hypertransitory.com

The latest image from the world of my upcoming novel True Tales of the Soryan Order: Two Against the Dragon.

This one features Maya, a member of the Soryan Order. In the background is Shaine, one of the principle main characters in the story. We’ve seen Shaine’s Sword earlier on this site.

In this one I tried to imagine more of the setting of the nation they live in. I really wanted a sense of atmosphere and I think it came through.

I started this piece in 3D with Daz Studio 3 as usual. Initially, it was meant to be a solo piece of Maya but I thought putting Shaine in the background added some more interest to the piece.

Shaine and Maya are Daz Studio/Poser models that I outfitted and adjusted. Shaine’s sword I created entirely in Blender, then brought into Daz for the Shaine model to hold.

As usual for my process, getting a 3D render is only half the work, if that. Sometimes it’s only about 25% of the job. After rendering, I bring it into Photoshop for a lot of post-work.

Some people are able to get these kind of renders out of Daz Studio without doing too much post-work. Honestly I’ve never took too much of a crack at it. I know my machine doesn’t have the horsepower necessary to produce super high-quality renders, so I go for the opposite approach. I try to get the flattest render possibly out of Daz, then I increase detail and inject life into the art in Photoshop.

The logo was created in Adobe Illustrator, then I brought that onto a separate layer in Photoshop. I messed around with a bunch of textures for the logo, like metal or wood, but in the end I opted to keep it simple and a bit more elegant rather than make it worn and distressed.

I could have created the logo in Photoshop, but I prefer to start out those types of things in vector format, so I can always resize it to whatever specs I need without worrying about losing quality.

Moving on, the background sky was a free stock sky image I got from one of the many design/photography blogs I frequent. Most of them have some sort of weekly freebie you can use so I just collect them until it’s time to get busy again.

These stock photos usually serve as a good starting point, but I still have to heavily modify them to get the look that I want.

Now, the lighting on this one really has no basis in reality, but the truth is I don’t care too much about those things. If I was doing a piece for a client and they for some reason needed to have super-accurate lighting, then I’d definitely stage everything from the start keeping the light-source(s) in mind.

In this case, it’s all up to me, so I just wanted it to look cool. If that means there’s some shadows and light showing in the piece that upon closer inspection don’t make sense in the real world, then so be it. I don’t like my artwork to be constrained by reality.

Anyway, this file ended up being fairly large, but still not as large as some of them get. I don’t like to throw things away in case I ever need to go back, so I usually save all my working layers. This one ended up with almost 140 layers in it, bringing the files size to over 300mb. I have a fairly decent computer that’s maxed out on ram (4GB), but when you start hitting those levels you see some performance slow-downs.

Luckily I had it pretty much done when I started noticing slow saving and slow screen redraw times. It doesn’t always work out that way.

So I felt good about this one. I still haven’t decided what exactly the cover of this book will look like, but this piece may be some kind of promo poster given away free with the book possibly.