Details on How Ellie Is Made

Main Daz Studio Components

Ellie is a Genesis 8.1 Female. I likely won’t migrate her to Genesis 9 for a long time, if ever. In terms of paid items, pretty much all of them were purchased on sale, but even considering that, she’s still somewhere between $150 and $300 of paid components.

Her shape was made with a combination of:

Her textures were made with Skin Builder 8 for Genesis 8 Female by Discobob and Zev0. It won’t run on G8.1F, but you can run it on G8F and then load up the materials on G8.1F. I had to tweak the nails, they came out weird.

Her hair is Lizanna Hair by outoftouch, but using ColorWerks Hair Shaders by SloshWerks in order to get a completely custom color for that perfectly ambiguous brown/red. Her eyebrows are Super Natural Brows by RedzStudio, also using the ColorWerks Hair Shaders.

Now for her accessories:

And now clothes:

Lastly, Ellie’s all-important skirt, one of the biggest and spinniest you’ve ever seen, is from the dForce Skirts for G8 Female by Sunfire, but extremely modified. To try and make a long story short, I used dFormers to turn the skirt into a giant disc, hence making it a full circle rather than the 1/4 circle it seems to actually be. I then draped it down onto a copy of its original shape with some cones to manually position the folds. I saved that shape as a morph, and then I was able to overdrive it to about 105% to make a skirt that is juuuust a bit more than a full circle. This is important for it to be able to do the spinny effect I want! I then made a scene where G8F spun at various speeds while wearing the skirt, and saved a bunch of frames from that timeline as additional morphs. That way, Ellie can go spinny without having to actually run any simulations.

The coin band on her skirt is something called a Geometry Shell. It’s basically a duplication of a figure or item’s geometry, but spaced away from the figure by a fixed amount. I set up an opacity mask on it so that it’s basically just a draped line of coins, and applied the gold accessory shader to it. The underside of her skirt is a geometry shell too; surfaces in Daz Studio are usually not double-sided. These automatically follow dForce simulations and morphs. I used this technique to put the gems on the bracelets and anklets too, by using the emission map as an opacity mask for the geometry shell.

Graphic Tee Designs

Ellie’s main t-shirts are IP unencumbered, using designs that are CC0, public domain, or otherwise permissive. Her main t-shirt uses a heart from Wikimedia Commons. The majority of her other t-shirts use emoji from Twemoji via the Online Cheatsheet. Paired with the fact that her plate skirts count as transformative fair use, many of her outfits are IP-safe!

I sometimes put her in real t-shirts–like ones from the Yetee–when I get permission from the artists behind each design to do so.

Skirt Designs

Her main pattern, used on her skirt border, and used to be used on the frolic top, is from the seamless daisy vector pack from FreePatternsArea. To use it on the skirt, I pre-tile it and then use a polar coordinate mapping on it; the skirt’s UV map is a giant circle. The pattern is under a free license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). As its license permits and promotes sharing under the same license, I offer up the Spinny Skirt Texture Kit, a GIMP file that was used to make the skirt. In addition, here’s the GIMP file for the regular tiled version of the main pattern. Both versions let you export the pattern with six different background colors!

Like I mentioned before, the skirt’s UV map is a giant circle, so it can also just use circular images as designs. She has a few simple designs to illustrate the versatility of being able to turn any circular image into a skirt:

But my favorite type of circular object to use to make skirts for her is dinner plates! Many of them are circles with pretty patterns, and they just happen to make lovely skirts as well. When she spins fast enough for the skirt to flatten out, it resembles its original form. Another fun fact: the German term for a circle skirt translates literally to “plate skirt.” Other languages are rife with ideas for circular objects to make skirts with!

In order for a plate to work well as a skirt design, it has to have a design that goes all around the circumference, or at the very least, takes up a lot of contiguous space. If the design has too much empty space, the folds of the skirt will swallow it. It also has to be circular. You can make square skirts instead of circle skirts, of course; these are usually called handkerchief skirts. But that’s not what Ellie wears! :V Another thing that is tricky to deal with is the highlights on the rims. If the highlight isn’t on the design, I can just erase it. Otherwise, I usually just cheat and rotate the image so that the highlight is on the back of the skirt, and won’t appear unless the skirt is in full flight. I could definitely use some help on figuring out how to deal with highlights! If the pattern is simple–single color type beats–then I can turn it into a mask and use it to make a multitude of designs!

Replacements.com has been a very helpful resource for finding good-quality, directly-above pictures of pretty plates to make her skirts with, but sometimes other sources have better images. I pretty much always have to run them through realesrgan to make them suitable for use as textures, though. That upscales them and removes JPEG artifacts.

The way all this out-of-character texture map trickery exists in-character is that she buys any plate she thinks would make a pretty skirt and recreates the design by hand. It takes a while, but it’s always worth it to her!

Misc Items

There are a bunch of other items that recur often enough to be mentioned here.

Alternate Outfits

Recurring Props