When my new story "The Flower Chamber" comes out, you may see a few familiar faces amongst the furniture. Yes, that's Huddle, portraying "Garth" the owner of the Elbow Bar in the domed city. A test render for one of  "The Flower Chamber" standing sets.

Some of the furnishings are purchased and some of the work is what people call "kit-hacking," but I built most of this myself from scratch, including the bar and backbar, the beer sign, and the Wurlitzer jukebox you can see in the mirror, and most of the materials.

This project is the result of half a lifetime of interest in mixing comic art and CGI. My interest in it went all the way back to early 1980 when Omaha was just a pipe dream, when we watched news stories of computer graphics and modeling start to develop in the new age of CAD-CAM. It was all a long way off, but I knew it was something I wanted to do.

I was already building and manipulating the sets for Omaha the Cat Dancer on our PC using a house design software in the middle 1980s, and I used PovRay to experiment some in modeling my characters. 

But things weren't far along enough then to make it practical for a hobbyist with a desktop PC, until Poser came along in 1995. I used a combination of Poser2 figures (which I drew over) and sets rendered in RayDream and Strata Studio to create a one-shot erotic comic, "Tumbling Boxes," on my first Mac. No more worrying about lighting!

I continued using Poser through the 1990s, experimenting and then creating some of the Omaha characters on the Mac, and supplementing my income by selling clothing, hair and props on Renderosity, while working with the Nellie and the Drummers virtual reality. Meanwhile, furry artists in California were experimenting with LightWave and breaking into animation.

By the time I became worn out from the relentless advances of  3D graphics, I was working with Jim Vance to finish the Omaha saga itself. Which was composed pretty much entirely in digital media, with 3D modeled reference sets, brush art of course, and then computer coloring in Photoshop, attempting to imitate Kate's airbrush marker style.

Now it's several generations later, I've had to learn one software after another, and finally gave up in despair for about 10 years -- and I can't tell you which is more difficult -- learning a new program or trying to remember how the old one works! And meanwhile, every teenage kid is not only critical from ever-advancing game graphics, but is discovering Blender, Sketchup and numerous anime creation softwares that are available now for beginners.

I don't intend to compete with dyed-in-the-wool CGI geeks, and I don't have enough years left to even try animation … but I do want to take advantage of all the technology that exists to make a fun and colorful story.

Now I spend A LOT of time worrying about lighting!

 More later.

You have no rights to post comments