Sunday, November 19, 2006

Agents of Death

I’ve just posted page 17 online. I’m happy with how it came out, although it ended up having one less panel than I had originally planned.

In a previous page, I mention that the recruits call the planet where they get their training Hell, since it lacks a real name. Page 17 refers twice to hell by making reference to Dante’s the Inferno (“abandon all hope”) and Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost. For the latter, one of my favorite parts of the story is when Satan says he is Hell and where he walks, so goes Hell. I paraphrase this somewhat by saying the recruits will become agents of death and where they walk, death will follow.

The first panel on the page was originally the second, but I decided to switch the first and second since they seemed to fit better that way with the third panel. The first panel shows the reflection of Magnus in Sgt. Black’s sunglasses. To create this effect, I tried to create a reflection map which I could than add directly to the sunglass model in Poser. However, I was not at all happy with the result and decided that I could do the same thing in Photoshop. After creating a separate render of Magnus and another recruit in Poser, and then creating a composite of that and the background, I applied the spherize filter in Photoshop. This gave the image a curved look. I then added another layer with a light effect to imitate glare off the sunglasses. Lastly, I took a Poser render of Sgt. Black’s sunglasses and superimposed the other image I had created of the reflection. After some additional tweaks (an hour or so total work), I had the panel where I wanted it (appearance-wise). Here’s how it turned out:

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