I need a truck for Penelope Kinnison to drive in the upcoming project Kheprit.  She’s a driver in a science fiction mining setting.

Step 1: Reference.

I looked at some pictures of dump trucks for reference, and decided a truck needs a cab, the bed that raises up, the piston that pushes it up, bumpers, doors, side mirrors, some lights, a tailgate that comes up or down, and big wheels.  I thought about tracks, but they didn’t read as trucks but as tanks.  This is not a military vehicle.  I Google imaged some dump trucks until I thought I had a pretty good idea, and then I modeled the first image.

Step 1: Modeling

One of the things I did was make sure that both the tailgate, the bed, and the doors were separate pieces, to make it easier to rig them later.  I also put the piston in there, even though I don’t think Penelope will be dumping her truck so far.  I also put a box inside the cab, to soak up space.  If I need to put Penelope in the truck, I’ll do it later, in post production.  Modeling a cab interior is too much render work for unseen faces.

Step 2: Rigging

The wheels are linked to the main bone: As I pose it forwards or back, the wheels turn.  I thought about making the wheel bones just a bit off-center with the model: This would make the wheels “jiggle”like a suspension over rough terrain.  There’s also a steering system on the front wheels.  When I made the bed rise up, I realized I needed to fix the back bumper as well so that the bed didn’t smash it.  There was a little modeling redo there too.

Step 3: Materials and texturing

I think I did pretty good here.The lights Emission Strength is driven by bones, so the lights will glow based on the bones.  You can see that I put a logo on the side and front of the truck.  I should probably put a number on the side, since each driver would be assigned a specific truck.  Observant people will notice that I since thought about adding a “windshield wiper residue” texture to the front windshield, I modeled some quick windshield wipers for the front of the truck.  I also pulled the grill forwards a little, since the texture of the truck, not black, was showing between the bars of the grill.

All in all, not bad for a day’s work!

Step 4: Potential enhancements?

I mentioned the texture refinements?  Also, I think that I could get those stacks to belch a little fake smoke if I tried.

For the Operations Center scenes, I decided to go “Michael Bay style” as a color effect to differentiate the lab. What’s that? Well, look here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContrast
Basically, I pumped up the blue in the shadows, and added orange to the highlights and some of the midtones. and for some shots, it gave me the effect I wanted:

BEFORE

AFTER

Except for Nia and Jason. They have skin that is a shade of brown, Nia darker than Jason. And my color correction didn’t find their skin as a highlight.  It turned them darker, to the point where Nia blends into the background.
BEFORE

AFTER

So I did some research, and I found this:
http://priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-white-skin/

Wow! I don’t think I’ll master color correction for their skin in time for NANOWRIMO.  I’ll have to go back and correct it for the Comixology Graphic novel.

But It just goes to show that privilege is insidious, and is in the places you don’t expect, and it is part of my job as an artist to look at things and go “that doesn’t look right. Why not?”

Well, here we are at the end of Week 2
I have 16 pages of the next Shades so far, so that counts as 16000 pages of Nanowrimo. Since pages are posting to the internet MWF, that means Page 6 is live!
go here to read it: http://ghostassassin.thecomicseries.com/

Hi! I’m working on getting a new job, in addition to Shades 2 for Nanowrimo. I’ll probably try and post something Halloween related a little later this month.

Wow!  It’s September already!

I didn’t want anybody to think that I’m lost in cyberspace, so here’s a quick look at of projects:

Here’s a look at some of the families for Shades 2: Suburban Jungle Warfare coming this November:

I wanted to have the Starrs (on the left) all grouped visually through denim, while the Reagans (center) are much less cohesive, and the Aceys (right) are supposed to be visually hard to identify where they each fall on the Gender spectrum.  Teddy Reagan is wearing a cool version of his father’s Jacket (center), but paired with jeans because he is secretly dating Selena (busty girl next to him.)

Each of these is a variation of the other: I started out with one blender model and then tweaked it until I got these different body/head shapes, while making them all look like they’re from the same art style (instead of starting each one from scratch).  Now it takes me about one evening to tweak a character, which is good, because I still have three more family groupings to go,

So, for Shades 2 I need to have a scene set in the mall.  And I needed some background stores.  I tried making my own backgrounds here:

 As you can see, the walls are flat with a store plastered on, and it looks REALLY fake.  1990 Doom era bad CGI.  I tried to add some depth with the doorway, but the warping makes it really hard to draw the inside of the black and white store.

Even a downloaded texture from cgtextures.com would look flat.  I needed to look at some real mall photos for reference.

https://www.google.com/search?q=malls&safe=off&rlz=1C1AVNE_enUS644US644&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=hvKIVd62N4GjNta0g-AP&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAw&biw=1034&bih=619#safe=off&tbm=isch&q=mall+stores

And what I saw is that they all had a “front” and then I could add a texture inside the store.  So I tried that.

Better, but the all glass front of the “sole-less ” store is problematic.  And the doors look a little blocky, and Covers looks still too similar to Harbinger’s.  Still, this is promising.

Once of the best parts is that it’s the same interior of a store for all three stores, but with a little UV manipulation, it looks like three different stores.  I think I can get away with three storefront textures, and a variety of store names and fonts for the signage.  A little bit of tint variation will help with the interior of the stores too.

The moral of the story is this-> get some reference, and then realize that there’s only so much you can do with a flat image.  But draw the eye elsewhere (to the store front), and you can get away with a flat interior of the store.

As always, comments are appreciated.

New Underverse This week!
http:\\underverse.thecomicseries.com

Become a Friend of the Comic on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Underverse-The-Comic-Series/

So, I’m working on a big scifi story…  I think it’ll be at least the end of the year before I get all the models done, but Kheprit is the story of a soldier who is recovering the shattered, stolen hardware of one of the Great Nine artificial intelligences: OSIRIS. Along the way she picks up some companions, the beautiful miner Dale and his adventurous wife Kaylee (her name is a placeholder, His is a Dale Arden homage)

See, humans have developed FTL travel, and it works by poking a wormhole through another dimension. But that dimension isn’t empty, and so humans developed these AI to protect them from the Eldrich Horrors that might come through on a badly calculated jump.

Lovecraft+Egyptian mythology+scifi.  How great is that idea?

But I wanted to try a more realistic style for this art.  So here’s a sample shot of Kheprit so far.  Warning, I haven’t modeled her flight suit yet, so she’s not wearing pants.

As always, feel free to comment.  I’m probably going to have to do more modeling work on her hands and make a shoulder deformation fix when her arms are up like this.  Also, her arms need a little more definition

So, what have I been working on? I have been working on setting up Far Weft, my etsy store for selling knitted creatures.

Here’s a Unicorn that will be for sale.

Wish me luck!

My wife was taking a class from Lisa Kessler, and one week she had to write a Romantic story. So I took a shot writing her idea. Although it wasn’t Romance enough for her, she liked it enough to post it here http://misplacedsanctuary.com. Check it out, and comment on it if you like it. Read some of the other posts while you’re there, too.