That front cover looks great! 
Looking great! Thanks for the detailed development posts, I find your thought process fascinating. So will this be printed and published at some point? How are you selling it?
-rich
Thanks guys 
@rich - going to distribute it through Amazon (self-published through CreateSpace) - if all goes well and I have the energy to continue, there will be 4 or 5 issues after the first one to tell the whole story arc. I’m estimating an April 2017 publication date for this first one, but it has been going fairly well, so looks like it might be sooner. The rough part (for me) will be trying to get the word out…I’m no good at promoting things, but I’m trying…have a website, facebook page, etc.
Just kind of messing around here…the first one is the Pilot character 25 years later…then I decided to do a render with her even older…I know bad lighting, bad hair and lots of work to be done if I was going for a final render, but no need for that on this one.
Now working on a ‘spaceport’ scene. From this test render, I can see I have the panels on the side of the walkway too high, supporting poles way too thick and the walkway itself - thought I might get away with putting checkered holes in it for a grated look, but just doesn’t work, so I’m going to have to do something there.
Fixed the side walls size, deleted the walkway and just made a simple plane with a texture, added some emission to the poles and added more poles around the landing pad, added texture to the column underneath the landing pad. Put a quick image in the background just for concept. I want to come up with some type of city skyline, but not sure how I’m going to do it yet.
Here is what I came up with for the shuttle port. I ended up taking a brighter skyline pic and blurring it beyond recognition then using a splotcy paintbrush in PS to make the lights…then added some glow/lighting effects to the final image. This scene is very close to the end of the graphic novel and something I’ve noticed is my techniques have changed since I started…which I think is going to make it look somewhat inconsistent. So, as much as I hate doing things more than once, I know I’m going to have to redo scenes for consistency. That, and I hope to get some readers to take a look at the rough draft, so I’m sure that will cause some fixes and changes as well. :eek:
Looks decent, but the posing needs a lot of work. Many of them look stiff and unrelaxed as they stand perfectly upright. Only one guy on the far left is shifting his weight, and even so, it’s a bit too much there. Most of them have their hands completely straight down or awkwardly posed so that their hands are kinda on their hips and their elbows stick out at weird angles. They all look too evenly spaced apart from where they stand relative to each other. It still feels really posed and unnatural here to me. Look up and study group pictures and see how they pose for the camera.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]463814[/ATTACH]
Also, care to explain why the dude on the far left looks like he’s leaning over and grabbing that woman’s ass? :yes: I got a couple good ones here.
-In space, no one can hear you scream :eyebrowlift2:
-Houston, we’re attempting reentry
-I could make another witty space sex joke here, butt fuck it, I’ve said enough already.
Thanks for the input…yeah, the problem with this particular (MHX) rig and probably my biggest, or maybe ONLY, gripe about it is the lower arm only moves up and down, not side to side. Having said that, though, I’m sure if I used the IK features on it, it probably works ok. I just haven’t had time to sit down and setup IK for each and every character. So…the only way to get the lower arm to move sometimes (like for example hands on hips) is to twist the upper arm, which starts to give a very unnatural look. The guy on far left is going to be moved to the right a bit, but after a 20 minute render at the end of the day, it will have to wait. Ha…his hand is actually resting on the holo table behind them. When he moves over it will look less conspicuous. The guy on the far right, however, had his hand firmly planted on the woman’s butt…that was his own doing and I had to move it. But yeah, the evenly spaced thing…well, most of them are quasi-military, but yeah a bit too rigid. I’ll mess around with that in the next version of the render.
How do you import your MakeHuman models into Blender? My MH models have full bones, and a panel on the left which allow you to enable and disable extra bones, and also enable and disable IK.
I’m using the MHX2 rig. It’s just been a bad habit for me to pose them through FK…mostly because my older rigs did not have the IK option. Now that I’ve converted most of my characters (1 more to go!) I can start using the IK again…so much easier. In testing, I found the IK wasn’t working, though…then remembered have to go and turn on the ‘auto run python scripts’ option in the Preferences whew…
Thanks to punkduck over on the MakeHuman forums, got some better nodes for the eyes. Even though the renders are converted to comic-style, I think this may help they eyes get converted better. They were all coming out very dark.
Yay !
Hmm, shouldn’t you increase the amount of steps of your hair ? Or does it take too much time to render then ?
Gonna be a little more serious this time around, maybe the eyes come out dark because the area around the eyes are really dark and the renders slightly blur it together with the eyes? What would happen if you lightened up those areas probably by using less or brighter makeup or something along those lines? Maybe also make the eyes slightly more white? Just a suggestion I’m throwing out there.
Yeah, I can, but once I convert the render to graphic novel style, it doesn’t really matter much. But I can say I have never crashed Blender so much as I have with the 2 women characters and their hair! But actually it has to do with the size scenes I’m using with many characters and eating up memory. If it crashes after say the 7th render attempt, if I restart Blender it will render fine. It still may have something to do with hair, though, because I’ve worked on many complex scenes and never crash.
@ Omnilord - Thanks for the suggestions. It was an issue that involved the conversion of the model via the MHX2 format - and quite possibly my GPU. I seem to only get the problem on my desktop, so will test that soon and see if it is solved or not. My original solution was to throw a bunch of light at it and even added emission nodes to the eyes…and was STILL having dark issues. So, I think GPU, but will test soon.
The good news, I’m finally done with the graphic novel! (well, sort of). It ended up being 54 pages. I’m in the process of trying to get some beta readers (preferably sci-fi fans) for feedback. Then, I will be going back and updating/fixing things. There are already quite a few things I know I want to redo.
Here is the latest version of the cover…
Woah, you’re done?! I’ve not rendered a single page yet! Is that done completely, or just this part of the story?
Well, I’ve been hard at it for 4 months and making assets for it a few years on and off before that. But yeah, this is the first “episode”…will be 4 or 5 after this one if I can do it. But like I say, I still have to go back and redo the pieces I’m not happy with.
