Yet another graphic novel

For some time, I have been working on the concept for a comic book /graphic novel. The story follows loosely a novel by Rudyard Kipling (author of The Jungle Book) : Captains Courageous. It is acoming-of-age story where a rich, spoiled boy by chance has to work on a fishing vessel developing his personality. I have moved the story from the end of the 19th century to the 22nd century. It will be less a Star Wars like space opera but more of a graphic novel in “The Martian” style.
Location is Europa, one of the Jupiter moons. I have made the assumption thatthe Jupiter system has been colonized and Europa has been terraformedto have a thin atmosphere. Under an ice cover, Europa has the largestocean in the solar system, bigger than Earth’s water reservoir.
Modeling and rendering is done with Blender, of course. The final images will be post-processed with Dynamic Auto Painter, a tool that creates a painterly effect. Here is an example for the Europa surface:



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Assuming Europa has a terraformed atmosphere combined with low gravity (1/6 of Earth’s gravity) I thought that multicopters might be the vehicles of choice. Three types of copters play a role: a very large cruise ship, a mid sized shuttle, and 2-person fishing dories.



Looks like low-tec but is quite efficient and rugged. I don’t want to assume the existence of anti-gravity devices.

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A small part of the story will play in space. Therefore, I needed a concept for a somewhat realistic space transporter. Here is my approach:



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wow! looks really exciting! this project looks very ambitious. I’m excited to see where it goes. As somebody who’s working on my own story produced with blender, it’s really exciting to see other people working in it. your art looks good!

Current focus of work is the set of main and secondary characters. I need about 50 characters with different degrees of detail. Manuel Bastioni Lab is the tool of choice to create these characters from few base meshes. Here is an example:


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I’m setting up a pose library to help with scene building. Here is a sample.


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Still working on more characters. here is the workflow:

  1. Start with base character in Manuel Bastioni Lab (MBL)
  2. Create sets of clothes, shoes, hair for base character
  3. Register as proxies
  4. Copy base objects for each new character into separate file reusing clothes
  5. Create character with MBL morphing functions
  6. Morph clothes with MBL proxy functions
  7. Copy to new file, keep MBL data for later changes
  8. Finalize character
  9. Remove shape keys in cloth meshes
  10. Make final corrections
  11. Transfer vertex data from skin mesh to cloth meshes
  12. Add armature modifier to cloth meshes
  13. Posing

Here is an example


After finalizing a character the Manuel Bastioni Lab addon creates 44 shapekeys for the skin mesh. These can be used to construct expressions like fear, rage, or joy. When linking a character into a scene file, these shapekeys are no longer accessible. Therefore, I had to create a armature with sliders (bones) that drive the shapekeys. On top of the armature, a poselib provides configurations for main expressions. here is an example:


The last weeks, I have been struggling with wrinkles for the clothes. There are a number of options:

  • cloth simulation : too complicated
  • static bump maps : easy, but not realistic
  • bones driving textures : difficult to adapt
    Therefore, I have been focusing on a fourth alternative: tension maps.
    https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?345542-Addon-Tension-Map
    There is an somewhat older addon that creates a vertex color map based on mesh deformation. The map shows green colors for contraction and red for stretching. This map can be used to modulate bump maps for wrinkles. Here is an example:


    The wrinkles depend on two bump maps for bend and stretch wrinkles. I have left a small amount of residual wrinkles even when the tension map is in rest position.


    This seems to be a process that is easily scalable to large numbers of characters meshes as I need.

Due to some traveling I didn’t have much time to work on the project. Here is a little update about clothes and wrinkles. I settled on the following approach:

  • Each piece of cloth has a residual wrinkle map that will drive a displacement modifier on the mesh
  • A second normal/bump map with bend wrinkles is modulated by a tension map (tension map addon)

I couldn’t get good results by using the tension map with stretch wrinkles. Here are some examples:


Time to think about a way to assemble a number of pictures into a page. What tool to use? Photoshop or Gimp are options. A number of specific comic book tools would be available, too, for a price. But what about Blender itself? I came up with this solution:

  1. I use several layers of planes: physical page including margins, active area without margins, frames, speech bubbles
  2. Frames (4-point rectangular mesh) locate a picture on the page. They have to be snapped to the grid with a consistent, small gap between each other.
  3. A wireframe modifier is used to create black borders around each frame.
  4. Speech bubbles are flat meshes on top of the frames linked to a text object.
  5. To prevent perspective distortions an orthographic camera is used.
  6. Starting with a template page it is easy to create a new layout.


After doing the layout, images have to be assigned to the frames. I use an emission shader so we don’t need any lamps or lights. A coordinate correction per frame allows to scale and shift images easily. This is important to experiment with image layout and find the right cut from the input image.



Unfortunately we have to correct for the image sizes to get the right mapping to frames:

Okay, so it’s not just me who had this idea, although my ambitions are not nearly as big.

The latest MBL should change your workflow for the better. Although I pretty much tossed all of my MBL 1.5 clothes meshes instead of trying to adjust them for 1.6…

Instead of using a tool to ‘fake’ the painterly effect, I decided that I’d just paint the whole thing all over again in Photoshop. That way, any inpainting looks consistent with the rest of the style. And then I’m probably just going to lay things out in Illustrator so that the text can be vector text. And I am probably just going to inpaint the wrinkles.

There’s some neat tricks there. I am probably going to steal your idea of building out a pose library. :slight_smile:

really really cool! i love the dronelike hoverboat. try to put more subsurf on the ships to make them look less edgy. this ruins the overalllook. give your maincharacter something the guy in the book uses, like a knife or a pipe.

I still have to do the switch to MBL 1.6 for the main characters. New base meshes again. I’m thinking about redoing the cloth meshes as well to get a better geometry. The new MBL workflow (facial expressions) doesn’t help much if you link a character asset to a scene. I could not yet get the MBL tool working with a proxy. Fortunately, pose libraries for MBL 1.5 work with MBL 1.6. Don’t need IK for poses.
Overpainting is a widely used technique but not the way I’d like to go. Even if wrinkles are driving me crazy.
Assembly in Illustrator is probably easier to do but I’d like to save the money. Coming back to that after the first real pages.

I have put together a new template for the surface of Europa: foreground, hills, clouds, haze, space background. These building blocks will be used for several scenes. Why clouds? I assume that Europa has been terraformed to a certain degree.


Marvellous stuff here, I shall watch with interest!

Cheers, Clock. :slight_smile:

Used my first space transporter concept to do some variations due to modular design. Next step will be a space station in orbit around Europa.


First module of the space station is a docking hub for space transporters. I used a lot of modifiers, especially wireframe. bevel, and array.


Here is a render of the docking module in orbit around Europa. Clouds of Europa are done with micro displacement.


I put some more work into the space station. Textures need refinement. Still struggling with the cloud layer of Europa.


Some improvements on Europa surface.