Besides doing some odd small jobs for the new Renderotica site, like icons n stuff, I've been doing my best not to get too sidetracked with rampant bouts of unrelated inspiration sending me off in an artistic tangent that accidentally creates a whole new concept for a series, or a new character...
No its not Amanda, it Chistina this time, Laila's university girlfriend. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but a very caring individual that watches over reckless and hyper intelligent Senegal Sisters. Off course she also likes to get naughty with them on occasion, or take one for the team as Laila tries to steal something out of an office somewhere... etc... you'll see.
Anyway, I had to work in a separate smile for this lady. Have you guys noticed btw? That Lali, Laila, Julie and Amanda all have their own smiles? :)
I've also been fidgeting with Laila, setting up her morphs properly, some new clothes. I have to confess something by the way... I bought content from Renderosity! I know, I should be ashamed. Normally I make everything myself, but this time the scenes were taking so fucking long to build that I thought fuckit, I'm gonna buy shit. I wanna get this comic done a.s.a.p! So here in these renders of Laila you'll see this interior thing called East Park Lobby or something, and her top and skirt are also from Rendero. I doubt you'll recognise anything in the comics though. I hh...haa, aaattt e eee that!
Yeah, outside of my erotic comic endeavours, I also write books. I already wrote two, mainly psychological thrillers, but wanna give them one last edit before throwing them into the world. The book idea I speak of above is a semi-fantasy / thriller trilogy, of which the story of Sen becomes a part of after the trilogy. I wrote the whole skeleton of the story when I was 21 and started working out bits and pieces of it recently.
Anyways, back to Lali, I've been working on her expressions recently, producing some renders as tests, like of her concentrating on a chess game. Sen's primal scream render was a tough one to get right. Like with the Madal warrior's scream, that was based on Morph++ morphs, it took some serious finetuning of not only the face, but the body pose too. The face could not be done with Morph++ alone and needed to add some zBrush morphs to it. Anyway, I'm babbling now, onwards!!!
Below are some more renders if the ladies :)
Great renders! And you use only Poser to do the rendering?
ReplyDeleteya, Firefly.
DeleteThanks!
Looks great. I end up getting a lot from the places but unfortunately still find it unusable. I have dozens of couches, and beds usually settling for the easiest to apply magnets to the make simple impressions.
ReplyDeleteChristina looks good, but because I love brunettes I'm partial to Laila. But Lali is kind of a brown brunette.
hehe yeah Laila is hot, huh?
DeleteYou mean a brown blonde?
I find a lot of free licence stuff, works well. I only buy props like buildings and maybe some clothing items. I hardly ever buy hair because they always disappoint somehow. The few hair items I have seem to be ok. I'm gonna make my own for Lali.
Love the renders, I think of all the characters, I like Laila the best. Though you can not deny how great Lali is. On a side note, you have inspired me to develop characters of my own. Not really planning on a comic book or anything (though people have suggested it) but having consistent characters in my art seems like something I want to experiment with.
ReplyDeleteoh nice! where can I find your stuff then?
DeleteYeah I think well thought up characters make you more recognisable, plus the art becomes more engaging... I believe
I've come to terms with using 3rd party content a long time ago and here's why...
ReplyDeleteYou, like me, are not just making simple image sets with two characters fucking in one location. We both have A LOT more to do. Not only do we have to outline our story concept, then write the dialogue, we also have to (most times) build several sets and lighting rigs to match. Then fill these sets with props. Once all the preproduction is done, we still have to render out all the comic's pages, including the ones that don't have sex (erotic artists who merely make CG sets have the luxury of skipping that step). Then, to top it all off, we have to postwork our renders with word balloons and captioned sound effects.
So, when you add all that up, and figure in the fact that it is just YOU doing all this work... why should you feel guilty about using 3rd party stuff? It is really the ONLY place we have to cut corners, as all of the other work we need to do ourselves.
That's how I rationalize it to myself, anyway. Spending that extra time modeling, UVmapping, rigging (if necessary), and exporting to a Poser friendly format, then tweaking your materials in Poser is just an extra step that can/should be cut out. I refrain from making ANYTHING in Maya anymore unless it is something I am absolutely sure I cannot find elsewhere. You'll find you'll be able to turn your stuff around a lot faster this way.
Oh, and regarding using sets created by others... don't overlook the beauty of just ripping apart sets in Maya to get the pieces you want (doors, windows, etc.) then assembling them again to your needs. And last piece of advice... retexturing 3rd party sets goes a long way to making them unrecognizable most times. :-)
You're right, but I'd like to add to that that its also a trade-off. Like for example the comic I'm doing now, Lali is in an old english university ;) and from what I've seen these buildings are usually classical but also furnished with modern sections that have long since been built around it. The Law Faculty in Cambridge is one ugly ass building, for example, but the medical is still in the old English victorian / gothic style (don't know the exact name for it).
DeleteSo Lali will be seen in a Lecture room and then running through these halls. The lecture room is a very specific location and I didn't want any compromises to be made for that. I couldn't find anything online except for some semi-movie theaters that looked like crap. I'd be spending more time trying to unfuck that prop than I would making my own. So I basically reproduced the one I sat in back in 2002 in Holland. But for the hallways and corridors, which will be like 10 frames worth of the girls running through it, weren't that important to me what that looked like. So I picked out some decent looking props from Rosity.
Yeah you probably won't recognise them immediately though, I've changed all the floors and wall textures and colors. Hehe like you say, I do rip them to shreds. Like these corridors I bought, I just cut out the wall with the door frames, lol!
BTW there are some really useful freebees on Rosity, shit like umbrellas, bangles, tables and trashbins.
I understand not wanting to compromise. But again, it comes down to time. Focus your energies building that perfect set for an area you know you will return to time and again. If it's only going to appear in a few frames of one comic, you probably shouldn't be wasting the time modeling it in the first place.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the freebies, you're absolutely right; TONS of good stuff on Renderosity. ShareCG and TurboSquid are others to grab freebies from as well that I use regularly. Just make sure you pay attention to their commercial use rights, and contact the creator if necessary!
hehehe yeah. I do watch out for the commercial use thing indeed. Some of it is not clear and need to contact the artist for it. I actually had a lord of the rings poster up in that other comic, but took it down because I couldn't find out what the commercial right were for those kind of things.
Deleteanyway, I'll be contacting you soon ;)