The History Of Abbey (Part 1)

Okay, so I've noticed that, for a lot of 3D artists (like so many artists before them) creating an established character (i.e. a character that people have come to recognize, relate to, or even look foward to seeing) changes things. Now Abbey isn't as famous as, oh lets say Erogenesis' Lali (or Epoch's Clara Ravens, or any of Blackadder's girls. There are so many wonderfully done recuring characters in 3DX that it's hard to keep up...) but she has been a somewhat regular fixture of Renderotica's forum galleries for about four years now (and Art of Darkness for about two years now, I think), so I thought it might be fun for some of you to see were Abbey came from (for the rest, it's an excuse for gratuitous nudity... and isn't that what the internet is really all about?! No seriously, I asking!)

This is the version of Abbey that some of you may know already. Her back story and the details of the character have stayed a bit of a secret, because I still plan to do a series of Abbey comics and I didn't want to give to much away, but Abbey's silly fun loving personality, unstoppable libedo, and her occasional use of assault weapons have been featured several times images I've posted. It's been a long road to get Abbey to this point, so lets see how Abbey's evolved.

 

The dark haired character you see here (at right) is Vanessa. In a way, she is Genesis for the Abbey character. Vanessa, seen here in 3D for the first time anywhere, is a character I came up with almost 15 years ago. She was created to be the perfect universal female lead for action storys. The basic idea is that she's young, beautiful, athletic, and highly intelligent. Her short and sassy haircut with her bangs playfully framing her face was chosen for a reason, it hints that, while she is concerned about her appearence, she has a rebellious streak and her personally was fun and sarcastic. Basically I thought her up as a default character in stories I was working on, because just by changing her outfit and were in the story you meet her, I instantly know who she was in a story and what she would say or do. Frequently, when I think up a new idea for a comic, novel, or a movie idea, in my head this is what the female lead looks like until I need to change things up a bit for story reasons, or because they can't all look like her (sigh).

In the world of 3D, these two are where Abbey really got started. The blonde character was called Celeste, and she was my very first attempt at making a custom character using the Victoria 4 figure. And yes, this is where the dickgirl/Futa part of Abbey's story starts. I had an idea about four years ago to do a comic series about a teenaged/twenty-something dickgirl who was shy and desperatly trying to live a "normal" life, who would get sucked into a series of sexual and physical adventures that would, eventually, teach her to make peace with her "unique" nature . The black haired character to her right, would have been her best friend (also a dickgirl) whose much more adventurous personality would have been the source of many of thier naughtier adventures. I never did think of a good name for the best friend... Because shortly after I started working on stories for this pair, something happened that changed the whole coarse of the project.

Like any good character, their adventures are only as good as the world you create for them. I needed more characters to fill out the world Celeste would live in, but I didn't have the money to buy a ton of "off the self" 3D characters and making Celeste took a long time because I was still getting used to tweeking Victoria 4 with Morphs+, so I had to improvise. The Best Friend character, by the way, was and "off the shelf" by 3D vender Exnem called Luciana. One day I decided to take all the characters I had at the time, and mix-and-match thier skin textures, to see if I could cheat a few good characters out of that. I needed a sort of punk/goth dickgirl to be a club rat at a local night club for a story I was tinkering with. I combined the texture I was using for Celeste with the Morphs I used for her Best Friend and came up with new character that I really liked...

 

In the middle is the result of that combination. I tweeked the face morph a tiny bit and played with body dials to give her a tough but sexy build, and this is what I came up with. Strong, rebellous, and sexy. I quickly realized that in my tinkering over the next few weeks, that I was using this new character more and more, and the others less and less. It became obvious that this new character was my new favorite for a number of reasons. While Celeste could be quite cute with the right expressions, she looked best when pouting or suprised, this caused her in my mind to become much more timid and vulnerable then I had wanted her to be. She was accidentaly becoming a character that people would take advantage of and I didn't want her to ALWAYS be the victim! The new girl had such a sweet face that she looked just as good or better when pouting or surprised, but she could manage a much better wicked grin! That helped form the idea that the new girl was only the victim when she wanted to be... and when she didn't, watch out, cuz she could be a natural born trouble maker!

I continued to play around with character. If you where a member of Renderotica back then, you may remember seeing Abbey look like this. I added piercings and tattoos, played with hair colors, tweeked her body till she had just the right combination of muscles and feminine curves. (Yes ladies, I do realize that very few women look like this in the real world and for those that do, it's a lot of hard work and probably a good amount of plastic surgery. I'll talk about that later). Unrealistic as Abbey's figure may seem, I was mostly happy with her (though, the extreme nature of her physique did cause me to give a lot of tought to how she would come to have such a body, we'll talk more about that on page 2). I've since removed a lot of the tatoos and peircing as Abbey's personality has been fleshed out in my mind. Some of these things may return later on but, I thought, the most fun part of any heroes journey is usually finding out how they got there, I'd have to start with Abbey's origin and then work outward from there! So it's back to the basic figure that I liked so much. 

So, I had a character that I was really happy with, and people where actually starting to recognize (even if only on Renderotica), but one thing still bugged me. Abbey's body had long since been purely a feat of Morphs+ (with help from X&M Perfect Victoria Fixes) but her face was still Exnem's Luciana with some tweeks. Nothing against Exnem, but I wan't to ditch the morph injection, partly because it interfered with some expression, and partly because I wanted Abbey to become even more unique. So I spent an afternoon carefully recreating her face, just using Morphs+. Slight adjustments here and there to play with her age and make sure that she could still emote properly. Then I decided to subtly soften her body just a bit, adjust her breasts to a slightly more natural shape... And here we have Abbey 4.0. It's hard to tell the difference, but that was the point. Not to change the character, just to make her a bit more my own.

But there's still a lot of work left to do... Remember what I said about a character only being as good as the world they live in... It's time to add some people to Abbey's little world!

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