Taking a break from Engineering set to work on the corridors again. The second image shows what the panel details looked like before I accidentally saved over the file…just as well, I think my new panels look a little better.
Even though I have panel holes all along the array, most of these will be filled in. I don’t think it’s necessary to have panel details everywhere. I have an idea for the flooring that’s a bit different, so I will be redoing that as well.
Thanks! It seems to look even better with close-ups. I was also struggling with lighting a bit…many times I would only get dark blotches where the character’s eyes should be, but I’ve started brightening my renders and that seems to help
Back to working on the corridors…still putting more details in than needed for the graphic novel, but I think it’s probably better than not enough detail. Still do do: Fill in the ‘holes’ with paneling and other things. I’m also going to angle the corridor off as well as create a “T” connecting corridor and that should do it.
Ok, done with the corridors…the last shot the lighting is really bland, but I think it will work for what I’m doing with it.
By adding a 45 deg angled corridor, I quite cleverly removed any need to show a door but I can always add one later if needed.
“The Pilot” character (Lt. Kayla North) is a spunky, self-sufficient character that comes on board the Destiny in a very unique way - who happens to also extremely dislike the organization that owns the Destiny ship, but who also has very strong navigation/piloting skills. She is actually properly introduced and plays a big part in the second graphic novel.
So…when I first created most of the characters for Destiny, we only had Blender Internal - no Cycles yet. When Cycles came out, I found myself learning that and trying to adapt the materials to Cycles - AND learning hair at the same time. I found myself in the middle of that time when you could create hair in Cycles, but you could only render it with CPU - not GPU…ugh. Luckily those days are gone.
These first 3 images shows the character I constructed straight out of MakeHuman and then attempting to create some believable hair. These are all Blender Render days…
Next, I worked on her clothes. She’s not ‘officially’ part of the crew and refuses to wear the standard uniform, and her jacket is from another period of time - and is special to her. The last image shows my conversion of the character over to Cycles and the vast improvement in how hair is rendered. Still, an 800X800 Cycles render was taking a staggering 4 hours! Undoubtedly, something to do with my hair settings - probably too many strands.
Back then, I really thought I had created a very attractive woman character…:rolleyes:
Then, recently when I needed to bring her into the scene, disaster struck. As had happened a few other times, when I tried to scale down the character, the hair went crazy (covered entire body) and, in this case, the clothes and mesh went wacky. Well, the hair I could easily fix. I spent a few minutes trying to apply scale, etc. to fix the clothes, but became quickly frustrated and decided to recreate the character from scratch…
My first attempt at recreating the character - yikes! Perhaps I can use her as a future villain. But now, I was using the MakeClothes add-on and created her clothes in Blender with it so that from inside MakeHuman I could throw the clothes directly on the model…step in the right direction…
Finally, I ended up with a character I felt really fit the role. At first, I was trying standard polygonal hair from MakeHuman, but decided to create the hair myself…I’m glad I did. Meet Kayla North…
I think I’m close to 50% done with the graphic novel (first episode), but still have a hefty list of things to model. Next up is one of 3 shuttles that are normally aboard the Destiny, the “esc Kaku” . As inspiration for the shuttle, I used a drawing my co-creator made many years ago. This was probably made around 1982? We were a couple of nerds making our own Star Trek ships. Sorry for the backwards scan…
here it is pretty much quick and dirty finished (exterior). The last one I brought in Captain Massey (Destiny Captain) for scale. Hard to see in these images but I had an idea to do something a little different for the text (name and numbers) on the ship. Instead of putting it into the texture, I created Blender text and created a material node for the text that gave it some transparency so it would look like it was part of the texture. Again, quick and dirty, but works…
Glad to see you’re progressing nicely! 50% done you say? How many pages you looking at reaching? I’m story boarding mine now, and I’m looking like around 30 or so. Great work!
Was originally looking at 23 full pages, but I suspect I should have slightly more than that. I had 160 “frames” in my storyboard and then I did a rough layout of how the panels would fall on each page, but what I’ve learned is that sometimes a scene will be very important or visually appealing and you find yourself getting a bit artistic when actually creating a page so at this point I’m using my layout only as a guide. I also found myself updating some dialog and how a scene plays out, because once you start to see it on a page, it seems to help you realize better how something should be said or how it should look.
Thanks! Currently, there is a story arc of 5 separate ‘episodes’ which tells the whole story, with the possibility of other stories fitting between those 5 stories if we go that route. The first one that I’m working on now, the script, storyboard, panel layout is all complete. Still working on needed models, renders and doing the finished pages with text balloons, etc.
Thanks Peter, yes, I actually found that site when I decided to change my font a couple weeks ago. Didn’t really want to go back and redo the lettering I had already done, but looks much better now I think.
but I can always add one later if needed.
