This is one of the largest scenes I've created in a long while. There are LOTS of elements and lots of pieces to them. If you've ever used Poser with a large scene, you know that it can be difficult (and frustrating) to use the Hierarchy Editor to find a specific nested node (in lay speak, that means you have to look through a complicated list to find something, like the hair, that is buried deep in the list of an item's editable properties).
A rare color view of my scene (note the pink light on the hero: This sort of trick makes it easy to spot which light is hitting which surface (and since I work in b&w output, the light color doesn't matter as far as the final render is concerned).
You can also see a little of the complicated Hierarchy Editor, which shows a list of everything in the scene.
The way I navigate this long, complicated list is to put really long names with dashes (or other characters) in the item name property. So, instead of looking for Nirona, Michael 4 (Hero) and the Dragon, I'm looking for:
V4 Nirona +++++++++++++++++ V4 Nirona
Michael 4 = = = = = = = = = = = = = Hero M4
DAZ Dragon 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - DAZ Dragon 3
A compressed look at the items in the scene, as shown in the Hierarchy Editor. Also notice that I mark one item with the words, HIDE, which is a very useful note for later. I also used numbers (2 ----- 2, or 1 ----- 2) to mark which items are near each other.
These long names really stand out in the list and (so far) do not seem to have any negative effect on application performance. Here's a screenshot of the Hierarchy Editor window, and although it's not highlighted, you can see that I also mark specific items of interest that are nested inside a figure. In this case, I've added a bunch of dashes to the M4 figure's hair, making it easy to find in case I need to make a quick fit adjustment.
Click to see it in more detail.
I know a few people who find this to be VERY weird. They like short names and don't want to clutter things up. I, on the other hand, find that this is a very useful method of finding what I want very quickly.
Whew! Sorry for the looooong delay between posts. I've just been busy with other stuff and have really fallen behind on both the comic book work and on posting updates.
As promised, here's a quick post about the "set design" for the interior scene. I put that phrase in quotes for a definite reason. You see (at least I hope you will), this is not a full set design as I would make for an animated film. I didn't worry about walls or even exact locations. I put stuff where I needed it so it would fall where I wanted it in the main camera (for those of you who are just now joining us, I'm working in Poser 11 Pro).
Here's the final picture, which shows everything where it is.
Here's a look at the basic scene that will take up pages 2 and 3. I marked two landmarks in the scene: 1. Hero Rock and 2. Treasure Chest.
Here's a shot from another angle that gives you an idea of how I moved things around to fit them into the viewport.
This is an oblique view, looking down at the scene. In some cases, I have scaled objects to increase their size so they would look better from a distance. The ceiling is hidden in this view.
As you can see here, I'm being loosey-goosie with the location of objects; my goal was to fit them into the scene and frame the shot I wanted. As such, I had to play around with their scale. The gold coins in front are scaled down to 75%, but the coin piles in the rear are scaled up to 130%, and the treasure chest is a whopping 194%.
View from the side. You can see that I also played around with the y-axis. By that, I mean there is no ground plane visible. I raised things up or lowered them down as needed to get the framing I wanted.
The different scales were needed to get the sense of space that I was striving for in this scene. I fully expect that I will have to move things around again for other panels. If they were going to be walking around the set a lot, this approach would be problematic, but fortunately there are no other long shots that cover the rest of the cave. From this point on, I'll be working with medium and close-ups, so the fragmented construction of the set shouldn't be an issue.
Top-down shot. That big black blob near the Hero Rock is actually the cave ceiling. I thought about having it cover the entire scene, but that just blocked all the lights and made things a lot harder to work with. Having a small prop in front of the camera worked out a lot better for multiple technical reasons (most having to do with lighting).
I was inspired to try this approach from a variety of sources:
I read an interview about the creation of the first Incredibles movie, wherein the director said they only built the parts of sets that would actually appear on camera (much the way most movie sets are built).
A visit to the Houston Natural History museum several years ago: We saw an exhibit of the props from The Lord of the Rings movies, and there was a set recreation that showed how they used forced perspective to blend the actors together with the scenery so that the Hobbits could be farther away (and thus look smaller) and Gandalf would be closer to the camera to make him look bigger.
My old college film classes where we saw how they used matte paintings (a sheet of glass with a painting on it to put in something that wasn't really there (this is why I chose to do the ceiling/cave roof the way I did).
Here's a few videos on Forced Perspective to give you an idea of what I saw at the museum.
Not a perfect example, but very good advice.
And here's another one, that shows how the masters did it in the LoTR movies.
This special feature shows the same table set that I saw at the museum. It was a very cool display, as we could walk around and see it from multiple directions, then move to the camera position and see it from that POV.
And, just one last thing. Yes, since I am working in 3D, I find just as much useful information from filmmakers and photographers as I do from comic book and traditional artists.
NEXT TIME: More on developing my establishing shot
Haven't had time to work on Days Gone for a while now, but the other day I needed an illustration for a mailing label for the Collectors' Club Newsletter, so I took an old illustration and colorized it.
Not a bad job for a quickie. To be honest, I had expected to make his trousers blue or brown, but I found that they looked nice when I matched them to the red arm bands. I don't think these are the definitive colors I'll use when I create cover art for the book, but it was still a fun exercise in digital coloring.
