So where were we...? Oh yeah, looking this first attempt over, and considering questions.
191 bluejaysfeathers
Are we… allowed to suggest changes to the angle of the light? Bc if so, his face looks pretty lit from the left for someone illuminated by the sword he’s holding like that (interesting bc the hands don’t look that way and look much more illuminated directly by the blade).
Oh, suggestions are no problem, as the light is exactly where the issue is. And that issue comes in several forms:
(a) Daz human figures display best when there’s enough lighting to emphasize the modeling of their features. When they’re washed out or too flatly lit from in front, they look increasingly artificial.
(b) The contrast between strong lights and darks is the whole point of this piece. In fact, I’m probably going to wind up rendering the 3D art as line art for the page banner at the end of the process.
(c) The canon text specifies at least two different light sources that are unavoidably going to interfere with one another and with (a). 😄 So I’m in trouble already, and I can’t yet see the “mighty leap” [writer joke*...] that’s going to get me out of this leopard-infested pit I’ve dug for myself.
(For those of you who’re curious: every single damn piece of concept art seems to involve mutually exclusive imagery-choices like this. Strange but true. Eventually you start getting used to it, and acting like it, and soon no one invites you to parties any more...)
But at such times, taking the work apart into its component pieces and then adding them back together one at a time sometimes helps indicate a way to go forward. So let’s try that.
(Debugging, with exemplar images, under the cut...)
Here’s our hero in daylight, to help make it plainer what we’ve got to work with.
...BTW, for those of you who’re thinking “Wow that’s a big sword”: yes it is. 😄 And carefully chosen for its user. Khávrinen is an other-Earth congener to the so-called War Sword or “Great Sword of War” of Albrecht II (of Austria)—what medieval-weapons specialists of our day refer to as an Oakeshott Type XVIIIa. (See page 191 of the .pdf here.) It’s usually referred to as a “hand and a half sword” or “bastard sword”: a good compromise among size, weight and balance for a man who both has wartime obligations to the greater realm of which his father’s princedom is part, but also wants to be able to use the weapon to defend himself when he’s on the road trying to look after his dingbat boyfriend. It can be used either one-handed—as it’s significantly lighter than it looks—or two-handed, due to the extra room on the grip. (And as a result, this sword is incredibly popular in what we laughably refer to as the Real World as a reproduction sword for medieval re-enactors. Google for “sword of Albrecht II” and stand back.)
The Leo 7 figure I use for Herewiss is supposed to stand 6′4″ and change…so in terms of an Oakeshott XVIIIa sword’s ratio of height to its user’s height, this is easily how tall such a custom-made sword would stand against its owner (and you wouldn’t get much more custom-made than forging it yourself, which is what this man is primarily preoccupied with doing in The Door Into Fire). Luckily for me, one of the better digital weapons-makers who sells through Daz, a person who goes by Valandar, does the Albrecht II as part of a historical-sword set. So there it is.
...Anyway. This render was done with a 16K HDRI file—a skydome, essentially, producing relatively neutral daylight with a color temperature of 6500K. ...The sun’s off to the right-hand side. Now watch what happens when I turn it until it’s behind the camera’s POV.
...It’s okay, but Herewiss looks kinda flat. ...And that is exactly the effect I’m going to be fighting against when I start installing the very-dark-and-very-bright lighting conditions. Especially since the closest source of bright light is going to be coming from right in front of him. (And worse still, below.)
So let’s turn the lights off and see what starts happening. Nothing but starlight... (The Milky Way HDRIs by the designer Orestes Studios, which are pretty much the darkest I’ve got that make sense in this scenario, have some horizon light / “city light” around the edges, but not so much that it really annoys me.)(NB also that in these renders, for speed’s sake, I’m leaving out the add-on atmosphere dome that softens the distance in finished shots. But normally that, or its equivalent in native-app “bloom” settings, would be present. You learn very quickly that even fairly close shots can look very fake without some softening/bloom in the air.)
...Now let’s start kicking the tires. Subtlety on the light coming from Khávrinen’s blade can wait for later: I’m just going to apply a very bright emissive surface to the metal and we’ll see what we get.
So there’s that. Now we see that there’s no danger of Dusty getting any light on his face from the sword’s blade: which in its way is good, as it makes it easier to control what does get there. …But we’re still left with an issue to handle, in that he blocks it from showing at all behind. Let’s see what happens when we add the present version of the whole-body flame.
This tells us again that what light gets to his face is going to come (at least initially, and at least partially) from that outer sheath of Flame.
Now that, too, is okay. The fun part about getting all this to look good, though, is that this version of digital flame—built and rigged as it was to be attached to a figure’s hands—is rigged really badly for (a) being scaled up very much, or (b) being moved around independently. So it takes a surprising amount of time to get it to behave in any way that’s even slightly like what I have in mind. (As you can see the from the lighting above. As @bluejaysfeathers remarks, it makes no sense for the light and shadow to be falling the way they presently do. The fire’s unevenness and naughty misbehavior is the cause.)
Nonetheless, after some pushing, pulling, yanking, dragging, and otherwise straining the apparent limits of this technology out of shape, I managed to get the outer Fire sheath into the shape you see below.
...Which is better than it was. (And if the image is going to wind up as line art, the silhouetting will be a plus, and help make it plainer what the viewer is looking at.)
So: now we add in Khávrinen’s own batch of Fire and see how things look.
...The ground is going to need attention—you see that big shadowed area right behind Herewiss—and the nice bands of Fire going back and forth in front of the blade are a little washed out. But at least the new source of Flame in front is adding light to his face and upper body that, at the very least, looks possible, or believable. Sometimes, in a project’s early stages, that’s as close as you get. :)
...So now comes more fine-tuning, and other business. Narrowing Khávrinen’s Fire down so that Dusty’s body contours are more clearly visible at reduced size: possible changes in Herewiss’s position: replacing the version of Lionhall that I don’t like with one that I do. Probably a couple of days’ work, on and off (while also doing other things). And at the end of the day, it’ll be a piece of art bit enough to go across the top of the web page: something along these lines, when the logo’s in place.
(Though meanwhile I may want to process the background, as I mentioned, as line art. The basic art is below, so I can play with it and see what produces the best result.)
...Some people are probably going to think that this looks like a lot of work for something so small. Well, a fair bit of work, yeah. But it’s just more worldbuilding. If I’m not willing to commit to doing the small things well—commensurate with the amount of time that it’s worth spending on them, a judgment that only the artist is fully equipped to make—then that bodes ill for the kind of effort I’ll be willing to spend on the really big things: cultural stuff, character stuff, the art of conflict and drama. Here, as in so many other places in the life of art (or the art of life), the meta is practice for the Matter. 😌
...And now it’s my bedtime. Night night, all.
*A classic get-out clause (literally) once associated with pulp serials, in prose or on film, in cases where the writer(s) had written themselves into a corner one week… and not satisfactorily solved the problem. The next week, the first line you read is “With a mighty leap Our Hero escaped the leopard-infested pit and rushed away to save the fair Esmeralda from a fate worse than death…” (eyeroll)
The guys at Independent Music News kindly added us to their list for 50 Unsigned/Independent Bands to discover in August, check it out, loads of great bands are listed!
Thank you to Dont Need No Melody for their kind words about our forthcoming single Soldiers which will be released through Tiny Lights on the 26th August 2013 via all major digital platforms and on CD format. You can read and listen about Soldiers here
