should be implemented as an option.

Not to be a complete ***, but if you had read what was written, you may have realized that the artist most likely intended for the chest and boots to be black; comic-book black, but still black.

Yeah, I remember first trying it out on test... With a fire/kin troller. Being exemped to level 25 after being at 50 for so long and not on a team, ugh, that was painful. Didn't have a problem keeping the Shivan EB held, but didn't have Hot Feet or any other source of real damage, took forever.

And now with Laz not helping with the meteor, I almost couldn't damage the meteor fast enough with my FF/Energy defender. She's not built to deal damage, she's built to survive and help others survive. It was the first time I ever even noticed that the meteor regenerated.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever liked that mission.

Same here, a lot I didn't bother to keep track of and some I didn't track from the get-go, so I'm a bit foggy on some of them too, but nowadays, I keep pretty close tabs on my characters' milestones (Creation, Alignment Switching, Hitting 50).

Paragon Wiki's User pages have helped tremendously, since it's super easy to keep track of my stuff there.

Edit to add: I just read through your list, you have some great characters. Several had me chuckling to myself, a couple were eerily similar to ideas I've had or toons I have created, and my favorite was Electric Pufferfish. The short little description for him was priceless.

He was the old model with the War Walker powers, Orbital Lance and the crazy heal and all. He took longer to take down than his old version, but he wasn't super difficult.

What? Really? I had absolutely no trouble with Siege as an EB with the duo I mentioned earlier (Fire/WP Scrapper and FF/Energy Defender), I wasn't even attacking with the defender. And like I said, neither of them are IO builds, the Scrapper doesn't even have any set pieces at all yet. If Siege has the same resistances he had before, then fire is one of the 3 damage types he doesn't resist, but still.