Don't Call it a Comb-back

I don't get my "bloomers" in a bunch when Nouk's name is mentioned. Nouk is a legendary TS2 creator who gave generously to the community and provided much needed diversity to the game. I should be so lucky as to be compared to her or considered in the same breath.

However, what DOES get my panties in a bunch is when someone makes accusations against me, questions my artistic integrity, and essentially calls me a liar.

I have nothing but respect for Nouk, and if she had been my inspiration, then I would've credited her. Period. After all, I credited everyone else who helped, even down to HP, Delphy, and Wes Howe for their programs, plugins, and tutorials.

The frohawk with cornrows isn't some original style that Nouk made up. It's a rare style, sure, but it's common enough in big cities with lots of diversity. I had wanted to make a frohawk with cornrows years before I found out that Nouk had made one.

The problem is that you only see the final product here. I spent about a month learning how to create hair with this project and experimenting with different frohawk shapes. I probably have close to 40 different drafts of this hair saved on my computer. The final version of the frohawk that you see is at least my FOURTH version of it.

The first version was an ugly, Mr. T-ish cylinder with some pulled vertices.

The second version was a thick, inner spikey layer surrounded by two tiers of large puffs.

In the third version, I took out the spikey layer because it didn't look right and replaced it with an inner layer of round puffs.

For the fourth (and fifth?) versions, I took a tally of how many polygons the hair would end up being once all the undersides had been created. The current version would've been well over 10,000 polys, and I wanted to find a better balance of looks & game performance. So, I removed the inner and outermost puffs, squished everything together, and then made some flatter, lower poly layers on the outside to preserve the fluffy look while keeping the polys down.

The final design is simply the most efficient solution I could find to creating a frohawk that looked fluffy enough to be believable without bloating the poly count, and without stretching the polys to the point where they became too jaggedy.

If you had come in here and simply asked about similarities to Nouk, then I wouldn't have minded. Instead, you came in here and made assumptions about me. You accused me without hearing my side of the story. You have already made up your mind about my innocence or guilt.

For all the work and time I put into learning, experimenting, reshaping, texturing, mapping, and testing this hair, probably close to 70 hours, I don't deserve to deal with your kind of bullshit. And as far as I'm concerned, the fact that you can come to my site and download the products of all my hard work is a fucking privilege. There are too many presumptuous assholes on the internet, and I'm too old and wise to tolerate this kind of disrespect on my own site.

And this is why are you are banned. If you'd like to continue this conversation, then you may PM me on MTS--privately, discreetly, and with a respectful tone, as you should have done in the first place.