Requesting Advice

[Bluebeholder]

I'm considering making some girls of my own and was wondering what people consider the key features of a good pack (particularly from those who make them).  What is the minimum and optimum picture count?  Anything in particular to avoid?    Any advice on creating stating characters out?  And finally what design differences separate random and unique girls?

[Lorde]

I'll take a stab at this.

What is the minimum and optimum picture count?

Though I do expansion packs for characters, I don't have a hard or fast rule for how many images I use. I put "whatever I like" in the characters folder. I'd say a rough estimate would be to try to get at least 4 images each for Profile, and sex, 2 for group, bdsm, les, beast and anal (you can "fake" an anal pic if it's from behind and you can't see what hole it's in.) and maybe 1 each for death|defeat and preg. (you can fake a preg with warp brush in photoshop.) That should be a bare minimum. Keep in mind you probably won't even find that many for some characters. Other times you will find 100 sex pics and not one les pic.

Anything in particular to avoid?

If you are searching on E-hentai for images. Stay away from galleries marked image sets. There a sea of reuploaded content you can find on rule34 or danbooru. It's also better organized on the latter 2 sites. E-Hentai is still good for full artist sets though.

    Any advice on creating stating characters out?

not exactly sure what you are asking here. 

  And finally what design differences separate random and unique girls?

Think of random girls as filler girls. Most players treat them as such, so you probably only need a handful of images for them.

Also, keep in mind traits give boosts to stats. This sounds obvious..... till you get your girl into play and notice she has 3-4 stats at 100 already.  Also, it's probably a good idea to make high stat girls slaves. Or if free, give them a lot of spirit and confidence.  Don't go overboard on giving girls Iron Will though. We have a lot of girls with that trait already. XD


edit: Oh one thing I forgot to mention. About naming your images.

All you really need to do is name the image after the type label and whoremaster will render it. Standard practice is in the following format. (Image type label)(number).jpg

example: Sex22.jpg

What I have found out however is that WM doesn't really care how you number an image. As long as the image type label is present at the beginning of the name. Also doesn't care about case. Sooooo

sex22.jpg works.
sEx.jpg works
sex       23672846274821467687234.jpg works
sexytime.jpg works (I have tested this  )
S e x.jpg doesn't work.
thisissex.jpg doesn't work.

So that gives you a lot of leeway when naming images.

Also keep in mind that whoremaster supports gif and png image types. But not the extensions. So you can save some time renaming these file extensions  to .jpg instead of converting them.

[LordShame]

Personally, I think at least 3-4 pics per category (maybe 1-2 for preg and death and a little more for profile) is a good place to start, though it's not really a hard minimum. More is better, obviously, but to me, quality comes first, and I'd rather see a smaller number of good pics than to have to look at a not-so-good one every once in a while.

As for design differences between uniques and randoms... With randoms, you should take advantage of the fact that the stats are randomized, while still making sure that your girl type has its own distinct character. Give them a small number of guaranteed traits (or near-guaranteed, as in 80-90%) and a few uncommon traits (30-50%) to define them as a group, and a large number of rare traits (5% or less) so there are still different individuals within that group. And for the stats, settle on which are important for the girl type, and set them to minimal variation; the others should vary widely.

Like, say you're building a soldier girl. For the stats, you need constitution and combat skill, and you want to set them pretty high, maybe at 75-95.  Agility is important, but you can have the slow, strong type, so set it to 30-70. Everything else can be 10-60 so you can have smart ones, dumb ones, cute ones, etc. As for the traits, you can have strong and tough at 75%, you can assume many will be scarred up so you put small scars at 85, cool scars at 50 and horrific scars at 20, and some of them will be assassins or adventurers, so you can put those at 25. That said, this is the group, and you want individuals. To get individuals, you set up a bunch of 5-10% traits, enough that each one is rare, but the girl is almost guaranteed to have a couple. That's where you go nuts with the nipples, breast size, legs, figure and other physical or personality traits that don't directly relate to being a soldier. And in the end, maybe some of them got traumatized or hurt in the war, so put in fragile, mind fucked, twisted, one-eyed, sadistic, maybe even some addictions, all at 2-5%.

So in the end, you have your soldier girl type, which is defined by high combat and constitution and the tendency to have scars, and among that type you have interesting variations in body type and personality, rather than every soldier girl being a clone of the other.

[exodia91]

Just use Common Sense.

[megamanx]

The thing is most people don't have common sense, which should be named uncommon sense.

[sgb]

What is the minimum and optimum picture count?
-Matter of preference.  Personally if I DL a pack and it has less than 20 images I don't keep it, but others may not care.  The important thing is the Profile images, as this is what the player will be looking at most of the time.  If you can't find at least 5-6 good profile images, I'd say the character isn't popular enough (among artists) to be suitable for a pack.

Anything in particular to avoid?
-Avoid 'extreme' fetishes (ie anything gross; use your common sense here).  Many people won't even want to look through these to delete them, so keep them for personal use if you like them.

Any advice on creating stating characters out?
-Download the coretraits mod or at least read through it so you can see what the various traits are actually doing.  Play a game in Test mode and take walks until you get the new girl (move other pack config files to another directory if you have too many) and see what her exact starting stats are.  Balance is up to you of course, but it's not terriblely interesting to have girls with many stats already in the 80+ range.  I personally get hit the randomize button, and then tweak certain stats to suit the character and balancing from there.

And finally what design differences separate random and unique girls?
-Random girls don't need as many images.  In fact, a good use for unique packs you decide to abandon due to lack of images is to be salvaged as random packs.  Don't make them TOO light though; you still want them to be worth looking at.  You can also get away with using different character images for random packs.  For example, for a 'nurse girl' pack you could take nurse images for all kinds of different games to make one pack.  Since random girls are just supposed to be generic examples, it doesn't matter if there's a busty redhead in one image and a petit brunette in the next.

But ultimately,

Just use Common Sense.

just go with what he said.

[Mehzerz]

When I make random girls they're generally the same girl. (There's one exception I can think of) I can see why having very different girls under one category would be ok. But in my descriptions I usually say why they all look the same. (The Windows girls for example) For some of the monsters, I planned on doing like blue slime, red slime ect. but there simply weren't enough images. 


So it's really up to you. Random girls aren't as important to some, since unique girls are what most people go for anyways. (Myself included)


I'm really disappointed with my Back to the future pack, Goth and Goth2 are seriously lacking. I may just put other girl images in there after all.

[DocClox]

For some of the monsters, I planned on doing like blue slime, red slime ect. but there simply weren't enough images.

You could probably do that by fiddling with the colour map in the gimp or photoshop.

[teitogun]

Depends on your standards and what you're able to find. Since I try to make sizeable image packs, I usually favor quality over quantity. Still my image packs are nowhere as thorough as some other uploaders'.

In general, for me a passable image pack is one that exceeds 70 pictures. A good image pack of a fairly common girl should be in the triple digits. For some girls, it's not so hard to go upwards to hundreds or more. I'm currently making an Asuka pack, and my goal is to reach at least 400 pics. I don't always include every picture I find though, trying to maintain at least a minimal standard of quality.

[megamanx]

Asuka Langley Souryu I assume if so then yeah i would be kinda disappointed if you couldn't find 400 good quality one(at the artists, not you)

[Lorde]

Depends on your standards and what you're able to find. Since I try to make sizeable image packs, I usually favor quality over quantity. Still my image packs are nowhere as thorough as some other uploaders'.

You do a damn good Job Teito. Just saying.