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This works for me, the only thing that still a bit wobbly is her words "that smile worked... I understand you want to place the info that they know each other for long time in this page.
How about : and don't you forget that, the days I pampered you as a toddler have gone by long ago
and leave the ship sentence away?
I like that idea and it does read as an awkward sentence. I had to read it a few times to get it.
Thank you both for the feedback. Here's the finalized version that went online last night:
As the story progresses, there's still more people making an appearance! As Duon's on his way to his interrogation after his meeting with Seth on Page 47, he also has to drop by Team 638 and brief them. Here's Team 638 in a first setup for the image... everything's still unrendered, as I have to figure out how to fit so many people on my card.
The Team will play a larger part later in the story. In this scene, they just will receive their orders.
I really like how the characters turned out. I still need to work on the Imari-skin that Noloxo, the character to the left, uses. The preset pattern is very recognizable, and I want to give her her own look. I did some slight alterations for the face in PS already, but the other maps need some tinkering as well.
The team looks great and the way they are together there looks very natural.
As for lots of people, I'm facing the same problem, so reduce polys to lowest level whereever possible. make all bones inisible (closed eye icon in the scene tab) that are under a layer of clothes, and after the intro shot try to focus on closeups, with only three people max in the camera and make the rest of them invosible as well. I started always having a group in my scenetap for people who are not in a sho and I parent them in place to the group and make the group invisible, so I don't have to start posing from zero. And on top I made planes with some people which are out of focus in a render. I have one fo the servinggirls and the fathers now, will have to make more though (see attachment). This sure works easier with standing characters and the keep on having the same form. you need a transmap for them as well.
One approach to consider would be to do it in two stages. So do one render with the two rightmost characters missed out, then another with the two leftmost missed out. Note that the central character - who overlaps the person on each side - is in both renders. You can then easily combine the two images into one in post. I was reading some tutorials on this approach by a guy on Deviantart called Nathanomir, I won't link because a lot of his pictures are NSFW, but it should be easy to find.
Thanks for the feedback and the useful suggestions! I also used Scene Optimizer, that helped a lot. The geometry is not really a problem, it's only at 800mb with all these people, but the maps are a pain in the rear end.
Here's the first test render (gotta love overnight ones...). It will need some work in the setup, though, as there's some intersection, poke through and the belts misbehave (and levitating butt in the image from the other side), but I think the characters themselves turned out really nicely! I'm quite happy with it in general.
Whoa, time flies! Between work, cookie baking and visiting exciting workshops at Digital Arts (Most recent, Drew Spence's Postwork Workshop that had tons of good stuff!), I'm trying to get some work done on Division. There's two more pages of comic to render before I'm off for my family Christmas vacation. It's basically a very brief filler segment about who's rooming with whom for the students, but hopefully it will buy a bit time, rendering-wise...
Yesterday saw the posting of page 51 of Demon Division, and it's another fragment of the puzzle that is Duon. I'm really looking forward to the interrogation by Jane Higgins (Duon, not so much), as it will allow for some insights into the work of the Retrievers, as well as shed some light on Simon, Seth's and Duon's interaction prior to the arrest of Siomon's little brother.
Woha, Duon is seriously quite off the track atm it seems, at least I wasn't expecting this to be his "hook line" ;) I guess the team leader thinks the same.
Does he need another briefing from Ms Secretary?
Yes, trying to order someone into a date is not exactly something that guarantees success (nor is it okay), and he can call himself lucky that Rami's having more patience with him than he deserves. There's some spoiler stuff involved that does partially explain his behaviour and he knows what the upcoming interrogation will do to him (that wakeup-scene I mentioned to you has something to do with it, too), but that doesn't make his actions any more right.
After some more feedback, I made some changes to the page. Here's the entire sequence (including the page for next Wednesday, as an exclusive preview):
Lessons learned: Shortcuts don't work. The goal is to switch from a once-per-week schedule to a twice-per-week schedule, to get more ground covered and allow proper storytelling.
How to achive an increased output... is still something I have no clue about!
Yes its a nice sequence like that, well done!
About the time constraints.. tell me about it. I probably will keep the beweekly schedule for quite some time until I have a considerable buffer and see that I manage to produce a page per week with time to spare. This week I will go with an extra only for the time loss I have with my work timetable. But the end is near :D
Thank you! I'm glad it's working out better than before. :-)
I'm going to put up the character Bios pages this month on Webtoons and Tapas, as I'd be short on pages otherwise... But I have plans to reduce detailed background renders a lot and only use them where they establish the scene, and focus for the rest on "character images", like the ones with Duon and the white background. Those render a lot faster, so I can have more "following the flow of the emotion" images that hopefully will help understanding the characters&actions better.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that your last couple of weeks of work this year will not be as stressful as I know they can be...
This looks and works much better.
Thumbs up.
Thank you, Drew! Also, thank you for the feedback you provided in the Digital Arts Facebook group.
It's really helping a lot getting different opinions, i.e. since I'm still learning how to do things properly.
I'd like to take the chance and thank everyone here for the help I received during 2018 (and of course, the years before), to finally be able to kick "Demon Division - The Comic" off the ground. There's so much I learned, and still to learn, but the journey and the people I had the great luck to meet here and in real life because of it are worth all the "work" (well, you know what I mean
).
Bee
PS: instead of working on the images for the next page, Seth and Duon insisted to send their greetings. A Happy New 2019 to all!
Best wishes to you as well Bee!
I'm kind of waiting for that uppermost block to be pushed over and drop on Seth head... ;)
Thank you! And I hope you made it well into the new year!
Here, a few notable changes happened to Division's background plot, so the sidestory, Dwellers, will undergo some significant changes as well. On the bright side of things, it means that there are a couple of scenes that can be included in the present rather than the past, and hopefully some improvement on the character arcs. Hard to believe, one year of publishing, and not even a full day covered, plotwise!
I'm having a ball rendering the first images of Duon's interrogation scene, which also marks the end of chapter one of Demon Division! With six more pages to come in chapter one, chapter 2 will probably start in March. I hope to get done as many as possible pages prepared for publishing until then, as things will get a bit constraint, time wise, for the rest of the year....
I've uploaded this to my gallery here, too, if you are interested in the full size image: https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/725011/
I have to admit I'm currently enjoying Demon Division a lot. My co-author Lara and I have worked on the chapter 2 script for the interrogation (which will flash-back us through the events that lead to the death of Dwayne Taggart - and we'll finally get our first glimpse at one of the demons!), and we've planned the basics for the images. So I have material to go through for the next month or so.
Also, it was great working with Linwelly in sharing ideas about enzymes and nanobots - I can truly say that the ideas helped mature some of the plot details into something that sounds a little bit more scientifically plausible than before. I really enjoyed that!
Then, we also can finally return to Seth and the students and their second day at the academy, as well as Simon Taggart waking up again - scenes I'm really looking forward to.
Also, I've put Division up for critique over at comicfury.com, though I already have a pretty good idea of the weaknesses thanks to the feedback I got so far here and in the DA workshops. There's still a lot of improvement to be made, but yeah, one has to begin somewhere.
Talking about... Lara and I decided to stop Demon Division:Dwellers, and include it as a side story in Division. With the way things are currently devolping at work for me, and the tiny fact that we made a change to Duon's background that turn pretty much everything written so far for Dwellers on its head, we came to the conclusion that it's better to use Dwellers to explain events in Division in either "flashback chapters" or as real flashbacks.
So, here's what I've been up to the past two weeks:
First, we have the first page of Duon's interrogation. Detective Sergeant Edwards almost drove me nuts. Well, not the man himself, but how to adress him properly! As a non-native English speaker, I of course know how to adress him if he was part of the German police force, but how would someone adress him in English? So I struggled through lengthy internet searches and found out a lot of interesting things about Police Scotland and Detective Sergeants, but would I find just one fragment of infprmation on how to adress him? Nope, nada, zilch. I really wished there was something of a "quick help in translation - ask a native speaker" thing somewhere. So, yeah.
Duon's putting on a show of tough guy, but if you read the pages before, you know that he's not really emotionally stable at the moment... and the interrogation by a mind mage is no fun.
The other important thing you can see here are Duon's hands, and the reason he's constantly wearing gloves. I worked on the skin texure in Photoshop, and the burn scar you see is taken from photos of actual burn scars from the internet, cut into pieces and put together again. I also created a bump map to make it not look so flat, but that did not work as well as I thought. But I hope the scars give the proper impression of being from a branding rather than an accident...
The next page is the second group of students - yes, it's mostly names, but I also hoped to bring in a bit of reactions to how they feel about being forced into this, to move along the plot. Working with such a huge cast has a lot of disadvantages, as all of the students will play parts in the story - be it that they quit and get an inhibitor, get into other problems, or remain side characters. It's a bit frustrating, to be honest. On one side, there's all the lesson learned from watching countless TV shows with larger casts and that it's not a good idea to introduce more than a few characters at a time. Then, there's that pride in having all these fine "people" who have their own story they want to scream out into the world. But in the end, the goal is to properly tell the story and not confuse the heck out of the reader. So... yeah, one of the things that definitely needs more work in the future.
It's been a while...!
Demon Division now has begun its chapter 2, and with it begin new challenges. I'm currently working on some of the characters and their background/history that is part of the plot.
One of the is aging them (or rather, making them younger). It's fun, but also very challanging. It's a huge difference between having that image of a charcter at the age of, say 10, in your mind, and then trying to get that image across. And don't get me started about appropriate clothing, and historically correct clothing. That's a totally different hunt, so for now they are just using the adult version's wear.
Also, people have different hair styles at different ages, and you've got to match the haircolour, unless a character dyed his or her hair.
For Simon, I had to deal with two issues. The first is his skin; the one he's using as an adult is Lucien 7's skin, but that doesn't work at all for most of the younger characters. I used Tween Ryan 7 for the smoother surface. Fortunately, the eyebrows fairly match between the two skins, so I didn't have to edit them.
The other issue is getting the scale and proportions done right. Simon is using G3M as a base, and there are several products that can be used to age a character, or make them younger. The one I mainly used is "Growing up", but then I had to dial out most of the character body shaped that define the more adult versions of the character, because of things like muscle mass and definition.
So here's the result. Does he look like "himself"?
I'm currently experimenting with filters in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint to get the effects I need for the interrogation of Duon Ward. One of the interrogators sees Duon's memories, and that is kind of difficult, as it technically would limit things to just Duon's POV, allowing no facials of him. There ar a couple of workarounds for that, but it's still difficult to find the proper balance and keep things visually interesting.
This is awesome!
Great posing!
Wow you did a great job on him!
Thank you!
I'm glad you like them.
Bee, I have been thinking some more about the trouble with conversing the story from page format to scroll down format. There is one thing that came to my mind which might help the reading flow and can be done without much extra work. I'm using this myself especially for scene changes or time shifts, that using small panels with bits from the last scene blurred more and more, so you get a fadeout. or alternative a fade in. Will be posting some examples here :
fade in
Fade out
You can use the same concept vertically as well
I know thos don't work in every situation but at leas some can be covered
Thank you for this! Yes, I think that actually works pretty well. But I don't want to copy the effect "out of the box"... so I'll try and think up something that's unique to Division. At the moment, I'm still having fun experimenting with brushes in Photoshop... which is a lot of fun, but I'm still struggling there. Though, I found the Blend Modes and the filters do pretty awesome things! (Yeah, I'm easily impressed by the shiny things...). *laughs*
that looks like an interesting kitbash on the reactor, can we see that closer?
Sure! I used a few SciFi crates on containers together with a VR console, and slapped some metal- and glow shaders onto it. Some stuff needed to be converted from 3Dl to Iray, and there's a ton of scaling, of course.
Of course, the (ex)vid-screen at the top of the machine would not really be needed, but I left it. Might come in handy for future scenes.