Fall City HallwayScene

Moving onto some internal scenes now. Still jumping around to keep things fresh. Here's a WIP of a corridor scene where one of the villains goons are going to be hanging out while he is conducting his business.

I'm thinking of hand drawing some images to put into the picture frames. The scene has a Yakuza theme to it so might try my hand at some oriental style pictures. It's also worth noting that I hope to make the corridor modular so that I can just use blender's mirror and array modifiers to create other scenes relatively fast, perhaps just change a few colours and textures around. In fact I'm hoping to do that for a lot of props. The ashtrays and cigarette packets took me a wee while to model so If I can be lazy and reuse them I will.

Rose's katana blades Ebony and Ivory - Project Fall City

Just a quick one!

Fall City is coming along nicely although I'm jumping around from asset to asset to keep things fresh. I guess I'm putting off the character modeling for as long as I can as it's definitely a weak point of mine. One of the main characters 'Rose' is a young energy drink addicted semi-psychopath on a mission to save her mother, and she's going to do it with kick ass swords! Katana's to be more specific!

Here's Ebony and Ivory so far...

New blender comic style render direction

I decided to take the new project away from the black and white images I posted before. While I liked them, especially for a 2D comic they proved a little limiting when applying it to an animation. There was just such a loss of detail say when a character who was already cast in shadow, standing in an alleyway...cast in shadow. I tried messing around with colour variants and while I'm still not happy with the colour palette just yet, I am more happy with the general tone.

Obviously still early days yet, I'm thinking of sticking to the de-saturated colors. I'm rather fond of the Jin-Roh palette. The artist Bengal's colouring has always made me want to try something similar and I think this is the project I'm going to do it!

Just a quick update on the Fall City project. Got the Inner buildings feeling good and now planning out the rest. Also went with a stary sky, in a more realistic style. I think It compliments the style. Also a red sky for some kind of funky effect, maybe a fight scene.

2D Animation Effect In Blender

      While I'm working on my other projects I need a break from time to time or I'll burn out. I do admittedly have too many 'projects' on the go but my focus still remains on Odessa and a few others. One mini project that has got me exited however is Fall City (working title). A 2D Animation effect in the style of Sin City. In fact you could guess that Frank Miller has influenced me a lot in the style I'm going for.

      As you can see I'm definitely going for a 2D effect with a black and white ink style. Visually it will look like Sin City but the tone will be closer to Watchmen, another favorite film of mine, nice and gritty :)

      So far everything is early, in fact what you see there is what I have. I'm planning on making lots of building models in blender to form a city. I won't be seeding them in a particle system like Andrew Price's tutorial for two reasons. Firstly I want to make a 'real city' where everything is laid out where it makes sense, a real down town, shopping district, park areas. Secondly I down want it to be random and 'generated'. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but as I'm going for a 2D animation effect then a lot of the background is going to be in the spotlight often.

      It's going to be a pain in the backside to model the buildings but as I'm doing more and more I'm getting faster and eventually taking a model and splitting it into variations will quickly bump up the amount of assets available.

      There's a lot to figure out, getting to the characters will be interesting. Modeling human forms is not my forte, I'm much more used to hard surface assets but I'm willing to stick with this one as the story is already advanced in my head :)