Creating a Page: Raiders of the Lost Eye Ch 7 Pg 5

Apparently Ernest Hemingway was the one who said that "The only kind of writing is rewriting". I've learned that art can be like that too. I thought I'd take you through my process for creating page 5, Chapter 7 of Raiders of the Lost Eye to show you what I mean.

When it comes to comics, especially this big fantasy epic I've got going on, I prefer to work from a script. That way I know ahead of time what I'm going to need to create visually. So for this page I already had the dialogue written. I knew it would portray Duster, her powers magically restored thanks to a talisman she found/claimed, confronting this fantasy world's version of her enemy Count Lukas von Hartig. This von Hartig is a slave-dealer rather than a big game hunter, and a male chauvinist to boot. He's a villain in very much in need of a comeuppance, which Duster would deliver in this scene.

I began by loading the file for the last panel from the previous page into Daz Studio.

For serials, this is a handy technique. The figures, props, lighting, and everything else are already loaded in the previous scene's file. It's just a matter of repositioning things, adjusting the camera angle and lighting... easy, right?

Well, not for a big, single-page splash I've been building towards for some time. It took some extra work.

Since the image was really about Duster confronting von Hartig, I removed the three henchmen to provide the image with some clear focus. Duster would dominate the image. I imagined her floating/flying in a pose that conveys power and control. von Hartig would be hurtling through the air, looking at her in terror. She'd be above him in the image, underlining who has the upper hand (literally!). And since it's a comic page with dialogue, I needed to ensure that there was room for the word balloons.

Here's my first attempt:

If you have a look at the last panel from the previous page you'll see it has a backlit effect, making the characters into little more than silhouettes. All the light is coming from a HDRi wrap-around image, with the brightest part of the HDRi behind the characters. For this following page I wanted the two characters better lit so I rotated the HDRi 180 degrees, attempting to have the HDRi's brightest part shining onto their fronts and faces. As you can see, the HDRi provides some nice ambient light, but not really enough to properly illuminate the characters. I decided to add some spotlights. I loaded the image into Comic Life 3 where I had the dialogue ready and waiting. Duster's position interfered with the "attribution tails" of her word balloons, so I had to adjust the camera angle and her left arm's pose to accommodate them.

Here's the second attempt:

This was slightly better; you can see Duster much more clearly. Still, I wasn't completely happy with it. This was a big moment, and this just didn't look dramatic enough. I decided to keep the HDRi for its ambient lighting but to turn off the "Draw Dome" option so it wasn't visible. Instead, I left the image background empty (transparent, actually) so I could put in a different graphic.

I decided to have a big lightning bolt behind Duster; there's your drama! Now, I had used a lightning bolt HDRi for the first panel of the previous page, but I didn't want to reuse it because it would look too similar. I went through a lot of Google Images results and eventually settled on this picture:

It's smaller than my final image, but I knew I could enlarge it and then use a Gaussian blur to make it fuzzy like a depth-of-field effect. The main bolt is nice and thick, providing that appearance of bright illumination I wanted. It would appear that Duster was mainly illuminated by the lightning bolt, so I got rid of the conventional key light and instead used a bright rim light from the side.

I also added emissive lighting effects to the talisman and to Duster's eyes. I knew the talisman would be obscured in postwork in GIMP by a visual effect called a "supernova", but I wanted some yellowish light (the colour of the talisman) shining onto Duster's chin, neck, and upper chest. It would be subtle but it would sell the effect.

Duster's eyes don't normally glow when she uses her powers. And she can't normally command lightning. But I decided the eye glow would underline that there's a magical source at work to restore her wind powers... and that it has some additional effects. In addition, with Duster mainly lit from behind now, making her eyes light-emitting helped illuminate her face.

This looked better, but the light appears to be coming from the side; the lighting bolt in the image would appear behind Duster. So I had to swing the light around so it was behind her more than from the side. In addition, I thought more of the wind prop effects should be visible. I had two instances of the same prop for the whirlwind effect; I shrunk one a bit and raised it. I also added a light to illuminate von Hartig just a little.

If you compare these two images you can see how in the one immediately above, the light source illuminating Duster appears more behind her than from the side, as I wanted. The spotlight on von Hartig comes from the same angle, but I moved it in closer to him to illuminate him. It's subtle, ensuring there's a bit of a light outline on his head and clothing.

I then combined the test image with my background to see how it all looked.

You can definitely see that this is a low quality test render if you enlarge it. The idea is to quickly produce this image so I have a proof that the concept works. I also loaded it into Comic Life 3 to ensure the word balloons could be positioned properly.

I was finally happy with the lighting and positioning so it was time to produce the high-quality render. As I noted in another recent journal, the latest version of Daz Studio (4.11.0.383) has some substantial changes to the Iray render engine. One effect is that renders are faster now. This image cooked in just under a half hour:

(If you look closely at Duster's upper chest you can see the lighting I was talking about, from the emissive talisman disc.)

Besides adding the background, the image needed some postwork. As I mentioned above, I added the supernova effect to the talisman disc. I created a "glow" effect which I described in a much older tutorial. I also added a motion blur effect to Duster's hair and von Hartig's body to further sell the idea that the characters are being whipped around inside of a whirlwind. I adjusted the background image a bit, blurring it as well as adjusting the colour saturation so it's a little less pink and a little more grey, trying to get it to match the look of the sky in the previous page's last panel. Below is the final result, the image used in the comic, but without any word balloons.

I had an internal debate with myself about adding a thunder "sound effect", a "KRAK-A-BOOM" or text to that effect, but I eventually decided that it wasn't needed. 

It's funny, I thought it wouldn't take as much time to create this page as previous ones, because it uses a single image rather than several panels. But having just one panel for the page meant that it had to look just right, and that took some time and experimentation.