Hey Everyone, been a long time again (almost a year!). But that's not what this post is about. I'll do a general update post at a later date talking in detail about all the current projects I've been working on.
Today I'll be talking about just one of the projects I've been working on for the last 6 or so months. A commissioned mini-set titled "Night of the Warlock". There will be 12 images to this set, and there will be a comic version with text and a clean version with just the images. It's all done, but I'm currently waiting on the approval of the commissioner before I post the completed set. I'll update this post with a link when it's been uploaded sometime in the next few days.
It's a superhero themed set featuring two of the commissioner's Original characters, The Urban Sentinel (Mandy) and the Ghoulish Warlock. I'll start with the design of Mandy. Here are some renders of her bellow that I made when first designing the character. She came out pretty much perfect on the first attempt, although we changed her hair to a ponytail for the final version.
Next up is Mandy in her Urban Sentinel Suit. In the mini-set she's basically only referred to by her super heroine name. The look selected for her costume also came out well on the first go. Though we did change the original boots to thigh-high, high-heeled boots for the final design.
Now on to the Ghoulish Warlock. Not much to say about him. Clearly he's very well endowed. We only really altered his skin tone and some texture issues for his final design.
And here they are with their final designs sizing each other up.
The basic plot is that the Urban Sentinel is investigating a string of missing women cases. There are rumors going around of the fabled "Ghoulish Warlock" being somehow involved. Believe him only to be the stuff of legends, Mandy is quite surprised to discover that the culprit she's been trailing is actually him! I won't give it away, but its only a short set and there's some magic and mind control involved. You can probably guess the rest ;)
Here are some WIP shots I did when setting up the location set piece:
This was the first time I'd worked with an outdoors, nighttime scene. It was lit with lots of spotlights and moonlight (well more like a tinted sunlight) in luxrender through the reality plugin. Each of the final images from the set took a ridiculous amount of time to render, sometimes taking over 10 hours before the "fireflies" (rogue pixels) were cleared up from the image. I really need to investigate swapping to a different engine to help cut down on some of these outrageous render times. Anyway, that's part of the reason why it took so long to get this out there. A lot of work went into this mini-set so I hope some people enjoy it when it's released.
I'm not quite sure what the future plans are for this character but there have been some initial discussions. I believe the intention is to create a sequel set in the future. Either way you'll probably see more of the Mandy character regardless of what the future may hold. I'll also be posting some more on my
Tumblr now that I've returned so you may want to follow me there if you haven't already.
And finally, another preview:
~ Jimjim
