Comic & Status update !

Hi! Apologies for another long posting delay. My internet was out for about 2 weeks, and some problems still occur... But that doesn't stop me from spending time on my projects :P

Posting stuff is more difficult though... :D

Here are some preview pics. I rendered these, to see the mistakes they had, and all have been fixed, but not re-rendered yet. One image takes 40 minutes, which is also why I don't do long animations just yet. One spicy WIP too :)

Mega https://mega.nz/folder/a0ljlKQa#5LGw1pZDRwdiLWaSgTkrxQ

Drive https://drive.proton.me/urls/XY1AT9B52C#C4l4f0cb5w4p

(The drive now contains image previews !)

The comic is about 50% done, which is 33 pages so far. I've spent about 70 hours on it this month, and this is what have been done :

- Characters have new rigs adapted for these poses (and animations for the future). Facial poses are much easier to make, but sometimes they look weird, so I'm keeping it simple for now. Next step will require sculpting normal maps, and make procedural face wrinkles. This will take time, so I'll see if this will be implemented here.

- New workflow for color management has been implemented. I can make one render, then change the colors to make it from day to night even, without needing to re-render everything again. The lighting looks much better too!

- CLOTHES! This is what took me the most time to make, but I found a good alternative to make them work. Basically, all clothes you can find online, have unusable topology. I'll write more below about it.

- Environment has been completed. I had to find assets online, and adapt them to the post-apocalyptic theme. I used dust shaders to make it look good, and place them in the scene.

- Vegetation uses about 10Gb of my VRAM. I paid for 24Gb of VRAM, and I will use all of it. I think it looks amazing, even though I had to optimize it at some places.

Clothes available online have very complex topology which is unusable for rigging. It takes the long process of retopologizing them, and it's not worth the effort. My solution was cutting out the part of the character that will use the jacket like the torso, duplicating it and separating it from the character. Then add a shapekey and sculpt it so the whole jacket fits inside of it. You can then bind the jacked to that mesh that you can set as transparent for the renders, and you get a fully working jacket that follows your rig ! You can do it with everything else. The backpack though, requires manual sculpting for each frame. Backpacks in 3D suck!

For better character facial details so they don't look weird when posed, I'm gonna need to manually sculpt these details and create textures with a procedural shader, so the forehead will distort when the eyebrows get lifted and such. There are many tutorials to do this in Blender, and I found a way myself on how to do this, but we'll see IF I can implement this, and make a release next month. I took the time to manually remake the head topology and transfer textures to have proper deformations. WIP included.

I also lost a week of my time because I tried to use BlendRig 6, but it's a complete waste of time. I tried following tutorials, and the results were always tragic on the face especially. Even with manual fixes over and over again... I went back to AutoRigPro with a newer version, and FaceIt Pro for facial rigging, but with advanced shapekeys for realistic deformations. If you plan on making rigs without the hassle of making them yourself, stick to AutoRigPro !

So what's next? I'm posing the spicy stuff and mixing it with the story I wrote. No spoilers though. You'll see when the comic is out, and I plan to do that this month. Changes that will be made, is tweaking the wolf's fur a bit because I realized it's not long enough compared to wolves, and find a way to add movement to images (blur or illustrations) to make it look more dynamic like in cartoons or anime.

I'm working hard with all the free time I've got on this, so I'm grateful for all of you for supporting me with such patience <3 If this takes too much time again, I will make sure to take a break and make a small nice release this month to keep you and me entertained.

Thank you, and don't hesitate to comment or message me ! I've already exchanged with a few artists about guidelines and tips for their projects :)

PS: If you got tips on where I could find unique The last of us themed environments on the internet, even for a resonable price so I could produce future content faster, feel free to tell me ! :)