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Appearing somewhat out of order -- there are other character reviews I want to get to -- but I felt like doing this one first, and what's the point of having your own thing if you can't sometimes do whatever you want?

So, recently, Daz released Freja 9, a new version of their Freja 8 character. And honestly, if you'd told me ahead of time that Freja would be the first repeat character from a previous generation, other than Michael or Victoria or Josie or one of the other evergreens ... I wouldn't have believed it. In any event, as most of the bundles included things I had no real use for, I purchased only Freja 9, Barselaj hair (on Freyr), the Kinship head morphs, and the Viking Eyes (again, on Freyr).

In general, Freja seems intended to be a less stylized version of the muscular warrior woman that the original She-Freak was meant to be, way back when. Daz also seems to be trying to mediate between groups of users with demands that aren't as different as they seem, but are somehow poles apart ... but more about that in a minute.

As with her putative partner Ivar 9, Freja 9 is sold with her HD version as default. She does include a standard resolution version. She therefore also includes both more detailed HD normal maps, as well as standard definition maps. Freja 9 includes her own Proportion slider, which adds about five "inches" of height. She also includes sliders to add muscle bulk, and it's here where Daz is trying to meditate between different customer groups. One set of people says, as Diana Ross was wont to sing, "I want MUSCLE!" They want muscle, they want bulk, they want definition, they want it lots and they want it NOW! (Seriously, some of the people in the forum ... but I digress.) The other group of people like an athletic female, but they think all that muscle is just too masculine. (... See previous parenthetical.) By keeping it as a separate slider, Daz is hoping to satisfy both groups of people. (Note: they have not satisified both groups of people. See previous parentheticals, and take them to their logical extremes.) For this image, I dialed up the bulk to 50%. Honestly, going from 50% to 100% doesn't really add THAT much visible bulk, but it's what I did. One slightly odd thing -- the texture they used for Freja is fair enough that you can actually see the veins in it. Yet there don't seem to be veins on her normal maps, and there aren't any HD veins morphs, as they did with more muscular G8 characters. Also, note that the Bulk slider actually softens Freja's muscular definition. Kind of a lot, actually.

Freja includes a hierarchical material preset for her full body, including eyes, eyelashes, and anatomical elements. That single preset also applies whichever genital preset would be appropriate, if it's attached, which is a rather clever bit of programming. (So, yes, with one single preset each, both Freja and Freyr are fully equipped, shall we say, under those skirts.) She includes the now-standard single eye color, and a body-only material preset. Very oddly, she includes no makeup whatsoever. I guess the thinking is that nobody would use her as a modern woman, so they'd always use the warrior makeups that came in her mega bundle -- this despite promo images showing her as a fully made-up modern woman. (I didn't forget makeup this time; it's not there to be forgotten.) In any event since most character makeups are LIE-based now, the ones that come with Victoria and/or Minerva should work. Odd choice, though. Anyway, Freja 9 also includes all three genital options, as well as the materials for male and female chests ... which brings us momentarily to Freyr.

Freyr's name comes from Scandinavian myths and legends. He was reportedly the twin brother of the goddess Freya ... and also probably her husband. (We are NOT going there; "brother" is QUITE enough, thanks.) For Freyr, I did something different this time. For previous female-to-male characters, I used a bunch of sliders, and very little from existing male characters ... in part because there really haven't been enough to work with until now. For Freyr, I used essentially only the other male characters. His head is mostly Michael, with a lot of Ivar, 50% of Freya herself, and a small amount of Nikolai 9. (More about Nik considerably later, I should think.) His mouth has been slghtly widened, because Freya made it a bit too small for all ... that. His body is various amounts of Ivar and Michael. To get him to towering Norse God size, I combined both the Proportion Height and Proportion Size sliders. As far as I can tell, Proportion Size is essentially a tweaked version of the Scale slider -- it does alter everything in proportion, but that really is just Scale. Proportion Height also alters everything, but focuses on increasing the height, so that taken to extremes, it might slim the character down some. The combination made him, at 6-9, a full "foot" taller than his sister. Anyway, since clearly he has to be on the viking continuum somewhere, he got the hair with the long braid. I also made him hyperblond and very fuzzy, because ... well, because. (Fun moment of re-discovery: trying to use the same shader on different hairs from different PAs doesn't always have the same result. In this case they were so different that it was just easier using the ones that came with Barselaj and the beard.) And yes, we will likely see more of Freyr somewhat later.

Trying to clothe the characters led me to run into something concerning. I didn't want to have both characters too dressed, but at the same time, I did want this to be relatively SFW. (...Relatively.) I don't have a huge number of skirts -- I mean, it's G9, so nobody has a huge number of anything -- but I discovered that all of the somewhat longer G9 skirts that I have are incompletely rigged. They're all designed for dForce, and all of the rigs stop at the hip. They don't acknowledge that anything below the hip even exists. This means that not only are they designed ONLY for dForce, but you're required to do an animated drape rather than a static drape.

Have I mentioned, I HATE ANIMATED DRAPES WITH A PASSION!? ...No? Well. Now you know. So I may need to figure out some way to rig all these skirts, if possible. In any event, because of that, I wound up putting both of them in Sade's Malna set -- for all that the skirt is fairly short, it's properly rigged below the waist. (Honestly, I was kind of shocked that Daz allowed skirts into the store with incomplete rigging. Reportedly, with G8, Daz required a minimum level of rigging for clothing; apparently with G9, it's gotten very minimal indeed.)

And a very brief word about the setting: Dystopian Garage is a texture set for Cyber Garage, both by Merlin for Daz+. Haven't really gone through all of it in any real detail. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how the rigging works for the garage. The ceiling and walls are separately boned, as one would expect of something by Merlin. However, when you turn off the ceiling, the girder structure overhead remains visible, so you can have it be the sort of decrepit structure where the ceiling has technically fallen in and just left the structure behind. (Mind, where the ceiling actually went would be a puzzlement, since it clearly didn't fall to the floor. But still. Nice work.)

Description

Appearing somewhat out of order -- there are other character reviews I want to get to -- but I felt like doing this one first, and what's the point of having your own thing if you can't sometimes do whatever you want?

So, recently, Daz released Freja 9, a new version of their Freja 8 character. And honestly, if you'd told me ahead of time that Freja would be the first repeat character from a previous generation, other than Michael or Victoria or Josie or one of the other evergreens ... I wouldn't have believed it. In any event, as most of the bundles included things I had no real use for, I purchased only Freja 9, Barselaj hair (on Freyr), the Kinship head morphs, and the Viking Eyes (again, on Freyr).

In general, Freja seems intended to be a less stylized version of the muscular warrior woman that the original She-Freak was meant to be, way back when. Daz also seems to be trying to mediate between groups of users with demands that aren't as different as they seem, but are somehow poles apart ... but more about that in a minute.

As with her putative partner Ivar 9, Freja 9 is sold with her HD version as default. She does include a standard resolution version. She therefore also includes both more detailed HD normal maps, as well as standard definition maps. Freja 9 includes her own Proportion slider, which adds about five "inches" of height. She also includes sliders to add muscle bulk, and it's here where Daz is trying to meditate between different customer groups. One set of people says, as Diana Ross was wont to sing, "I want MUSCLE!" They want muscle, they want bulk, they want definition, they want it lots and they want it NOW! (Seriously, some of the people in the forum ... but I digress.) The other group of people like an athletic female, but they think all that muscle is just too masculine. (... See previous parenthetical.) By keeping it as a separate slider, Daz is hoping to satisfy both groups of people. (Note: they have not satisified both groups of people. See previous parentheticals, and take them to their logical extremes.) For this image, I dialed up the bulk to 50%. Honestly, going from 50% to 100% doesn't really add THAT much visible bulk, but it's what I did. One slightly odd thing -- the texture they used for Freja is fair enough that you can actually see the veins in it. Yet there don't seem to be veins on her normal maps, and there aren't any HD veins morphs, as they did with more muscular G8 characters. Also, note that the Bulk slider actually softens Freja's muscular definition. Kind of a lot, actually.

Freja includes a hierarchical material preset for her full body, including eyes, eyelashes, and anatomical elements. That single preset also applies whichever genital preset would be appropriate, if it's attached, which is a rather clever bit of programming. (So, yes, with one single preset each, both Freja and Freyr are fully equipped, shall we say, under those skirts.) She includes the now-standard single eye color, and a body-only material preset. Very oddly, she includes no makeup whatsoever. I guess the thinking is that nobody would use her as a modern woman, so they'd always use the warrior makeups that came in her mega bundle -- this despite promo images showing her as a fully made-up modern woman. (I didn't forget makeup this time; it's not there to be forgotten.) In any event since most character makeups are LIE-based now, the ones that come with Victoria and/or Minerva should work. Odd choice, though. Anyway, Freja 9 also includes all three genital options, as well as the materials for male and female chests ... which brings us momentarily to Freyr.

Freyr's name comes from Scandinavian myths and legends. He was reportedly the twin brother of the goddess Freya ... and also probably her husband. (We are NOT going there; "brother" is QUITE enough, thanks.) For Freyr, I did something different this time. For previous female-to-male characters, I used a bunch of sliders, and very little from existing male characters ... in part because there really haven't been enough to work with until now. For Freyr, I used essentially only the other male characters. His head is mostly Michael, with a lot of Ivar, 50% of Freya herself, and a small amount of Nikolai 9. (More about Nik considerably later, I should think.) His mouth has been slghtly widened, because Freya made it a bit too small for all ... that. His body is various amounts of Ivar and Michael. To get him to towering Norse God size, I combined both the Proportion Height and Proportion Size sliders. As far as I can tell, Proportion Size is essentially a tweaked version of the Scale slider -- it does alter everything in proportion, but that really is just Scale. Proportion Height also alters everything, but focuses on increasing the height, so that taken to extremes, it might slim the character down some. The combination made him, at 6-9, a full "foot" taller than his sister. Anyway, since clearly he has to be on the viking continuum somewhere, he got the hair with the long braid. I also made him hyperblond and very fuzzy, because ... well, because. (Fun moment of re-discovery: trying to use the same shader on different hairs from different PAs doesn't always have the same result. In this case they were so different that it was just easier using the ones that came with Barselaj and the beard.) And yes, we will likely see more of Freyr somewhat later.

Trying to clothe the characters led me to run into something concerning. I didn't want to have both characters too dressed, but at the same time, I did want this to be relatively SFW. (...Relatively.) I don't have a huge number of skirts -- I mean, it's G9, so nobody has a huge number of anything -- but I discovered that all of the somewhat longer G9 skirts that I have are incompletely rigged. They're all designed for dForce, and all of the rigs stop at the hip. They don't acknowledge that anything below the hip even exists. This means that not only are they designed ONLY for dForce, but you're required to do an animated drape rather than a static drape.

Have I mentioned, I HATE ANIMATED DRAPES WITH A PASSION!? ...No? Well. Now you know. So I may need to figure out some way to rig all these skirts, if possible. In any event, because of that, I wound up putting both of them in Sade's Malna set -- for all that the skirt is fairly short, it's properly rigged below the waist. (Honestly, I was kind of shocked that Daz allowed skirts into the store with incomplete rigging. Reportedly, with G8, Daz required a minimum level of rigging for clothing; apparently with G9, it's gotten very minimal indeed.)

And a very brief word about the setting: Dystopian Garage is a texture set for Cyber Garage, both by Merlin for Daz+. Haven't really gone through all of it in any real detail. However, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how the rigging works for the garage. The ceiling and walls are separately boned, as one would expect of something by Merlin. However, when you turn off the ceiling, the girder structure overhead remains visible, so you can have it be the sort of decrepit structure where the ceiling has technically fallen in and just left the structure behind. (Mind, where the ceiling actually went would be a puzzlement, since it clearly didn't fall to the floor. But still. Nice work.)