The Bill Collectors – Terrace Scene

A few years ago I had an idea for an espionage-style comic book featuring a group of characters that I called “The Bill Collectors”. I drew up a 5-page preview of it, but I wasn’t really happy with my work, and so I never pursued it further.

I didn’t think that my particular style of artwork lent itself to the genre, but then I started to become more involved in 3D artwork. I was impressed with the results that some were able to produce, and so I thought to give it a shot.

So this piece is initially created in DazStudio. When I say created, I don’t mean that I modeled everything from scratch. Daz is not a modeling program. I use Blender for modeling and creating my own objects.

Instead, Daz allows me to use premade objects (figures, props, etc.) and pose them and modify them to my own ends.

So essentially I buy the figures that I want, then modify them using “morphs”, which are distortions to the wireframe “mesh” of the object. Morphs might be something such as making your character skinny, making the nose wide, making them older, big ears, etc.

Beyond the morphs available in Daz, I usually take things a bit further and adjust the textures used to wrap up the mesh. These I will open in Photoshop, add or remove detail and adjust color, saturation etc. until it looks the way I want.

Sometimes I’ll completely replace the given texture if it feels necessary. Much work is done before I’m able to really get to the point of actually posing the character.

Anyway, after I get the look that I want, I can go about posing the characters and setting up my scene. in this regard, you become a director much like a Hollywood movie director or a photographer.

You need to place your models (“actors”) in positions, outfit them correctly and set them up with the correct props. Then you have to worry about the lighting and positioning of the camera to get the best shot and really bring through the mood that you want to portray.

In these DazStudio screen shots you can see the characters staged in the 3D environment. The terrace is a prop that I bought, as well as the clothing and weapons. You can see the different angles of the same piece.

Many times I may have 4-5 different cameras so I can switch back and forth between different views and try to capture the most dynamic angle.

You might notice that the gunmen figures are not complete. I decided at some point that only their hands would really be showing so it was not necessary to even outfit the rest of the body. One they were off-camera I didn’t worry about them. A huge advantage to traditional photography.

You also may notice that the skin and some of the clothing of the characters is lacking any detail. This is the way it shows up in the program using the material settings I have chosen. Most of the time objects appear with a more accurate preview of how they will render.

When it comes to lighting your scene, it really helps to know basic principles of photography because for the most part, the lights in 3D programs behave in the same way as their real-life counterparts. There are some important distinctions, chief of these being that I can set any light I want to not cast shadows.

Photographers are always fighting against shadows being cast and sometimes it takes an extravagant lighting setup to remove errant shadows. I know, I’ve been working in a photo studio for the past 10 years.

However, for these images, I don’t really need to use any of this. I’m using a cartoon rendering technique that does not truly rely on photographic principles. Instead, I use one light that behaves similar to our Sun, casting parallel rays over the entire scene. When I render this it makes a very flat images as seen below.

Then I change the materials of the models so as to remove most detail, then I make a series of renders in black and white which represent the shading of the image like the one below. I may make up to 10 of these.

If you notice the female character (Marie), is not wearing her hat in the first image. Unfortunately her hat did not fit correctly over the hair that I was using for her. When this happens it’s referred to as “poke-through”. This is a situation where traditional photographers have the advantage. You can just go over and adjust the hat on a real person.

In 3D I had to make a separate render of the hat all by itself, to be added later in Photoshop. I also made separate renders of the guns and the terrace, also the figures in order to make them more easily selectable in Photoshop.

When rendering, the more realistic you make your scene, you can usually expect some very long render times. Especially if your computer has to actually calculate the path of rays of light bouncing from source to object to object.

Luckily for me, these pieces are done in a cartoon style that is fairly easy for the program to deal with. I make the renders at a large size, so I may have to wait 5-6 minutes, but some complex, realistic renders can take days.

So about 50% of the work is done in the actual 3D program. Now I take all the render I have done (for this piece it was about 15 renders in all) and I composite them in Photoshop. Meaning I put the main flat image on the bottom layer and then add the top images, controlling which parts of which layers I want added using a combination of Photoshop features such as Layer Masks and Layer Blend Modes, plus a myriad of other tricks of the trade that I have picked up over the years.

Anyway, the goal is to take that flat image and make it vivid, dynamic and interesting. With this one I was initially pleased with the final image, but as usually happens with me, I began to be more critical of it over time.

Now I consider it a good beginning for my initial experiments with this look for the upcoming comic. I’ll be posting more examples of The Bill Collectors as I finish them, leading up to the first comic.