I've been slacking lately. I know I was supposed to be working on the next scene for the comic, but actually I haven't been doing much of anything. I blame video games. I generally shun the damn things, because they're basically just a good way to waste lots of time, but lately I seem to have been making up for lost time.

Anyway, I've gotten back to work on building the prison scene for my comic. Right now all I need to do is add a toilet, a sink, and some kind of ventilation and then add the textures and this cell should be finished, which is three-quarters of the build. It's actually looking like it'll go fairly smooth, which is rare! Here are some screenshots of the WIP.

Sorry you guys. No excuse for myself; I'm still slacking. I've been trying to force myself to get more done on this thing, but I always end up getting distracted or there's something else more pressing. I did finally finish the base build for the cells, complete with textures and what I think is going to be the lighting. The textures have some tiling issues but for now I think I can leave ‘em alone because it probably won’t show up in the final renders.

Here's another screenshot, this one of the fully textured cell. At this point I just need to throw in a few more little odds and ends to flesh the scene out and I can start working on the new pages. I also need to build a deck (not a real one, a 3D one) and a kitchen, but I already have a pre-fab kitchen set that I'm probably going to use to save time. See ya!

Some new WIP pics just to prove I haven't been totally slacking off. Here's some of what you can expect to see in the upcoming new pages I'll begin posting later this week.

This is the base model for a particularly unsafe rocket-propelled device that'll be appearing early in Act III. See, I do model some of this stuff. Not a lot, but some!…



And here's a look at the finished version, in-scene. The “shed” set is also something I had to model (didn't take any wip pics though), but the props inside are mostly freebies I gathered from places like ShareCG.

And this is part of the Kathouse Brothel set that I'm slapping together. Here's Madame Kitty's shrine room, from start to finish. I always start off with the absolute basics. The human figure at the center is there for scale, just to make sure I don't end up modeling doors that are too low for people to walk through, and that kind of thing.



In this case, the room was pretty basic; it just needed a central pool area, a couple of windows, and a statue of the Buddha. Not too much clutter, so it didn't take long to throw together.

Here's a look at the almost-finished set, minus textures. I know, it looks like stir-fried crap, and it is crap really…



…but I find that the quality of 3d artwork generally comes from good lighting and camera use. Oh, and some decent texture work goes a long way as well. Here's a shot of the shrine room as it will appear in the comic. Not great, but not bad either.

Hey, “DeathM-”.. er,um, I mean, “Slacker”

Glad you had this WIP section here. Great screenshots.
If I'm reading this right….. this isn't DAZ Studio, but CARRERA.
High end imaging program for generating background scenes and outdoor environments.

CARRERA isn't something you buy, like.., “off the shelf” in like a “Best Buys” stores (as I know such).
Funny, …in communicating with Jessy, she remarked she was using Carrera back in 2007, but found the program ate up a lot of computing memory at performing its basic functions and was slow rendering.
So she abandoned it.
How did you get a hold of Carrera …and how well do you work with it upon your computer equipment??
Have you a “workstation” -at home???

Is your Daddy “filthy rich” or somethin'?

xx,
Fastmax

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I try never to recommend software to people: Just because something works really well for me, I know it may not work so well for others. Carrara's relatively cheap. Even now, the newest version of the base app only sells for $149, which is dirt cheap for such an effective modeling/rendering solution. The Pro version is quite a bit steeper though ($384), but still not a life-altering investment. I use an antiquated version of Carrara, Carrara 5 Pro, which I paid $200 for years ago. They're up to version 8 now.

I do own a newer version of Carrara, but I've learned that the newer versions do use a lot more resources than C5, but don't really offer much of anything useful in return, which is why I've stuck with C5. I've run it on a laptop, a super-cheap eMachine, and my current system which is more substantial but still hardly top-of-the-line. Some of my general impression of Carrara, compared to Poser (I haven't used DAZ much):

1) It's easier to create and manage large scenes, with large numbers of people and geometry-heavy objects. Poser just crashes if I try to render more than three or four people, even without an environment, but with Carrara I've literally had hundreds of figures onscreen at once (see my battle render for “Knossos” and “Red Tears” from my Sci-Fi gallery at Squickism. Either of those would be impossible to do in Poser).

2) It renders a LOT faster than Poser, and more reliably. Scenes that would take thirty to forty-five minutes to render in Poser can be rendered in about four minutes, and the quality of the lighting is IMO much better. Also, Poser's default render (slow enough though it is) does not do shadows and reflections. If you activate shadows and reflections, it goes even sloooooooooower. Carrara handles shadows and reflections without issue.

3) Poser is better at doing small, simple renders. It does a better job with skin tones and has better anti-aliasing. It's a simpler interface, because you don't have to deal with exporting to another program and manually retexturing stuff. It's good at what it was designed to do. But I need something that does more, which is why I use Carrara.

A few WIP pics. This is the lobby of Madame Kitty's Comfort Palace, from the next page of Death P*rn, which should be posted tomorrow.

(1) This first one's just the basic skeleton of the scene. I wanted a smallish lobby with a view of the upstairs “playrooms,” and dual koi ponds. And as always, I use a dummy figure for scale.



(2) Here it is fully fleshed out, a more or less functional set. I made sure to throw in a few things that'd be fun to break, thus the huge priceless vases.



(3) Next up, I slap on some textures.



(4) And last but not least, lighting. So here's the lobby, more or less how it will appear in the comic. If you look really close, you can see there are little koi fishes swimming in the ponds.

whoaaaa see the WIP´s are awesome!! make me think that im not so far of achieve something big!!

Well EC,
I'm impressed. But still think you're “a slacker” -cause “a real death porner” would have had those little fishys in the pools -fugging each other.
“Details”, man. Get with “the details”. :)

xx,
Fastmax

I was gonna have a sumo guy in one of the pools “getting intimate” with a fish, but the idea totally slipped my mind when I went to do the renders for the comic. Oh well. Would've been funny.

gosh. You're a typical creative maniacal genius. Always forgetting things.
Learn to write stuff down.
And don't forget to have a pen and paper on your person at all times either too.

I downloaded the beta of the new carrara, no idea what the fuck I was doing. I just thought fuck it i'll stick to daz studio advanced for now. I still have assloads to learn about 3D stuff though.

What you said about running with large amounts of high poly figures in carrara makes me tempted. the next few pages of Malefic are on hold while I try to do them as they have 90% of the cast in one shot.

You'll probably just end up having to render them separately and composite them. That's what I did in Poser when I had to do a lot of people in one shot. Probably the same with D|S.

Yeah I have started doing that, and cocked it up.

Going to start over and simplify the lighting. At least it's only a couple of pages.