Samuel_Tow

Aha! I found it! After looking around at the advise I got and trying some of it on, I learned a few things - a woman with that costume and a human face looks not just weird, but CREEPY. And if it's creepy to me, I just know it's going to look scary to almost everybody else. I tried to use a human face, and I just can't.

Getting rid of the whiskers helped, as did getting rid of the black mouth. Yeah, it's a little less panda without the black nose and black lips, but it's a little bit more appealing. I stuck with the Feline face and went with the Dark Eyes pattern. It worked like a charm!

I had to change the hair. I tried the one Ian suggested, and it still showed the brows. In fact, ALL other hairstyles I tried showed the brows, and they were just too scowling for me to work with. So I went with something else entirely. I went with with the Strange hair, and that was good for two reasons. One is the obvious - it hid her eyebrows, making the face look a lot less threatening and a lot more like how I wanted it to. The other, however, has to do with how it interacts with the rest of the body. Pandas have barely any neck of shoulders, their head just sort of melds into their torso, hiving them a very distinct "fat head" look, which simply cannot be replicated with the female model's slender neck. However, that big, long hairstyle is the perfect shape and transition to give me that form, so now she actually LOOKS more like a panda AND looks better

I also solved the Sharp problem. Instead of using a white base with black pattern the same as the top, I used a black base with a white pattern and just used the Athletic Shorts pattern. This gave me a less... Fancy colour line that was still not as blurry as the Blend line. I actually like this one a lot. Now I just need to thing of, you know... CLOTHES for her to wear and I'm all set for Dual Handguns to arrive some time next year.

Man, that promise to myself to not make new characters until Going Rogue arrives is REALLY backfiring on me. Now instead of new characters, I have zillions of new concepts with costumes saved. Damn you, impatience!

*edit*
I also made the model slightly (a little less than slightly, actually) thicker and more heavy. She's a panda, after all. Doesn't make sense for her to be THAT skinny

I'd like to see glowing costume items, like those Tron lines on PsoiTron, or the blades on Fire/Toxic Tarantula. Currently, none of our costume pieces self-illuminate unless they have sprite effects on them - if you walk into darkness, they darken and turn black. Posi's Tron stripes do not. Even in pitch black, his costume turns black, but his stripes remain the same visible shade of blue, making them look like they're glowing or fluorescent. Want this so very much.

Now, I've grown out of the habit of making these costume help threads, but something has been eating at me all day, and I just can't seem to find a good enough solution to it. Does anyone have any idea how I could make a convincing panda girl? I did a bit of research as to what a panda should look like, but I can't seem to transcribe that knowledge of animals onto a humanoid costume subject.

Here's what I know about pandas: They have a white head, with black ears, black circles around the eyes, a black nose and black lips. Their bodies are almost entirely white, but they have black front and rear paws, with a black "tank top" liking the front two paws across the chest. I've not been able to ascertain whether they have tails at all (though ought to) and what those tails might look like, but Kung Fu Panda suggests a black tail.

Now, I did what I could, but I'm not sure how well that came out. Here is what I have so far, and I'm not very happy with it. First of all, I've had to cover the face's human ears because it looks really odd to have two sets, and only a very few hairstyles actually do that. I've already used the one I have in the picture, but not in this colour, so it's passable, but I wouldn't be opposed to a better alternative. I've also struggled to find a good way to make the eyes black. I tried the black eye spots, but ended up going with this heavy-handed black make-up, in large part because I wanted black lips like a real panda. I'm not averse to getting rid of the black mouth, though, because it looks... Well, really grumpy. That's also the problem with the with the Feline face in general - it's so grumpy! I don't remember it scowling quite as badly on this character, but then that might be because I covered the mean and nasty eyebrows.

Beyond that, the lower body was easy, though for lack of fur, I'm not sure how good the result was. I've worked with these kinds of costumes before, and it's a fine line to thread between "that's actually her skin" and "That's a woman in a coloured cat suit. Given that her face is white and drawn with fur (or at least I think it is), it shouldn't be too hard to perceive the rest of the body as that of a panda, rather than a white woman in black latex. But that's the best I can do, and I suspect that leaving her pantsless should force the look through. Either that, or look really creepy, though hopefully not creepy enough to get me genericed. I mean seriously, that's what a panda looks like.

However, what I have is very rudimentary at this point (and, as you can see, I haven't even worked on actual clothes, but that comes later) and I would be very much interested in seeing if anyone has an idea as to how to enhance the effect a little bit and evoke the image of a panda a little bit more and the image of a scowling woman a little bit less.

Any ideas?

Now, I'm not a statistician, by any means, and I AM grateful to finally have some numbers, but these numbers are very much the least useful they could have shared. MMOs really don't thrive on new box sales, and while I understand that new players are always good, City of Heroes has been proven to be an MMO which relies less on churn and more on retention. It's interesting, I'm just not sure how much it says.

As to the graph, that's actually problem with graphs in general - scale. This one goes from 5200 to 7600, which actually only a band of 2300, which makes fluctuations look like large peaks and valleys. I understand its point is clarity so number bands where data points don't exist are cut, but makes the fluctuations seem much more wild comparative to the actual number values. The last data point looks like it's a little below 5500, but to the conclusion speeders, on this chart it may as well be -0.

Again, I don't want to demean the efforts of the Pantsless One, because it is a nice representation, but as with all data, the devil is in the interpretation. Just raw data can actually be more misleading than no data at all. And even I jumped to conclusions at first, so I'm not exaggerating.

If you watch the video carefully, there's a lot of gun twirling. You're likely to get a lot of customization options, but I sincerely doubt a pistol with a shoulder stock would be one of them. Something like that would be significantly difficult to spin, and even harder to stop and catch right, not to mention look really, really odd.

Personally, I'm looking forward to some kind of large, blocky semi-automatic. The automatics we have now are nice, but not futuristic enough and not really big enough for what I have in mind. I'd like to see a few flintlock pistols, as well, perhaps even one with a funnel barrel.

On the note of gun twirling, I wonder if a handgun with a laser sight won't look really odd in these cases, or if the laser sight would cut out for those moments so we don't see it constantly clip through our arms. Curious...