CG illustration, calendar boys, fantasy plots, and a rhapsody in Lux Render!

click to see all images at large size (mostly 1:1)

As you can see, CG illustration is on my mind -- these are actually images designed around Chapter Two and Three of Abraxas: Leon has gotten the kid, Martin, back home, and in the evening he and his old friend Roald enjoy a quiet hour in the gardens, talking over the past -- and the future. What's to become of the kid, and in fact, does Martin have a halfway decent idea, though he went the wrong way about realizing it? The story is actually about the conflict between the 'old warhorse' and the conscientious objector ... the natural warrior and the person who is not a born soldier, but isn't a coward, and needs to go out and prove this. I still think it's a very strong story ... and it's yielding some rich, evocative illustrations --

These were rendered BIG, because I've lately discovered that (hee hee hee!) I have the ability to render at 1600 wide and more. I've gone up as far as 2400 so far, with no crashes of the software or computer. And I loooove having the big images. So everything I'm sharing with you lately is at full desktop/pinup size. These pieces, today, are well worth seeing at large size, but I know a lot of visitors won't give me that extra click or to, so -- at the bottom of this post I'm going to paste in the "detail" crops, just for fun.

At last -- al last! -- I got the painting finished on the LuxRender version of the Hyborian Age Calendar Boy ... and here he is:

You have GOT to see this one full-sized! It's like walking into the studio and meeting the model who posed for the painting! Lux does amazing things with the skin tones -- and I also had a lot more luck this time with getting it to handle a darker complexion without going muddy...

Notes for the technically minded:

This is just about the first time I've coaxed LuxRender to handle the darker skin tones well, and to do this, I used an odd kind of mix between the 'biased' and 'unbiased' lighting setup. What's the diff? Well, raytracing uses resolutely 'biased' rendering, meaning, you set up a boatload of artificial light to create artificial (or contrived) results that, if you get really, really good at this, can be made to mimic proper daylight, moonlight or whatever. LuxRender is an 'unbiased' renderer, so you can feel free to set one light, call it SUN, make it really bright and a long way away ... set it to render, come back tomorrow, and you can get a startlingly photographic, real-world daylight result. It's not all that difficult to get good daylight results that way. So far, though, I'm having a much tougher time getting Lux to simulate (or duplicate) very soft lighting, such as firelight, candlelight, torchlight. This ain't so easy. So ... hmmm. Now, one of the ground rules in Lux is to stay the hell away from distant lights, which Lux recognizes as suns. O...kay. So in the last few dozens of renders, I've been using exclusively spotlights and point lights. And it turns out, you can ship a scene out of DAZ Studio that was set up with spots and points, and you can fiddle happily, and endlessly, in Lux's own window (not the Reality bridge -- Lux itself), changing the strength and color of spots and points while the render is in progress. Wahoo.

The results are ... well, you're looking at 'em! The Hyborian Age Calendar Boy is such a hybrid -- a biased light set rendered in an unbiased renderer. Ye gods. Does it work? Yep. And it really does look like lamplight. Compare the LuxRender image with the previous raytrace -- these are very close to the raw renders, of course, before they took a trip through Photoshop:

Please, please, see the above at full size: LuxRender on the right, raytrace on the left. The raytrace is by 3DLight, done in DAZ Studio 3. This scene, complete with spots and point lights, was shipped into Reality, and thence to Lux. Nice!

And now, those "detail" crops I promised. And yes, I do intend to post the Photoshop tutorial on retouching and overpainting. All the images you see today are heavily overpainted. One or two are experimental. These, below, are from a scene in Abraxas that comes along well after the point where it was discontinued on account of being tagged as porn. And that is something I'll never agree with. It wasn't even spicy enough to be called 'erotic romance.' There was nothing 'hot' in it up to page 62, which was the last on-line -- just some adult concepts which were logical, rational, salutary, cautionary. In fact, the story would have been just plain dumb without them -- the developing plot of a tale about a young conscientious objector out to to prove he's not a coward won't "go" if he blunders along, oblivious to danger and doing "brave" things because he has no idea he's in mortal peril! To make the story mean anything, Martin needs to know he's in real danger, and do his stuff anyway, and the only way to learn this is to walk into danger, have a close call, a narrow squeak, survive, and grow. In the first chapter of Abraxas, he runs into a real villain ... remember Yussan? Uh huh.

On that note, here are Leon and Roald (Martin's guardian, if you recall), in the courtyard, talking over the days of their service in the militia, and trying to hash out if Martin has half a plan after all:

Stay tuned for more on this, because I'm starting to get bitten by the inspiration bug. Again. In its next incarnation, Abraxas won't be a comic, but it's going to be richly illustrated, because I'm having a ball with this, and I'd forgotten how much I love these characters and this story!

Jade, May 25

Comic art and Photoshop effects

With work piled up to high to get into a serious art project today -- only a spare hour to be scrounged -- I decided to play in Photoshop on my tea break. For a while now, I've wanted to play with its merge modes, and especially with its ability to work various merge modes across various layers to create artistic effects. This is not something I ever spent much time on, in Micrografx -- not because the tools aren't there in the old software (they are) but because I had no use for this kind of art before.

But with comic and games art becoming so vastly popular today, I've been taking more notice of this area. Today's comics are digitally generated (they also cost a tonne of money! Have you notice the price of comics lately? Phew!) and the art is amazing, even on the small mags. On the big books, the full-on graphic novels like Slaine The Horned God, by Pat Mills, the work is astonishing.

Speaking of Slaine, you have GOT to see this ... see what fans are doing on the desktop these days:



...that's not a major motion picture from Peter Jackson. That's a bunch of fans in Spain spending a year or more bringing the comic book to life as a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist. I know every panel and every word in the three 100pp Slaine books, and this -- is -- it. Am gobsmaked by this -- check out the details here: www.miguelmesas.com Oomph. Would realy love to see this as a movie...

Anyway --!

Sorry for wandering off topic, but mentioning Slaine jogged my memory. It's amazing what fans are doing on the desktop -- and I predict that in the years ahead, some of the best comics and graphic novels are going to be born on the desktop and distributed over the Internet. I've got rather a hankering to be involved in it, as it unfolds, so I thought to myself today, "Hmm, if I only have an hour going spare, let's go play in Photoshop and see what happens.

This sort of thing turns out to be very easy, and the results you can generate are almost limitless -- you might need to see these two at LARGE size to see the effects properly, because they're from quite large images, and the more they're compressed size-wise, the less that arty attributes show through:




Here's a VERY quick cookbook method for how to do this:

Finish your render in DAZ etc., and save as an image. Open this in Photoshop and then select FILTERS > Find edges. Then convert the result to grayscale. Then go ENHANCE > Brightness and Contrast. Crank the contrast to 100%; darken a little if you lose too many fine lines. Then, LAYER > New Layer. Paste the original render into the new layer, and drag this under the line sketch. Now, with the line sketch on top, play with the Merge Modes and opacities till you see something you like. A good place to start is "Overlay" and 100%. When you're happy with the result, flatten the image to a single layer. Now, you can play with the lighting and color to your heart's content till you have something you really like ... save it. When you know your way around Photoshop, the process should take about five minutes, not counting doing the original render, obviously. I did ten in under an hour, and am uploading eight.

Interesting, no?

Jade, 21 July

Promo stills for movies not (yet?) made

Change of plans. I was originally thinking about a kind of Michael 4 fashion show, along the lines of the Victoria 4 fashion show of yesterday, but my muse went in a different direction. It all started with this:


...which partners two of my own characters, and my favorite characters. And then I thought, "Wait a second, this would look amazing as a promo still for Hellgate. So I dropped the Neil Travers and Curtis Marin characters into the same setting, and discovered I was right! (Clarification, it be necessary: this is Mel Keegan's HELLGATE, not, repeat not the video game from a few years ago. Mel Keegan's HELLGATE dates from 2001, and is a million-word SF opus with glbt content -- it has nothing whatever to do with the "shoot the zombies" game.)

All of which got me to thinking about promotional materials for movies and shows, and I caught a glimpse of the other shots, which are the kind of formula images they generate to catch your eye and make you wonder, "Hey, what am I missing?"

So I'm really pleased with the way the Hellgate promo stills rendered, but I am REALLY pleased with the piece featuring my own characters.

Long-time visitors to this blog will recognize Leon from many, many projects, including the Abraxas story -- that's the guy with the red hair tired back on the shoulder of an exotic shirt. The new character ... with the dreads and the leather, is just that, new. He's also one of those characters that the lights and the camera just seem to love. Now and then, when "doodling" with character design, it all comes together into something amazing -- and here's one that drops into that category. The amazing ones get names. This one is Roy --

And this shot also looks like a promo still for a movie! I get flashes of storylines ... Leon and Roy could be military veterans who're about to get involved in some dangerous, exciting, hilarious, intriguing events. And don't I wish there were 36 hours in a day, and 12 days in a week, which would give me the time to tell these stories in pictures and words?!

Well ... maybe soon. Right now, behind the scenes, we're experimenting with the best epub-maker software on the market. Yup, the one you pay money for, and which gives the 100% professional results, not any one of the numerous free conversion engines which give weird results, to say the least! So from here, working with images as well as text in the ebook format is a definite "can do."

The reason we've never bothered to do this with with PDFs is that the PDF file size gets too big, too fast, as soon as you start to embed images in them. Once the file size blows out over about 5MB, the hand-held devices (like BeBook, which is the one we're most familiar with here, on account of we invested in them) quite literally barf. And for anyone trying to read on a smart phone, it's instant disaster.

The hand-held ebook readers have a hell of a hard time time reading a *lot* of PDFs ... such as anything formatted on Letter size paper with page breaks inserted! I have otherwise perfectly viable ebooks that just make the BeBook roll over and quit. And very, very long ebooks, such as the complete annotated Iliad, which is about 7MB. The little machine just jams up tight.

All of this got us to looking at the alternatives to the PDF format for big documents which demand a lot of images, and epub is by far and away the best. Now, a file on the .epub file extension turns out to be a ZIP archive in which are embedded numerous files and folders. The text is all encoded in an XHTML file; images are only ever linked, not embedded, which is why the file sizes stay small and don't crash the hand-held readers (duh!), and the proper software breaks a long book down into separate files for each chapter, which makes navigation from a Table of Contents a breeze. Making an epub file from scratch, by hand, is right royal pain in the posterior, but the software does it for you. All you do is format everything up properly and click "go." First, of course, you have to put down your credit card and ante up some of that elusive stuff called, uh, money. So far, so good!

Long story short, the illustrated ebook, half images, half text, is starting to look very attractive. I've been asked a dozen times (hi, guys!) why I don't go back to the Abraxas project and just go ahead with it, and ignore the fact it was deemed to be porn -- despite that fact that it has NO sex, NO full-on nudity, NO bad language, NO violence, just a bunch of adult concepts. Go figure. I was, and am, mystified.

Well, the reason I haven't -- yet -- returned to Abraxas is the time factor. Doing it as a graphic novel was incredibly time consuming, because every shot had to be set up to accommodate the dialog, two or three lines at a time -- which added up to a heck of a lot of panels, a huge amount of design work, and then the additional job of doing the overlays for speech and narrative. It takes 3x to 4x times the amount of time to tell a story in that format as it does to tell a shorthand plot fleshed out with maybe 50-100 pieces of Very High Quality artwork. (Then along comes some bright spark on a puritan crusade and deems the whole thing porn. Excuse me?!)

However, with the epub format, using linked images rather than embedded images ... suddenly the illustrated novel idea starts to become more attractive. Hand-held devices won't crash with the epubs, and also -- the age of the Full Color Ebook Reader is upon us. They have them at Walmart for about $100!

So my mind is wide open, and I'm very happy to see where this goes. You know me by now ... my brain is so full of stories, they're always trying to escape! But, find the time to sit down and write a whole novel?! [sounds of manic laughter] Illustrated novels, though? Now, that's another question. Give you the story in shorthand, and 100+ fabulous images to add the flesh and blood to the tale. Now, that's another proposition entirely! Food for thought...

Jade, 9 July

3D art meets prose ... somehow, somewhere

Telling a story in pictures ... or pictures accompanied by as little text as possible ... is a very attractive challenge for an artist. Graphic novels and comics are the perfect expression of this -- you could also nominate movie storyboards as a perfect example. Somewhere out there, there's a sublime marriage between the written word and art. Not language and images per se, because that sublime marriage is called motion pictures. It's something else, and it transcends both comics and prose. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I think maybe Walt Disney had the same kind of vision and spent a lifetime trying to capture what he's glimpsed.

Way back when, in the days of yore when Disney was literally inventing cartoon animation on the one hand, and a guy called Willis O'Brien was inventing stop motion animation on the other (King Kong, 1933), the technology was so primitive, it took a regiment of artists years to produce a story that could be told in about 75 minutes.

And now? Wellll, unless you have four or five powerful computers, you still can't animate; but by golly, the visualization is doable right there on the desktop. So -- how long before the computer power becomes available to the ordinary artist, to be able to animate? I'm guessing about five years or so, when PCs have ten processors, never mind two or four, and they're cheap as chips. And ... am I looking forward to that!

But till then, I'm hunting for something that's a marriage between prose and art. Just can't ... quite ... find it yet. It's right there on the edge of my imagination, though. Shall keep looking.

Jade, 5 August

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

Bimbarella, Queen of Outer Space, Episode 47: The Ice Planet

"Let me understand this properly -- you're telling me I can't go rampaging around this planet dressed like this? Why not? You turned into a prude all of a sudden? Or is this planet inhabited by a whole population of prudes."

"No, dear, not at all, but --"

"Then, what have you go against what I'm wearing? You don't like pink? You used to like pink."


"And another thing -- you're always telling me to put something decent on my feet. So look! I've put on the biggest pair of cockroach-crushing boots I could find! And it still isn't good enough!"

"Bimbarella, love, will you just shut up for long enough to --"


"I just don't believe this! I've just had my hair bleached, and my tattoos brightened up, and my legs hot-waxed, and my --"

"Bimbarella! Shut up for four seconds, and turn around, goddamn it!"

"I don't wanna turn around. Why should I turn around? I'm tired of always doing what I'm told to do."

"You never do what you're told to do. When's the last time you did something you were told to do? Huh? You see? It's so long ago, you can't even remember!"

"Well ... phooey. Pardon the French."

"Will you .... just ... turn ... around!"

"Oh, all right. Have it your way."

"Okay, so I'm turned around. What am I looking at?"

"Well, I realize this is going to be a stretch of your capabilities, but ... have you looked outside?"

"Outside?"

"Outside. It's an ice planet, for gawdsakes! There's glaciers as far as the eye can see. You can't go rampaging around out there dressed -- like -- that!"

"Oh."

"Yes, oh."

"Well, I could put something warmer on ... but then nobody'd be able to see that I've just had my tattoos done, and my legs, and all. I could put a hat on. But I'd get hat hair, and I've just had my hair done..."


"...so I suppose you'll just have to go without me. I'll just have to stay behind, and sit here --"

"And pout."

"I like pouting. I'm good at it."

"You get plenty of practise."


"So I'll just stay here, then, and mind the ship."

"Don't touch anything. Don't push any buttons. The last time you started pushing buttons --"

"All I wanted was a lousy cup of double-decaf latte with mocha sprinkles."

"-- you found the ejection seat. I didn't even know this ship even had an ejection seat."

"Well, we came and got you, and you weren't really hurt, and it was a nice day, so I don't know what you're complaining about."

"Bimbarella! Just don't -- push -- any --buttons! Not till I get back."


"So whaddaya want me to do?"

"Mind the ship. Keep warm. And get in some pouting practise."

"Bring me back some coffee."

Jade, 29 August

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

DAZ Michael 4 ... getting into trouble again

Storyboarding. Nothing at all like skateboarding or snowboarding. It's something you do when you're halfway between the script and the "roll cameras" moment on the set of a movie. These days, a lot of directors use a thing they call "pre-viz," or a video pre-visualisation of the action that's about to be filmed (or taped), but for about a century now, its all been about storyboards ... and if movies and starting to drift away toward the video equivalent, well, graphic novels aren't.

In fact, a graphic novel is the souped-up version of storyboarding. Just the way the director started with an idea that turned into a script, the writer/artist combo behind graphic novels starts out with an idea that turns into a script. The director would have an artist sketch out the shots as storyboards so he could get the cameras right and get the flow of the shots in his mind's eye. But the writer/artist combo working on a graphic novel aren't heading off to a soundstage. They're developing the script into the finished version right there on the page (or screen). The storyboards are the end product ... so make 'em phenomenal.

Most movies actually start their lives looking like this:
...and end up thrilling you after the color and sound and special effects have been added. But supposing you stopped at fantastic images ... each panel in the storyboard is fully developed into a finished "pane," accompanied by dialog and enough narrative to tell the story...

That's quite an idea. And the end product would be more than a story, less than a movie -- something new(ish). Comics have beaten this path ahead of us! But not in this kind of resolution on the artwork. Even the recent digitally designed comics aren't like this -- well, not yet. Someone has to be first, put it to the test, see it it works.

Anyway -- as you can see, Michael 4 went out to meet someone. A tryst? With whom, for what? And by the looks of this, something didn't go quite according to plan. Now, if I can just figure out what's going on here --!

Jade, 21 August

Web comic art experiments, Phase 2

click on each page to see it full size ... and read the prolog

Further experiments in web comics. This time around the narrative captions are matted, and I'm playing with fonts and so on. It's, um, really exciting.

The art begins as individual panels, of course, and actually spruces up like this, if you don't mind having a fiddle about in Photoshop...

...and they're rendered out of DAZ, imported into Serif and combined there. The final export is done out of Serif, at 200dpi, and then I use Irfanview to crop and convert each page to 100dpi so the pages are not prohibitively big. And as far as I know, these pages are a perfect fit for the iPad. Cool, huh?!

Is there anybody out there with an iPad who could test these pages for fit, and send some feedback? Thanks in advance!

Jade, 19 July

***Posted by MK because the internet is AWOL. Intermittent crap. Be warned, guys: our connection is going to be in and out for a week or two, as of this point: Telstra (or whatever) is doing a lot of work on the landlines in this area. And as you know, if you've been looking at the "poster notes" on these journal entries in my looooong adventure through the world of CG, 3D and digital, even at the best of times we can find ourselves with dialup speeds in this area. This is why MK has been making many posts for me, since Day One -- Keegan has the fast connection, not me! (This should change in the near future, when the cables or whatever are updated, and they stop working on them. At least, s'wot Telstra promises.) Credit where it's due: this blog would not have been possible without the support of a pal with decent internet. Because ours sucks. We moved into this area about six months before I got into Studio and blogging about it, and I almost quit right there: DAYS to download something from the DAZ store, at one point. Argh. Thank gods for friends when you need 'em! 

Web comic art experiments, Phase 1

click to see at full-size, and read

For a while now I've been saying that I'd like to get into graphic novels ... and for just as long I've had ideas about how it would be done and what it would look like. At last I've had the chance to put some things together, and here ... for your entertainment and amusement, is the first experiment!

Obviously it all stared life as individual renders which were done in DAZ and then assembled in Serif. Nothing magical about this...

What a cool way of telling a story. It's literally made for me ... and what got me quite excited a while ago was the news that the Apple iPad is perfectly designed for displaying graphic novel pages, at about 10" high and about 6" wide. I need to thrash out the details, but -- this ain't hard, and it's very exciting.

Jade, 18 July