GAME: Away From Home
CHARACTER NAME: Truck Nuts
There is perhaps nothing I enjoy so much as a 3D porn game developer attempting to represent a convincing dinner table spread. It's such a wonderful encapsulation of everything I enjoy about these games.
See, poser tools such as Daz3D prioritize character models and clothing far above prop models such as food (searching "food" on the Daz 3D asset store produces just 130 results, while a search for a specific clothing item like "bikini" yields 184). This means that if you want to represent a well-laid dinner table, your options are extremely limited, and the end result often resembles the above - a confusing hodgepodge of disparate elements. Let's list them out:
- The central plate is by far the most egregious, containing what looks like a single pancake, on top of which are a handful of onion rings, a dollop of mashed potatoes, and two slices of ham. Drizzled across one of the ham slices is what might be gravy, barbecue sauce, or maybe maple syrup
- The other large plate in the center of the table contains a stack of four pancakes and three slices of French toast, both stacks drenched in melted butter. A single slice of tomato has been added as a garnish
- Two small bowls of maybe the worst-looking salad I have ever seen. Where did these motherfuckers FIND square spinach leaves? Brother PLEASE do not eat that
- Every single plate that's actually in front of a person has a different array of food on it, making it seem like they were served at some kind of hotel continental breakfast instead of by a single home cook
- Top-left plate features two sunny-side-up eggs and a few slices of bacon
- Bottom-center plate: an omelet, a single sausage, and two bacon slices
- Top-right plate: omelet and two differently-colored food-adjacent lumps that I THINK are meant to represent scrambled eggs and boiled spinach, but that's just my best guess
What a rich tapestry. I love it. The REALLY wonderful thing is that SO MANY of these 3D porn games make similarly haphazard attempts at representing dinner tables. And every single one of them is radically different, deranged in its own unique way, despite painting with the same extremely limited palette. I probably have at LEAST a dozen shots of differently-laden dinner tables, and I am so very excited to share them with you in the future.
Now, if you're someone who is at all familiar with 3D animation, game development, or the production of visual art in general, you might be questioning why on EARTH this kind of thing is so prevalent in these porn games, if the toolsets are so bad at populating them? Why put so much work into dressing a dinner table when there simply isn't any way to do it convincingly? After all, there are lots of things that 3D art can't represent very easily, and food/eating is always very high on that list. There are lots of ways to mitigate the deficiency in supply of food models in this situation, such as:
- Characters could announce that they are about to eat dinner, and then cut to a table of empty dishes, with characters stating that dinner is now over
- Characters could express a strong preference for the limited types of food that the toolset has models for (such as breakfast/diner foods, which always seem to be in good supply)
- Shots could be positioned such that the actual dinner table is never shown while characters are sitting down to eat
My working theory is that the impulse to dress a fully-laden dinner table is very much wrapped up in how many of these 3D porn games are about incest (I'll dig more into that in a later post). There's a rhythm, a certain set of beats every one of these lookalike incest sims tend to hit (I poked fun at this over on my other account), and one of those beats is The Dinner Table Scene. The Dinner Table Scene is an efficient way for multiple characters to deliver expository dialogue, get into conflict with one another, and flirt, wrapped up in the urban/suburban nuclear family model that these games so often base their sucking & fucking around. And, of course, you can't have a Dinner Table Scene without a dinner table, and so: monstrosities abound. Whatever the reason, it's a neverending source of delight for me, and I hope that it shall be for you as well.
BONUS: Cousin Lily looking like a mostly-used-up tube of toothpaste. Girl you need to see a bones doctor
A feast fit for a king. Quickly--our fair cousin will never thrive on such mean fare. Bring this meal to her at once!