Bodak

Creating the battlespace

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett once said that, when constructing a fantasy world, the first question he would ask himself was 'how do the sewers work?'

It's a great principle to follow (not necessarily literally) when creating a photo-story. You've already seen the base, but here's how I see it breaking down in the battle. The dome on the far right will be the moon-pool, and this will be the entry/exit point for both sides. The middle dome will be the barracks, and the attac...

Scene 6

Don't worry, there's still ten more you haven't seen yet...

1st Person Goblin

On the subject of 1st Person view points, I've got quite the taste for them. Here's one half of a scene from the gate-battle for my Elves vs Goblins battle, which is proceeding slowly but steadily.

Note the shields on the right which are helping keep the shadows fairly consistent.

Scene within a Scene

If you ever find yourself wondering why it takes me so long to get anything done, this scene might explain things. I've been working on and off for several years on a space-girls and lasers story with lots of emissives (you've probably seen some of these scenes before). There's a scene when some reinforcements arrive, and I wanted to do a glimpse of the command centre just before the dropship lands, showing the invasion force's officers realising that the battle isn't going their way. There'l...

Cocktail Dresses

I said I'd try and populate the 'modern' folder, so here's something I've completed quite recently. Genesis 9 looks good, but she's a real resource hog and I had to render this scene three at a time.

Crossing the moat

Again, I feel like the setting I chose really let me down on this: All the edges look too straight and regular, like a 90s video game.

Attacker downed

Another close-up of an attacker getting hit, with some more in-render blood effects that look entirely out of place for an arrow like that, not to mention the poke-through around the bra.

Downed Ninja close-up

I have a really bad habit of getting distracted by individual characters: I plan a story of twenty slides or so, and end up having to do follow-up and prequel shots of different characters when they get killed. The whole thing mushrooms out of control, and I never finish anything :/

Ninja defender hit

Often with G8, character morphs can create strange rendering artifacts on the foreheads (look at the the black spot on the left-hand girl's head). You can get around it by increasing the size of the hair by about 10%, but I didn't know that then.

I also found an- ahem- cumshot prop from renderotica that I re-shaded to look like blood, but it as you can see it deforms strangely when the figure's mouth is open. Another reason why this render never saw the light of day.

Fallen attacker

A close-up of one of the attackers, and an early experiment with decal effects for blood. Close-in scenes made me really dislike this set: There was a weird bump map which meant that the ground rendered higher in Iray than it did in the preview window, so I kept having to re-do renders where figures looked like they were stuck in the ground.

Onna Bushi charge

Another unfinished charge scene: I was never happy with how shallow the formation looked, but I couldn't be arsed going back in and putting more figures in the background.

3: Lorienne (iii)

She couldn't breathe- couldn't get up- couldn't understand why. Lorienne's Prada heels made a harsh scratching sound on the bricks as she convulsed, choking and coughing. Blood bubbled up between her lips and soaked her silk blouse, her short skirt falling back down her hips as her body arched. What had happened? She was dazed, blinking and breathless as she stared up at the square of bright sun framed by the high grey walls of the courtyard.

She needed to get up- she was supposed to b...

3: Lorienne (ii)

She didn't see the shooter who got her- was too busy staring down her sights at the bitch behind the entrance-way when the slug smacked into her chest. It was like being pushed hard in the chest and stung by a wasp at the same time: She threw her arms out reflexively, gave a little shout of surprise, not quite realising what had happened. Then the world lurched; the sky and ground changing places, and something smacked her on the back of the head and drove what remained of the air in her lung...

3: Lorienne (i)

There were shooters on the ground floor, shooters on the balcony- probably shooters behind the damned concrete lattice as well. A bullet hissed past Lorienne as she pressed forwards, feeling her Glock kick in her palm as she fired at the corner of the opposite doorway. Behind her she could hear Cassie whimpering; someone else shouting orders further back.

In the back of her mind, she knew she was in a bad position; knew she was exposed. A black-clad figure leaned quickly around the edg...

2: Faye (iii)

As the courtyard swam with her tears and her bare feet kicked out against the pain, there was only one thought in her head:

I fucking knew it was an abmbush! I knew it was a bad idea!

2: Faye (ii)

The bullets that struck her came out of nowhere- she didn't even hear the faint crack of discharge over her own surprised grunt. She dropped her own gun, breathless and suddenly weak, her knees sagging, legs losing their structure, feet coming out of her shoes as she collapsed...

2: Faye (1)

To Faye's eyes, the wide open courtyard seemed like an ambush waiting to happen. She could sense the nervousness of the others as they approached it.

"Push up," murmured Isla, the redhead covering the right-hand corridor with wary eyes. "Faye- take point."

Great.

1: Cassie (iii)

The shock didn't last long. Tearing open her blouse to see the bullet hole in her bra was enough to bring home the reality: She tried to scream, but the breath just wouldn't come. The heels of her Louis Vuitton sandals scratched against the rough brick courtyard in a way that would have horrified her moments ago. It didn't seem important now. She could hear the pop-pop-pop of distant small-arms fire, the crack and whine of bullet impacts, shouts of panic, orders, someone else's scream...

1: Cassie (ii)

When the shooting started, Cassie was so focused on hunting for targets on ground level, she didn't see the dark figures up on the balcony. When the pop-pop of gunfire sounded all around her, and the hiss and whine of bullets, she had just enough time to panic: Then a slug punched into her chest and she let out a yelp; more shock than pain...

1: Cassie (i)

'Light resistance,' the intelligence report had claimed, but so far there'd been no resistance at all, and as Cassie emerged into the shadowed courtyard that fronted the facility, she couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right. The concrete lattice walls concealed the dimly lit interior in such a way that you could hide an army behind them.

Expensive, designer heels clattered on concrete as her fellow Agents spilled out behind her, into the open, painfully exposed pl...

Watching the Camp

My Elves vs Goblins story has one minor obstacle on the path to progress (two if you count the fact that the gate battle is proving bloody hard work).

Basically, I've done loads of renders of Elven Rangers running, shooting, getting shot and rolling around in the mud, but almost no renders of the Goblin defenders doing their thing. This makes for a very one-sided battle, and needs urgently rectifying.

So for the next month or so I'm going to need to churn out some r...

Mona's ironic end

Now I'm not guaranteeing that this is exactly how it will go for Mona, but having lost a training fight in the prologue renders, I think it makes sense for her to lose a real one too. This is a mock-up of how that fight might look- I basically took the pose from the knife-training scene and used it to create this one. I'm quite happy with it, so this is probably going to end up in the final version.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that the Marine finishing her off is weari...

Black Team: The Gym

 So my idea is that the bald guy is hiring the mercs, and the suit lady is showing him around their training facilities to convince him they're worth the money. As well as seeing the core work, the knife fighting and the swimming pool, he's also going to see them getting to it in the gym and possibly a firing range (underwater speargun firing range?!)

Here's the first render- there'll be another one to put some girls on those running machines.

Knife Training

So I showed you the Knife Training WIP a few weeks ago: Here's the first render from what I think will be the final version. As you can see, Mona is pretty pissed off that Eleanor's gotten the better of her. There'll be a few more renders to go, including the second training fight in the background and the buyer and the seller on the right hand side.

The posters are just random images I found on the internet, skinned onto simple 2D primitive planes. I might have to re-do them wi...

Black Team: Billie and Natsuki

Here's another example of building characters: On the left, Billie is one of the recruits learning to use her Scuba kit in the swimming pool scene (you haven't seen that yet). On the right is Natsuki, who'll be in the Gym, spotting for her benchpressing friend when the buyer passes through. You'll be seeing the first stage of that one later.

Edit- One thing about Iray is that when you render the scene, you often find figures don't look entirely how you expect. Now I look at this,...

Black Team: Mona and Eleanor

So you saw the initial stages of the training knife-fight for the set-up sequence: Here's the two trainees from that scene- Eleanor (brunette) and Mona (blonde). I set them up in their Scuba kit initially, then deleted all the scuba clothes and props and gave them their gym leotards instead, saving them as separate files. It means that I can easily bring them into scenes as the story progresses. One consistent bit of feedback I get from a whole range of people, is how much they like seeing a ...

Amazons Book 4

Here's Book 4, which brings the Ghulam invasion arc to a close. Book 5 deals with an Amazon counter-invasion of the Ghulam homelands, but I never finished it. I got distracted with Book 6, which I'll be serialising on here for Tier 2 members, and deals with an Amazon civil war that breaks out during the events of Chapter 5.

Amazons Book 3

Here's Book 3 of five

Amazons Book 2

Here's the download for the second (of five!) book of Amazon mayhem.

Amazons Book 1

OK, so a few people have asked me to put these on here: I wrote some (OK, an awful lot of) text stories about Amazon warriors in various battles, and they are really really old. I have to admit, I look back on them now and don't think they're all that great, but if you want to read them then here they are- some of them are illustrated with my artwork.

The link will take you to the download for a 7z folder full of PDFs. I always scan files before I upload them, but that doesn't m...