Pic 33: Testing hair and "black dress" options

The following picture are all flawed in one way or another. This is on purpose as I am testing hair and dress options.  As you can see in the background, I am playing with the living room. I learned from Hopepunk City, that Ariane looks better against a dark turquoise colored wall than a dark red wall.  This is because the opposite of skin tone is turquoise.  Bottom line is I am still playing with the colors.

So this is the black dress and hair style of the current version of Date Ariane.  For each hair and outfit, I am doing two pictures. One standing and lit from the back, and one sitting and lit from the front. Dresses and skirts don't handle sitting poses very well.  While the dress looks great on the left, in a sitting pose it looks like it is clipping through her leg and you can see right up her skirt.  Sometimes that's a feature.

This second dress is a bit more daring.  It might be fun as an evening gown, but I can't help think it looks like a negligee.  The corners of the bottom of the skirt are individually poseable so the sitting pose doesn't look bad, except the back of the dress is clipping with the chair.

The hair style is the same as I used in Ariane in Paradise and I still think it looks really good.  If I decide to use an old style again, this might be my first choice.

This is an interesting dress because the skirt and top are separate items. In fact the top is the spaghetti strap top from last week, and the pleated skirt is from a school girl uniform. It still has the problems with sitting that the others do.

I am thinking of using this in the dress shop game, since the top and skirt are separate and can be textured to any color easily.  Using this as the dress throughout the game would mean whatever dress you buy in the dress shop could be worn everywhere.  I could just recolor the dress.

The hair here is the hair used in parts 1, 4, and 5 of Rachel Meets Ariane and all of Hopepunk City.  The biggest flaw is the left and right shoulder parts do not rest flat on the shoulder without clipping.  Adjusting for that resulted in quite a few continuity errors in HC.

Another dress option I could go is NOT a dress.  This is outfit #3 from last week but with the less revealing top of #2, and a nice black satin jacket thrown over it.  The biggest advantage is that the pants fit perfectly while sitting, so I don't have to adjust anything.

The hair is the new hair I am considering for the game, but in these pictures you can see it's biggest flaw and it's biggest strength.  The left picture shows harsh shadows cast on the face with the poor lighting. There are similar shadows with all the hair styles, but this one is the worst.  If I stick with this hair I am going to have to be super picky about the lighting I use to avoid the harsh shadows.

The right picture shows the hair's advantage: the shininess of the hair in good lighting makes the hair more realistic looking than the others. If I decide to pick another hair, I am going to have to play with the textures to match this look.

The final "dress" is the same jacket as picture 4, but colored blue instead of black.  It also doesn't have a top underneath, compensating by closing the top up a little. Wearing a jacket with no shirt might make dancing fun.

The hair used here is the fanciest of the hairstyles.  It was previously used in Rachel Meets Ariane part 3 where Ariane poses for pictures for Rachel. It has the same disadvantage as the third hairstyle in that the front shoulder fringes have to constantly be adjusted.  On the other hand in the poorly lit left, there are very few odd face shadows.

So what do you think? What dress and hairstyle do you think looks the best?