Or, “Working for Hutt, Inc.”
Yes, you read right. A month ago, Agent 86 asked me, at the last-minute, to do the cover art for Hutt, Inc. 3: The Two Arenas. Wow! I agreed, after explaining the medium I used and, roughly, what I could & couldn’t do with his request, since he had assumed I used a more traditional & low-tech medium.
Image may be NSFW.
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The request was for — oh, let’s call it a prisoner transport scene, to avoid spoilers for potential players. Now I did not have access to the module, although I was told what had happened going into the scene I was illustrating. Among the wanted details was a very elaborate set, space background, and lots of people! It didn’t take long for me to decide I needed some help, since most of my work is on simpler pieces-smaller scenes, fewer people. I think 4 was the most people I had used in a picture up to this point. I also envisioned some “special effects” that I knew could be done but wasn’t sure how. Another real possibility was that my computer might not have the memory to render such an elaborate picture.
Being more sensible than most fictional “apprentices,” I appealed to my “master,” Terras Jadeonar, who has taught me informally since he got me into the 3D art hobby. I proposed a collaboration on the piece. This turned out to be a very good idea, and made it possible for the final picture to be so much closer to the author’s vision than I could have done solo.
By the time I invited Terras in on the project, I’d already started working on several characters, male human, female human and a feminine-style droid. Like all my 3D pieces, the characters (and other items) in the scene started as purchased, or free, 3D mesh models, that I had to alter–posed, unique facial & body features added, dressed, given expressions. Terras took over the droid and the planned Wookiee at my request, since he’s made some amazing characters like those, from the mesh models.
Eventually, I added the model set and created, with Carrara’s tools, a special effect “prop,” a transparent, slightly glowing cube. It was a very simple thing to do, but I am still quite proud, as I had never tried to do anything like it before.
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Screenshot from inside Carrara’s render room, by Terras Jadeonar. A visual aid for Agent 99 on using a more advanced rendering technique.
At this point, things got more and more elaborate. I added several background characters, and Terras contributed others; I did a total of 10 for this piece, and lost track of how many he did, in addition to his 2 “main characters.” Making and dressing the individual characters is one of my favorite parts. Carrara has lots of morphs for expressions and I needed the 4 main characters to look unhappy and mad. I love mixing & matching pieces for various outfit sets I pick up, and changing the colors and materials. As I mulled over a futuristic armor set, I muttered to myself about the glaring omission of groin protection for man or woman–and loaded a bodysuit for him and bikini bottom for her, then colored to match the armor pieces that were included. Even the minor characters got this kind of treatment. Yeah, I’m a Virtual Fashionista; it’s cheaper than being a real-life one.
When my machine proved incapable of rendering even what we’d done so far, Terras made that work for us, by creating a much more elaborate set, that was actually closer to Garret’s original vision than I could have done, providing new and altered props that gave the final scene a much different look than in our earlier test renders.
To make this work meant a lot of back and forth via IM, Dropbox and email. We talked over the direction the piece was taking and what to include and how to create the look. Garret was kept in the loop with update emails and Work In Progress (WIP) images. I found this invaluable when working on Heroes on Demand and similar small projects for Agent 94 over the past year or 2, and it was even more useful on this much larger-scale project, with a much less flexible deadline than I was used to.
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A fast, test render for character pose & placement, done at an early stage of the project. (Image by Agent 99 & Terras Jadeonar)
The characters — his and mine — that I posed in groups were zipped and sent to Terras to be incorporated into the main scene, along with his background props and droids. I got some of the pieces I was working with this way, plus instructions for using some of the advanced Carrara features I hadn’t tried before. We always work this way since he’s in Saskatoon (Canada) and I’m in Little Rock, Arkansas. However the scope of the project meant we were doing a lot more of it, and I really enjoyed it. We also found it was often more convenient to use offline messages and screenshots sent by Dropbox rather than trying to find a time we could both be online, something that had delayed previous projects when I needed advice.
And the result? Up to this point, we had only done test renders, with low settings that took only minutes, some under 10, to complete. I was amazed when I saw the final render, which took over 24 hours. You can find Hutt, Inc. Part III here.