Monday Comics – Return of THE LIFE-TAKER pt 1

Hypertransitory Monday Comics, episode 20 -it’s the return of the surly, angry, all around bad-ass The Life-Taker!

RETURN OF THE LIFE-TAKER

This guy debuted on Halloween of last year. Those of you who were around then remember him well. Those who missed it, you can always go back to check out The Life-Taker comic, then get back here to read the continuing saga!

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JG’s CREATOR NOTES

After last week’s poll, the most well-received comics I’ve done so far appeared to be Kid Hype and JG’s Vacation.

So as you can see, I’ve ignored that info and done something completely different here.

Actually, I just didn’t have a Kid Hype or another hand-drawn comic ready to go, but I was working on another 3D Commander Series and a Life-Taker comic at the time.

Since The Life-Taker outranked The Commander Series in pageviews I decided to do this one instead. After this one, I’ll be back to some hand-drawn action!

I’M NOT A 3D PRUDE. HOWEVER…

This is the kind of 3D art where I have a pre-made model and I can buy or otherwise use props and clothing made for that particular figure to complete my scene.

Well, it is pretty difficult sometimes to smartly dress your female figures if you’re working in the fantasy genre.

I think a lot of emphasis is placed on making the girl appear sexy, but to do that the outfits bare so much skin on the model that it’s hardly believable that she would venture out to fight battles this way.

Of course, some would say I’m already making up a story, so who cares?

I don’t know. I like to dress the character in an appropriate manner to their role in the story. If she’s going to be in sword battles then she would probably not be wearing a bikini, but some sort of armor.

Except many times there will be a suit of armor for the girl, and she still ends up being mostly exposed.

The elf in this comic isn’t dressed the way that I would want, but until I’m good enough to make my own figures and clothes I guess I’ll make the best of it. Although I have clothing items that would cover her from head to toe, they aren’t of the right genre and wouldn’t fit with the story.

I know people are thinking “Hey, isn’t the Life-Taker half naked and running around fighting people?” Well, yeah -but that guy’s crazy.

HAIR, HAIR!

Rendering hair is always difficult. Even in a situation like this, where I’m not going for a particularly realistic look, it’s still a pain.

The reason for this is that depending on the type of hair, it usually involves a lot of transparency.

What this means is that at render time, the computer has to check each pixel and decide “ok, this pixel will be 25% visible, and the next pixel will be 28% visible” and so on and so forth for however many thousands of pixels there may be that comprise the hair in your scene.

This kind of computation can bring a computer to its knees, so you always have to be careful with how big you’re going to go with your render.

Even in a scene like this with leaves and other vegetation you might have to deal with leaves being translucent (light passes through, but not clearly as with glass -it’s scattered and diffuse). This makes your computer take a huge hit as well.

So since I don’t have the most powerful computer, I’m careful about how ambitious I get with any one scene. I’ve had times where I’ve went to render something, then went to sleep, then went to work, then came home and watched TV for a couple of hours and the render finally finished.

I thought about just making her bald or finding a helmet but I couldn’t find anything that looked good enough, so I had to just brace myself for some inevitably long render times.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Well of course there are no raw pencils on this one but here’s some screenshots of the working Daz Studio environment and also some raw renders from the program.

You can see by how flat the images are how much work is put in once they get into Photoshop. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!