Faces of the Rift

The DD2 Community Character Project is not just an experiment, it's a community art project. That doesn't mean we want to tamper with the data, but it does mean that when the data gives us options, we can make creative choices. That's what I did when I put together this early composite Feminine Beastren, based on five sources. 3 of the 5 characters used in this composite. From left to right: Dekion67's Mindy and Brynja and Dodocahedron's Tabitha. Once again, I used this method, choosing the mode  (or most frequent occurence) for selections and the average-median hybrid  for sliders. A small sample size of five characters means that for many categories, we're unlikely to turn up a mode. That was the case with many of the selections for this character. Since there is no value for these categories that occurs most frequently, we can make artistic choices. The fur opacity sliders are not up to us: they're the average-median hybrid of the submissons, so we have t...

This weekend saw two more submissions for the human female composite, up from 11 to 13. Here are the before and after: The color changes are simply because I started using the mode instead of the median for color selections. I'm not sure why I chose the median originally; maybe it was my sense that there's some logic to the color arrangements within the specific sheets, even though as a whole they aren't grouped in any particular order. Aside from that, you can also see changes to the facial structure. The distance between the nose and mouth has closed slightly (owing to a longer nose and higher mouth), the chin is just a bit narrower, the head is slightly larger, and the ears stick out a bit less. Also, while the screenshot doesn't show it, the character has decreased noticeably in height from 195 to 186, is slightly slimmer in the lower body but curvier in the chest, and is now tied between Eyebrow Shape #10 and #13. I've shown the latter in the second photograph ...

I recently discovered a new passion-project: making composite characters in the DD2 character creator. I find this fascinating for many reasons , and the best part is, anyone can participate . In this post, I'll walk you through how I made one of these composite characters. I began by doing an online search for Beastren Male slider sets. I found six results from creators who generously shared their sliders online: Top row: [1] u/okay_jelly6670's " Panda Beastren ," [2] u/4deCopas's nameless Arisen , [3] Slayer-Stevkan's " Savage Beast. " Bottom row: [4] u/FruitBoops " Hobbes, " [5] " Battle Beast, " user unknown, [6] u/CyberneticDiabetic's " Tai Lung. " Links to sliders in this caption.

Left to right: average, median, and average-median hybrid composites, all made from the same set of 11 characters. In another post I described my interest in making composite characters using DD2's character creator. By taking different characters and combining them, we can (1) run fun community projects where many people contribute artistically to the same character, and (2) create a result that's somehow representative of everyone's contributions. But the "somehow" matters: once we get character creation info, how exactly should we use it?

A composite male beastren based on seven different characters . You can read more on how he was created here . Dragon's Dogma 2's  character creator is truly amazing. I haven't taken the time to actually calculate the number of possible character combinations it can produce. But with around 1000 colors, over 100 face and body sliders (each with hundreds of positions), two races, two genders, and dozens of base heads, I'm guessing it must be very, very, very , very big . That's what I like about the Dragon's Dogma games: they allow variety, and you'll encounter a lot of that variety as you travel throughout the game world and encounter other players' pawns.