Sunday 10 July 2016

Challenges!



Oh man, after having been out of comics for almost two years because of that infernal Project E, its tough getting back in. Its basically going from a technical mindset to a storytelling mindset, or rather a mindset of trying to comprehend and navigate an illogical and merciless obstacle course, to a world of free thought, creativity and ambition that sometimes overwhelms me. Next to my render PCs I have my laptop which is running movies the whole day. star wars, lord of the rings, blood diamond, tinker tailor, body of lies, the bourne series, zero dark thirty, the green zone, the veteran, in a big looping playlist just to get back into storymode lol.



But make no mistake, making a proper comic in CGI takes loads of planning. Props, locations and figures need to all be ready before you even start, and sometimes even entire pose sets need to be prepared if the scenes are too big like with the DD. Luckily the VIP of the Disco Dragon scene isn't too big, so that's going fairly ok, and has been doing so for the last few months. But for Sen's comic there's still a lot of preparing I had to do I never realized. 



As you will soon hopefully see, Sen's Initiation is a very busy occasion with loads of poses and weapons and gear to think of, as well as weird creatures with the craziest materials. The script is pretty mad too... its VERy different from Lali's comics.



A number of things I made in the last few days were some new weapons for Sen. The long Laesalash is inspired by the German Knechts Kreigsmesser, a simple but robust sable. I made it in 3dsmax.







I also made a spearhead that can be used as a sword. Since spears are very long and not very easy to lug around, the Turtum spear is more a sword than a spear, but if Sen finds a nice pole that she can lodge into the back of it, it can become a decent spear. She will use this in the comic.







Much more to come, like the throne of the Murguul (made by ghostman) and some variations of the murguul themselves. ugh... why do I always make such big projects...

Sunday 3 July 2016

Project E Lite

When Project E starts working in Poser 11*, I will wrap the project up when I have time. This will be a watered-down version of the initial plan for the figure. I will try to provide as many morph packs as possible. Texture variations and clothing will have to come from vendors.

How is this plan different from the initial one? There are a number of things that need changing and improving with this figure, but I simply don't dare to touch her rig anymore because the moment I do, Poser will break something. For example, I want to remove some ghost bones that are now obsolete (because that was a workaround for the JCM bug) and her shoulder blades might need more polygons, but the moment I plug her into the setup room, channels get mixed up, and the bending is affected in the weirdest ways. This happened with Mesh4.5 and we eventually managed to fix it. It will have to do, its not ideal but she looks pretty ok as she is.

Comics come first, however. So please continue to be patient ;) Thank you for your endless support and understanding.

*I need P11 since they have fixed a number of issues. Unfortunately they also screwed up a bunch of others.