People who like hybrids, why?

I don't have a specific ideal body, it's more an issue of matching the sculpt with the body that I find that suits him.
But as a general standard for me, it's: for guys bodies that aren't too childish but neither super ripped (but it depends on the head, if it suits I ripped body then it's fine). I don't like, for example, super childish heads on a ripped body, or a very masculine head on a childish body. Body and head have to match.
I prefer realistic proportions too.
For girls, not a super sexualized body in an unnatural way (like those baloon boobs or stuff), and again more realistic proportions. Big boobs are absolutely fine if they are realistically done, but if they look like balloons I don't like them.

 

There are a lot of reasons. It's actually very rare that I buy a full doll anymore.

Mostly it's just aesthetic, though. I like very particular proportions and aesthetics, and hybrids let me completely control the way my dolls look. There are some body traits I don't really like, so I buy different bodies to have a full doll that I like in its entirety. Sometimes I don't even particularly dislike the original body but I know another body will give the head a more unique overall silhouette.

It's also considerably less expensive sometimes.

I don't really worry about resin mismatch because I'm a faceup artist and I know how quickly "white" can look like "normal" with a light application of pastels. I try to get a body that is slightly darker than the head if possible, actually.

 

I really didn't understand hybriding until I started doing it. I found the perfect head for one of my characters, but it was a minifee and the character was supposed to be tall. I had a dollzone body I was planning on modding to do a headless character. Bought the head secondhand, popped it on the body, and it was fantastic. The resin match was a little off, but not enough to bother me. I've done a lot since then, mostly of minifee heads on taller bodies.

 

I have four bigger Soom ladies. One is with new body, two are with the older body, which looked nice, but posing was pretty mid tier. The fourth one is a hybrid with head from Soom and body from Doll Factory. Reason for that is, I don't want too many dolls with same body (atleast if the body is not something I really like). I like seeing and playing with different bodies, that might be the reason why I have so many different kind of dolls (others that aren't for this forum ). I love testing new mechanisims and see how differently bodies can pose from each other.

 

easy. I'm picky about aesthetics. I wanted a similar sister sculpt to match my ringdoll raven boy. The nicest sibling face I actually liked was luts' avalanche, which was a boy sculpt. I tried looking at luts' girl bodies but they were not what I had in mind. My preference is for a fuller, mature, big girl body with boobs that weren't 2 halves of a ball slapped on a torso.

I found my perfect body sculpt from Granado but their face sculpts are also not in the vicinity of what I wanted, so there was no way for me to be happy unless I hybrided.

P.s. the luts head and granado body worked! Proportions-wise it's amazing.

 

I'm not really a hybrid person myself - the only 'hybrid' I currently have is my Little Rebel Mini Kamu and that's because the artist who made him doesn't sell a body in that scale (I put him on a Fantasy Doll body, which is the same casting company as Little Rebel so I knew the resin would match).
I know a lot of people do hybrid to make the doll overall more affordable but personally I would only consider hybriding if I really loved the head but disliked the body enough to not want to buy it or if I already had a doll on that body (I like to have all my dolls on different bodies).
How I see it is the majority of the cost of the doll if actually for the body so if I don't love that too then I don't want to spend my money on it, but if I can have the head I like on a different body that I like better (that would work fit and match wise) then I would rather go for that and have a doll I love as a whole rather than a doll that I love the head but not the body.

 

Some of my dolls are hybrids because they came form companies that only made heads and I had to get bodies form other companies for them, but mostly I have hybrids because I didn't think the face sculpt of the doll worked with the body - My dolls are mostly young children, and I get creeped out by seeing a child like face sculpt on a mature body with boobs and hips. I know it's an anime/manga thing and these dolls came out of the whole anime culture originally, but it's just a World Of Wrong to me,

Anyhow, there are very few companies that produce child-proportioned bodies in SD size so most of my SD sized girls are heads I like hybrided onto the few brands of body that do have a child silhouette. Some of my girls are on boy bodies with the boy bits modded off because that's an easier way to get an immature/undeveloped girl body and have a it of variety in the height and build of my family of girls.

And, one of my slim mini's is Frankensteined together from part from five different dolls because it was a cheap way of doing it t the time.

And then there's the ones like DollsTown where I like the bodies, but most of their face sculpts look far too miserable for me to be interested in, so I have other heads on those bodies.

Teddy

 

I myself love IOS heads, but not a big fan of bodies.That's for Ringdoll too. Mostly is because I like to have different body for a head. Hybridizing is just having more options, that's all. If I find everything in a full doll, I buy it in full...

 

Most of my dolls are hybrids, for me it's a posability thing. It may be because I have a background with stopmotion animation puppets, but it drives me crazy when a doll can't pose well. It's a lot easier to dye a body to match a head then it is to mod all it's joints to pose better. That being said, I haven't ever even had to dye a doll, because I can usually get a close enough match. I'm actually thinking about hybridizing my only non hybrid doll because she poses really well, except in her knees.

 

Because I had a loose head I was gifted by the company but couldn't part with because the original doll I bought was my grail. Now the gifted head uses my grail's body, because she fits the character better. And my grail head is not something I'd like to part with since she isn't made anymore and wasn't very popular. Finding her second hand would be a hassle. So instead of having her catch dust, I'm going to turn her into Frankendolly.

 

I like hybrids to give my characters a variety of body types. For example, I have my Minifees on their original body (I do like their original bodies though I know others do not like them whatsoever). MNF bodies have slim mature bodies. I have a MNF on a more child-like pear-shape body, another one on a plus-size mature body, another on a taller lanky body, etc! Posing isn't too much of an issue of mine as long as it can sit and stand, I'm good!

Also, as some said, there are dolls that are only available as heads so hybrids are a must. Artists tend to sculpt only heads and not the body becuse a body is hard to deal with. Some companies that come to mind are like R.Dean, Illusion Garden, Rosetta Doll, Foveo (their SDs are only heads atm but their MSDs have bodies), and so forth.

 

It's not an issue for me - in real life, very few people have the exact shade of skin-tone on their face that they do on the rest xof their body, so an exact resin match between head and body isn't a problem for me (in a way, it's more realistic for there to be a slight difference).

Teddy

 

If you look at my profile, you’ll see how many hybrids I have. At this point, few of my dolls aren’t hybrids. (15 hybrids to 9 non-hybrids—I expected way more hybrids there!)

Some of them are heads that aren’t sold with bodies (Simply Divine Medusa Valentina, Blackcherry Kaorin/Ichigo, Twigling Eloy all being good examples). One of them is a doll whose resin colour changed when her artist got a new caster, so a body from her own company wouldn’t match. So those ones, if anyone wants those heads, they need a hybrid body.

Then we have the ‘vanilla’ hybrids- dolls that are just a head on a new body. Vidania’s head was the second head that doll came with, so she just got a spare body and became her own character. Marrin’s company had really nice bodies for the price, but no heads I liked for her character. Dacrya’s head looked too small on the body She was sold on, but looks fine on her current body. I’ve yet to find a head that suits Aura, and looks good with Shrike, but I really like her body, so I’m sticking with that (current attempt is an Asella head that I think is just too big!). Other hybrids happen when a head I like looks decent on a body I like, so I go with it, or when a body has a feature that suits a character. Aradia, for instance, is an EID head, but needs to be closer to 60cm so she’s going to be a hybrid.

Then we have the “milliput take the wheel” hybrids, in which I’m more playing frankenstein than hybridding. Acyra is a loongsoul 73cm male body modded into a very tall, buff lady. On top of that, her head, hands and feet all come from different companies. I needed hands that didn’t look massive compared to her body (seriously, ls does Massive Hands) and feet that could also wear heels, because no one can tell me my 7’ tall lady can’t wear heels. She’s an easier hybrid, because I’m not really changing out bits of her body.

Zariel is harder. She’s an iplehouse HID girl chest, (ws) on a soom ID 68 body (ws) with impldoll muscle arms and thighs (ws) and possibly twigling hands. No idea what head yet. She happened because the iplehouse body was too short (65cm) the idealian had too large of a chest, and I didn’t like the proportions of the impl body, so I took the things I liked, and made a doll out of them. Eventually, she’s getting doll chateau wings too. For this kind of hybrid, I had to mod her upper torso to be wide enough to accommodate her new chest, and I’ll see what mods her shoulders need for the arms. She’s also going to need holes in her back for the wings. For me, it’s all worth it, because a 68-70cm muscular woman with bone wings isn’t happening any other way, and modding is so much fun.

The final hybrid here needed to be modular. I wanted to shell a character and her 6 past lives as one doll, and for that, I needed to be able to swap chests, arms, hands, legs, maybe torsos. And she needed 7 heads. But of course, I couldn’t have gone the easy route and gotten a body that allowed that kind of customization, because the only one I liked was like €700 for the body, not including add-ons. (And the list of add ons is long). So that one is going to be made of so many companies’ parts by the time I’m done her (unless I suddenly get the kind of money to make her through Twigling?)

So basically hybrids allow my more variety in sculpts and characters I can shell, and allow me to make other use impossible dolls. Ironically, it’s not even a price thing—often the things I hybrid cost me more to hybrid—it’s just a thing of “i don’t want it if it isn’t right for my character.” The one money saver is the one I’m making instead of buying a twigling doll, plus 4ish chests, one extra torso, two extra sets of upper arms, two or three extra sets of thighs, and then several pairs of hands. Which I think would land well over 1k before converting € to CAD.

 

I love hybriding, and have a multitude of reasons why I choose to do it. The most basic would be artist heads that didn't also offer bodies for them. Most other reasons are a bit more complex.

For a more general explanation—all the resin members of my crew are based off of existing characters (either my preexisting OCs or a few that come from some form of existing media), and getting proportions and bodily features correct is a big priority. Some of the heads I really like for a specific character don't come with a body that suits them, so I have to hunt around for other options that will. In other cases the body is a horribly clunky, barely poseable mess, and I need something that has more fluid posing capabilities for that specific character.

As for some more unusual, nitpicky reasons—

This reason's a bit more silly, but....for some of my male resin crew members, they needed non-stationary...manbits. The bodies that they were offered with didn't have this option, and I wasn't going to go out of my way to do a special mod-job on the ones they came with to fix this.

Another reason that has become especially specific for one of my bjds in particular—I have Asami Sato shelled as an Iplehouse Asa, while her gf Korra is an Impldoll Sally on the more curvy Star body. In-series, Korra is shorter than Asami, but the SID body makes her currently shorter than Korra—even with heels. the only way for me to fix this is to hybrid, as the EID also isn't tall enough to make this work, but also because....Iple bodies (more so the older ones, I can't speak for the remodeled ones) are clunky, hard to pose messes. I'd prefer to have Asami on a more scale appropriate, poseable alternative body—which means she'll need to be hybrided.

There are a good many reasons why people choose to practically hybrid heads onto different company bodies, and a few less-sensical reasons for folks looking to achieve a unique look. I haven't done this myself, but I've heard of people desiring larger heads on smaller bodies a la SD/MSD combo (in effect creating a resin version of Pullip or Blythe). I've also known of folks that put OT heads (Pullip, Blythe, OT vinyl, etc.) onto resin bodies.

Hybriding opens up opportunities for a lot of variation amongst the hobby, and gives people options to steer away from same-iness/excessive clone syndrome within their collection and amongst the hobby as a whole. There are only so many ways a person can change the appearance of a bjd stuck on their original body to get some variety, so having more options available gives people more choice and variety.

Personally, probably more than half my crew is hybrids. It just worked out better for my OCs that way rather than having them be stuck on the original bodies they would've come on.

 

The reason is simple for me - event heads. 3 of my hybrids are simply event heads I fell in love with and never bothered to buy the same company bodies for, for reasons of either money saving or aesthetics. The heads themselves were already hard enough to come by, mostly priced higher then what they were originally worth and also aged so that a color fit wasnt garantueed anyway. Sometimes its also simply experimenting and liking the outcome.

 

I don't have hybrids yet but I'm considering one since I don't like the body the company offers that much but I like the heads a lot. That's all there is to me really.

 

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I'm very picky about bodies. They need aesthetic AND engineering - but the sculpting also needs to match the vibe I'm going for with a doll's character. The shape of the hands and tbe details, the poses it is capable of, these are all things that characterize a doll and so it needs to match the personality I want them to give off.