Bodak

Win some, lose some

I saw this spider at the weekend for about 85% off, and it looked like a great idea. Unfortunately, after I left it cooking overnight for more than 7 hours, it was still a fuzzy, pixellated mess. I'll have to look again at the setting and find something that works in the dark.

Squish

I can't remember the name of the plugin I used to get the deform effect- I just remember that it was quite fiddly to use and glitched out often. I was quite taken with the close-in effect as well- I know I have a habit of trying to show the whole figure from head to toe, even if it detracts from the overall image.

Archers 2

I don't think it's as obvious as it should have been, but this is a different guard tower with a different pair of defenders. The re-booted sequel I'm on-off working on has more variety in the Ninja outfits.

First casualties

Obviously, the boss and her standard bearer are leading from the rear...

Defenders

There's the defenders- gratuitous arse shot- aiming their bows. I think I wanted a zoom-in on that particularly unpleasant-looking arrow-head.

Charge!

And they're off! I was never satisfied with how relatively empty this scene looked: I wanted an army of samurai girls charging forwards, but the angle I chose made it almost impossible to fill in the rear-scene detail.

Mandatory pre-battle speech

Here's the boss, telling her warriors that their sacrifices will be worthwhile and all that guff.

Ninja defenders

The whole idea of the story was that the roles were reversed: The Onna Bushi had discovered where the Ninja lair was, and arrived in force to storm it. Again, I had quite a lot of fun creating a Gen 8 version of my old V4 outfits from Cherry Blossom Temple.

The Onna Bushi army

This is from the Cherry Blossom Temple that never was: I had hours of fun creating each individual character here, but my ambition ended up exceeding my technical capabilities, and my choice of scene was poor, so the whole thing ended up getting called off.

First (only) casualty

This was the last render I did for the abortive Paladins series- But also an early experiment with using d-formers to create an impact effect where the bolt is going in. I use Mesh grabber now, and its much easier to work with.

Fairies and Frogs

OK, so hear me out... What about an army of Tinkerbell fairies with bows and double-ended glaives, fighting bipedal frogs with crossbows and bone harpoons?

Files and Folders 2

So I mentioned with the last post that I save scene components like bodies or weapons as a 'scene subset', so I can quickly load them into another render for continuity purposes.

This example, from my Triptychs set, shows how that applies to a photo-story.

If you look at the file browser on the far left, you can see all the sub-folders I use to organise my work (more on those another time), but the one I want to show you is the 'continuity' folder. Basically, because I have so man...

Files and Folders

Having said I'll be doing tutorials in here, I realise that I haven't really done much of that, so here goes.

Fundamental to my approach to creating large battle scenes is the principle of taking multiple renders from the same camera angle, often with overlapping figures to preserve shadowing and make putting the scenes together much easier.

Here is a fairly simple example, because it's just for a single, seasonal, one-off render which will go on Deviantart at the end of th...

T1: Cassie

I'm going see how it works to offer a download link, rather than hosting the images on here. In theory, this link will take you to a dropbox folder with the first Triptych scene.

Let me know how it works.

Wood Elven Warriors

For the last year or so (yes, it really takes that long) I've been chipping away at something entirely inspired by old-school Warhammer's Wood Elves (anyone remember the old plastic sprues, where half of the torsos were female?)

The story is that, unoriginally enough, some Goblins have been very naughty to the trees, and the Wood Elves have come to tell them off. Here's the Leader, her Sorceress, her bodyguard, and the spear-levy troops they've brought in reserve.

This is going ...

River Crossing

This is from a period of time about (checks notes) 9 years ago (!) when I was still crossing over from 3DL to Iray. I'd started a massive, sprawling urban battle story with these eclectically-clad girls on one side. This is from the climactic battle, as they try to ford a river, having found the bridge too well defended. Ultimately, the series never made it to publication because I absolutely hate post-work. I had to do all the effects in GIMP and it took ages.

I'll be cherry-picking s...

Hostile Planet

An early experiment with Iray light sources- most of the lighting in this scene comes from the helmet displays, the laser beams and the fires.

This is part of a larger series which will be making it onto this site in installments over the next few months.

Announcement

If you're reading this, then thank you very much for supporting my work!

It's going to take me a bit of time to get used to Patreon- specifically what will and won't be censored. My first draft got knocked back for all the obvious reasons, which puzzling to me, because sites like Neon Dark are out there unmolested, and a game modder I've been following has just started a line in graphic shemale hentai (if that's your cup of tea).

Anyway, to start with I'll be playing...

Onna Bushi and Ninja characters

Ever since the massive success of my Cherry Blossom Temple set, I've wanted to create a sequel. My first attempt proved ill-fated (you'll see parts of that one in the Dungeon in the coming months) but this one has come on much better.

Here are some of the characters you'll be seeing once I'm ready to publish- probably around the New Year.

Scene 2

 For all that I've never done much Cowgirl stuff, I do love all that posing around in the sun, waiting to see who'll fire the first bullet.

I can hear that 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' theme in my head right now.

Scene 1

I started doing this comic-book style with Surgical Strike 2 (Find it on my Deviantart page).

That was before I realised how much of a fucking massive pain in the arse it would be.

Apart from the final fight, I've rendered all the scenes for this one, but only got as far as slide 8 of the comic.

Guess I'd better bite the bullet and do some post-work :(

Skills House

Outfits aside, I like to ground my stories in at least a little bit of reality, and I was a Recce Officer until recently. If I was on a container ship, on my way to storm a defended beach resort to seize an HVT, I'd want my team to do ROC drills in an improvised skills-house too.

The final render will have some target dummies set up inside, and a few hangers-on (possibly with clipboards and high-vis-vests) watching critically from a distance while not actually doing any real work.

Mise en Abyme 2

See it?

It's on the table, along with a couple of others. That's the HVT these sporty types are going to be sent to grab. As you can see, the suit is talking to someone who isn't there: The other six team leaders are in the other two renders.

I'm going to have to do something about the poke-through on the tall girl's knitted top (I don't really like the outfit much anyway) and that distant sea looks a little artificial- more blur needed perhaps.

This is a set-up rende...

Mise en Abyme 1

Alright, so any literary pedants out there will tell you that Mise en Abyme actually refers to the practice of placing a copy of an image within itself- but this is pretty close I think. This is a brief render of a man being guarded by two gunwomen (must be baddies: they've got AKs). Have a look for it in the next render...

Behind the shields

See what I did there?

No?

Oh. Never mind.

Another one from my upcoming Elves vs Goblins battle: I wanted something claustrophobic to give a sense of being in that shield-wall as it approaches the camp under a hail of Goblin arrows and cross-bow bolts. I've rendered the mob of Gobbos defending the gate, but I still need to add in the archers on the platforms and behind the gaps in that wall, not to mention all the dead ones brought down by the Rangers' bows. I've mentioned t...

Goblin Camp

If you zoom in, you'll see a few things about the way I work, which I'll hopefully be exploring in some video tutorials once I've worked out how to do them properly.

I have a lot of folders (on the left) with all the different projects I'm working on, past and present. Sub-folders help me organise settings, poses, characters and temporary assets like single figures or props that I want to preserve for continuity. Notice the 33 and 75% poly replicas of the camp buildings, so that...

Crossbows

Here's where I really realised that I wasn't going to make it work: That took two renders, because I could only get the castle turret and two figures in the scene without crashing.

The idea of crossbows punching into armoured torsos made it into my Paladins of Pellan set though- I started the renders for that shortly after I abandoned this.

The advance

Here they go, advancing towards the walls. As you can see, I got bored at this point, and I never managed to fill in the detail on the far side. Nowadays, I'd use the decimator plugin to make low-poly copies of the figures that I could cram in ten or so to a render, but at this point I was still working in fours and fives. I realised that with this camera angle, I couldn't render enough figures in the scene to make the ranks look convincing: For every one in the front rank, I'd need the rest ...

The Ram

Here they are, all formed up and ready. The texture on those shields is shit, because I hadn't really got the hang of re-texturing models in Iray. I loved the banner though- I spent ages making a design for it, and then realised that when I simulated the thing in D-force, you couldn't see it.

Looking at the Castle

Here's two Paladin girls, looking at the castle and wondering how shit it's gonna be trying to storm it. I had to render the castle separately and then use it as a backdrop, which was the first sign that things weren't going to work out.