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CG storyboards ... I love this sort of thins. If a picture is worth a thousand words, half a dozen or so images in serial order have to be worth a whole chapter. So here's the scene:
It's twilight on a warm evening after a hot day, and something's brewing. The new kid on the block gets an invite to come up to the old shrine and see the boss. What is it, a tryst in the planning? Or an expedition he's hiring for? A job that has to be done? Or a seduction scene in the making?
You call it ... it could be any of these things. How about a mix of them all? Yes, there's a job, and yes, it's going to take several people to get through it, and yes, there's a bit of seduction going on here, on several levels. Wanna come up and see my etchings ...?!
The background is a bit cropped out of a Bryce render I did a loooong time ago. The set is the same as you saw in The Gatekeeper, a few months ago. The costumes are Sickle Yield's Rogue Armory pants on the younger guy, and the Sweatpants from the same designer on the big dude -- but with every texture changed, and layers of the built up to get this effect. These are booth characters designed by yours truly.
The younger character is the file I have saved as "Tonio," and I'm pretty sure I did an oopsie a long, long time ago. I've been trying to track down the character preset for Tonio Teniko, from Hellgate. This ain't it, but this is the one I have, labelled "Tonio." Hmmm. Looks more like the Vampire Amadeus. Where did the preset for Teniko go? Did it not save properly? Now I'll be on a hunt for the character, and I am so hoping I didn't delete something by mistake! The hair -- the young guy is wearing Neftis's Rock Star hair, and the big guy is wearing Neftis's Mario's Hair.
There's almost no post work on these -- really, just the firelight and candle in the hanging lamp. The rest of this is all "just as she comes," in the raytraced renders. And here, again, you're looking at the sheer magic of having a veryveryvery fast system. I was able to set the lights and do seven sequential shots for a scene, with multiple raytraces of each one ... and get the whole lot done in about two hours, which is the amount of time I had to indulge myself in art.
And I know, I know, it's been weeks since I uploaded anything! I've been buried under blizzards of work, and have only just dug myself out. I'll be able to upload more this week, and then I'll vanish on you again next weekend, when Dave and I are heading out of town. Roadtrip. We're praying for good weather.
Join me tomorrow, and I'll share the bookcover I did a little while ago -- a project called More Than Human, which comes out next month!
Jade, March 19
