Today's renders? Well, if you know your NARC -- if you know your Jarrat and Stone! -- you literally don't need a narrative accompaniment to these! But just in case, here it is:
You're looking at the suiting room on the Blue Raven gunship, which is holding station maybe three or four kilometers from the scene from the rendezvous Jarrat's keeping. Stone is "wide open" to his partner, feeling everything, in every nerve. He's prowling the suiting room, unable to be still as Jarrat's feelings, impulses, responses, reactions, lick through his own nervous system. Off camera to the right are Blue Raven 6 and Blue Raven 7 -- Gil Cronin and Joe Ramos. They're halfway into armor, ready to "jump" on a moment's notice. Cronin says to Stone, "Relax, he's a big boy." But Stoney already knows something's wrong. Jarrat's furious, the adrenaline is pumping ... and he went in unarmed. Stone goes to look at the data, see what the Tactical feed can tell him ... but it's vague by comparison with what he knows for himself, because he can feel everything Jarrat feels. He closes his eyes to concentrate, and then makes the decision. "Retask the gunship," he says to pilots Tanya Reynolds and Eve Lang, "inform Tactical NARC is on the street. This is not turning into a replay of Chell!"
Talk about your wow factor. (And if you've missed these novels, please catch up with them! They've been gay cult classics for a long time. Make sure you start with the first one, Death's Head itself. That's the one in which Jarrat and Stone become empathic ... and boy, does it complicate their lives! Deliciously. I ought to give a warning here: these are not kids' books. If you're underage, mark your calendar and come back on your 18th birthday. Also, if for some reason you don't like a sexy futuristic romp with gay heroes, well, the www is full of alternatives! But if you do, you're in for a major treat.)
It's amazing how this universe comes to life in the 3D art and I only wish I had time to do more. These renders of Stoney, today, were far more complicated than the Jarrat renders yesterday. I could have chickened out and posed Stone against backdrops, but I bit the bullet. This set is full-3D. It's a real closed set ... I'm flying the camera inside a box with six sides, and I have to tell you, juggling the lights took eons. It took about two hours to get these renders just right, and I could only do it because it's slow day at the office, and everybody else has called in sick! Everyone but me is down with gastro, so we're just in a holding pattern, which gives me the time to put into shots like this.
They are sooooo beautiful! And so complicated! Stoney is played by Michael 4, wearing a face designed by me, the GQ Event hair, and Jagger's blue eyes ... also the Beowulf shirt and pants, and the soft boots from the Narquilir costume set. The background is a combination of elements from the SFCS -- Science Fiction Construction Set, and Space Blocks, which is a set of "boxes" enclosing closed sets for an SF scene. Then, the lights. I have 14 lights set, to get these effects -- distant lights, spotlights, point lights, all colors, the works.
Worth it, though!
If I have the time, I want to continue this sequence a little bit. It'd be nice to see Jarrat and Stone together after the Blue Ravens picked him up. I'd also like to put Cronin and Ramos into at least a couple of these shots, but I might have to pull all kinds of tricks to make that work, because ... I don't think I have the computer power to put four characters into a scene, with or without props! I haven't yet tried three. I ought to do this, see how far I can go...
Can't promise to have the time to continue this sequence tomorrow, but -- soon.
Jade, 10 March
***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this.
