Blogstipation- It’s All in a Good Cause, Though

Filed under Works in Progress

All’s been preternaturally quiet around here, but there have been good reasons for that. I’ve been preoccupied with a couple of things that have kept me off the blog, you see.

At left is one of those distractions. It’s a closeup, or at least closeup-ish, view of the City of Nova York from my Empire State Patrol comics project – the city is the largest set for the story and I started it nearly two years ago. I’m hoping that I might be finished with the whole of Manhattan Island in early July, on its anniversary.

This is what I’ve called the “medium resolution” version of the city – the highest res at which the whole city would be visible – and it’s divided into large sections. The idea was that I’d use my low resolution version in the distance, and this medium resolution version closer in, with the addition of some “hero buildings” for the truly close-up bits that might show in a given image. Since I’m now on a much manlier computer than I was when I started I’ve begun to wonder whether I’ll need the low res version at all. We’ll just have to see.

One thing that’s typical of something that takes this long is that I may need to go back and rework the earlier sections of the city. The newer blocks are more detailed and, though they use the same materials as the old buildings, they don’t quite match. I’m working on a large number of rectangular blocks that make up Nova York’s outskirts. At the center of the city – which occupies the area of what’s now Midtown Manhattan – the streets are laid out in concentric circles that ring the Empire State Building. That’s the one remaining bit of our old New York.

My other recent distraction is an advertising campaign for my T-Shirt sites, Retropolis Transit Authority and Saga Shirts. I’ve had wonderful success this time around by advertising on webcomics and blogs – but online advertising is often a handy way to bleed money faster than you can count it, so the ads have taken quite a bit of my attention.

Cover Concept for my “Empire State Patrol” Project

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

This is a concept piece for my huge, looming, and intimidating comics project, “Empire State Patrol”. Which I think will take about as long to finish as the cathedral at Chartres. Go on, look it up. I’ll still be here.

There’ll be a common layout for all ten covers, which I think will be pretty much what we see here, and I’ve added an illustration for a scene in the second chapter. Since this is the cover for issue #2. I’m probably not really done with it, but finishing things like this makes me feel like I might be getting something done. Silly, silly me.

That’s Jake Rothman up on the rock, Marco Lippi down below, and Clay Hooper out back. They used to be construction workers. Now they’re rocket pilots. Life’s just crazy that way.

io9 Blog Throws Some Love to my Retropolis Transit Authority

Filed under Found on the Web, Works in Progress

I don’t actually read the io9 blog every day, but I make up for it when I do. They’ve featured some great science fiction related topics and some entertaining silliness in the few months they’ve been up, and I enjoy it enough that I’ve been linking to it in the “Notable Blogs” blogroll over on the left column (well, on my main pages, that is).

So imagine my surprise and delight to find that they’ve chosen my Retropolis Transit Authority site as the only T-shirt vendor in yesterday’s Triviagasm feature, Scifi Clothing You Can Wear on the Street Without Fear of Reprisals. To wit:

So how do we pick just one? The answer is simple: we don’t. We just have a giant closet full of scifi shirts ready to go at a moment’s notice, and the flavor of the day is Retropolis. These awesome t-shirts have a steampunk/BioShock feeling to them, and the designs are retro-cool. Plus check out their entire vintage futurism t-shirts section as well for extra retro-style. The t-shirt really is the most widely used geek badge of honor out there, so make your selection esoteric and fun.

My vacuum tubes are glowing in appreciation!

Trees for Tomorrow – Retro Future Art Print at Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Here’s a public service poster from the Future That Never Was: the Retropolis Civilian Conservation Corps’ TREES FOR TOMORROW program endeavors to replace all the trees we foolishly chopped down before we realized that we needed them.

Under the watchful eye of a Corps member, even an inexperienced robot is able to plant a new, living sapling out in the wilds beyond the wind farms and thereby make his own investment in breathable air for Tomorrow. Which he won’t need to breathe, of course – being a robot – but that’s just proof of his selfless dedication to a good cause.

This sprung up (if anything that took this long can be said to have sprung) out of my thinking about how Retropolis can do better than we’ve done not only when it comes to flying cars and faithful robots, but in making sure our planet stays a nice place to fly our rockets around in. I’m ditching the worst mistakes of the retro future (highways? cars?) and trying to reimagine it into something that makes a lot more sense than what we’ve actually done. So far.

One of the things I like best about the future is that there’s still plenty of it, after all.

There’s an archival print and there will be a poster quality print – once a bug in my printer’s online system is resolved, so I can make it available.

Klaatu Barada Nikto T-Shirt. It’s Your Civic Duty to Wear One.

Filed under Works in Progress

I’m at work on another high resolution picture for posters and prints, but today I just felt moved to do a t-shirt design that’s been in the Idea Closet for, you know, ages.

Because it’s important. Because you really can’t afford the risk of forgetting exactly what to say when the giant robots get their cue to destroy the Earth, can you? And with this on your chest there’s a good chance that at the critical moment, when Gort’s turning his nasty laser on the Capitol, somebody is going to be distracted enough by this t-shirt that they’ll say “Klaatu Barada Nikto?” And thereby save the Earth.

A little The Day the Earth Stood Still. At the critical juncture. Or, really, any other time at all. You need one.

World of Tomorrow, All Done and Even Named

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

In the past week or so I’ve seen an ice storm (my first, and pretty interesting to see), a snowstorm, some power outages and an internet connection that was up and down and up and down… and so on. So while I haven’t posted here, I was busy – I’ve wrapped up my six-weeks-long work on this retrofuturistic city picture, then discovered that there was a t-shirt and even a clock design in it, and now that I’m predictably online again I’ve added those to my online shops in nearly every way it can be added.

By “nearly” I mean that although it’s now available as an archival print, I don’t yet have a poster quality version of it up. There’s a bug in the printer’s system that’s preventing me from making that available in a standard framing size. Once that’s sorted, there will be a poster too.

I didn’t expect any part of that large rendering to turn up on t-shirts, but I found that there was a pretty nifty shirt hidden away in there. So in the long run, it’s become an archival print, a greeting card, a clock (!) and a whole collection of lovely and talented shirts.

The name I finally settled on for the picture is “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By”. That’s the title of a popular song from 1932 which I first heard as part of the soundtrack for Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven.

I think I’ve got a couple more of these in my head, about ready to force their way out in the near future; we’ll see!

Still Building the City of Tomorrow

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

Yep, I’m still working on my City of Tomorrow – or the City of next week, or possibly the week after that. I’ve done all the work on the foreground balcony and its characters, barring adjustments and post, and having done that I now have some ideas for changes I’d like to make in the middle distance; then there are some other elements I’ve been planning to add in between.

So, like I said – the city of next week or the week after. Give or take.

It’s a little painful to see what happens to it when I shrink it down this much. With any luck, though, this bit of a close-up on the left will give you a better idea of what’s what.

Not too many misadventures on this bit, though as always some bizarre things did seem to happen. I’ve been meaning to try the Guruware Ivy plugin for Max, and so I did that here (in the urns at the upper left). Next time I think I’ll give it a trellis to work with.

There are some small details that’ll reward a viewer who’s looking at the big version – like some Buck Rogers comics pages from the early 1930s, and a wine label (“Volstead Merlot”). That one’ll only make sense if you’ve looked into Prohibition history. And if not, why not?

Still not sure what I’ll call this. I was listening to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” earlier and that seemed like the perfect soundtrack for the image – but “Rhapsody in Blue” is such a high-falutin’ name for a picture that I probably won’t be able to bring myself to use it.

Continuing Progress on my Retro-Future Cityscape

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

All may seem quiet around here, but in fact I’ve been working steadily on this image (which I posted about earlier, here and here). Although I’ve thought about posting some more updates, I haven’t. All of this new work has been on distant elements, and then the monorail terminal and the sixteen characters who are getting off (or on) the monorail, or working up on its track (see the inset at right). Because of the relative size of all those things they’re scarcely visible when the whole picture is scaled down from over 7000 pixels wide to this size, 501 pixels wide. So it’d have been almost pointless to try to keep you up to date. There’d have been very little obvious change.

As of this afternoon, though, I’ve got the far and middle distance more or less set; I’ve done the final (or semifinal) renderings of the three scenes that so far are composited together here, and I’ve added a sort of poor man’s depth of field effect on the distant cityscape.

Although there will be quite a bit of retouching to do in Photoshop, everything you see behind the foreground balcony is in a semifinal state. So I thought I ought to post an update now, before I start working on the foreground.

I had some difficulties with the way 3DS Max does its render effects and rendering passes. The first problem was that I was getting unpredictable results from the Z Depth pass. That’s an additional rendering that uses greyscale to show how far from the camera everything in the picture is – it can be very useful for creating masked effects, like depth of field, in post.

So to get around that, I’ve created a Z Depth pass in a sort of handmade way, using the free Bytegeist “ZTint” plugin for Max. I rendered out a Z Depth version of each scene and combined them together in Photoshop (see below). By using the exact same settings in each rendered layer I’ve built up my own Z Depth version of the background. It makes a geat mask for adding efects to the entire scene in Photoshop, based on their distance from my camera.

In order to get what you see below I applied a white, self-illuminated material to every visible object. The ZTint render effect added black to the object color depending on its distance.

It turns out that it was a good idea to avoid Max’s render elements, because another problem I ran into was that when network rendering the scene in strips – which conserved memory while these very large images were rendering – the additional rendering passes were not rendered correctly.

The main image rendered out in ten strips which were then stitched together at the end. But additional render passes like Z Depth or a specularity pass were never completed in the same way: each strip just overwrote the previous one and they were never assembled together, since only one tenth of them existed at the end anyhow. Annoying.

I’m still using Max 8, so I don’t know if that bug’s been fixed in the more recent versions.

Anyway, it’s now time to turn my attention to all the work I have yet to do on that balcony in the foreground and the characters there. I don’t have any real idea of how long those bits – and the final compositing and post work – will take, but I figure it’ll easily be another couple of weeks before this is done. Luckily for me, I’m not working to a deadline!

Still in progress: Retro-Future City Scene

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

I continue my struggle to show you things that aren’t ready for your eyeballs yet with the current state of my (still to be named) retro futuristic city scene. I’ve made one pass through the middle distance, and a long pass through the distant city, and today I’m back in the middle distance again.

This is the first practical use I’ve made of the city model I started ages ago and worked on again during the fall. It’s interesting to see how I’ve come to use it. Because the city itself is built out of large, complex sections, it was simple enough to drop a complete copy into my background here. The surprising things happened when I tried to make a picture out of it; like Raymond Loewy’s revision of the Lucky Strike cigarette pack, the real trick was in figuring out what to throw away. So while I did plenty of moving, scaling, and rotating of individual buildings, more than anything else I had to decide which ones to delete completely in order to open up the vista in a way that served the picture.

I added a lot of detail to the monorail pylons and created catwalks that run their length. There’ll be a few workers up there soon. But today I’m positioning some shadow-casting silhouettes that create the illusion that more buildings, out of the frame, are casting shadows across the ones we see close up. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in that. Like there is, um, in everything else.

I’m still handling the scene in three separate layers. Once I combined the far and middle distance into a single scene the rendering times increased pretty dramatically – and having them all together didn’t actually solve any problem I needed to solve – so I split them apart again. Go figure.

One little tool that was all sorts of help here is Martin Breidt’s Image Overlay script for 3DS Max. It’s really meant to superimpose frame numbers and other data on renderings, but it’ll also do a quick image overlay. I’m using it to drop in whole layers (like a Targa image of the foreground balcony) so that I can see how the layers stack up, while I’m just working on one. A back layer’s easy – it’s just an environment map –  but it’s been really helpful to composite that foreground in as I go, too.

In progress: Yet-to-be-named Retrofuturistic City Scene

Filed under Computer Graphics, Works in Progress

I’ve never liked showing work in progress*, and I can prove it.

Though I don’t remember this myself I have it on the best authority that as an infant, I just wouldn’t talk. Just wouldn’t. They were actually getting sort of worried about me, till one day I fell down and hurt my head badly enough that blood poured all over my face, and before I could stop myself, I yelled “Get this stuff offa me!”

The first thing I ever said was a complete sentence. The way I figure it, I wasn’t going to say a word to anyone until I’d conjugated everything that could be conjugated in my head so that no one could hear me make a mistake. True story.

So obviously that means I’d rather not let you see things that aren’t finished, except that’s stupid, so here’s one that’s a long ways from being finished yet. It’s so unfinished that it doesn’t have a name. I usually name these after the titles of, or lines from, popular songs of the 20s and 30s, and though I have a few ideas I’m not sure yet what it’ll be called.

I’m combining a lot of elements here that I’ve built during the past eight years (which means some of them need some retooling; I spent some time reworking the monorail pylons, for example, which are just so dang big in this picture) along with some new stuff. The new bits are/will be mainly in the near foreground, where some of my newest Retropolitan characters will appear in their glorious high res-ness.

And though at the moment it’s arranged as three separate scenes – eventually, it’ll probably be two – I’m having a wonderful and a very relieved time spreading out into the new memory space that’s available to me now that I’ve finally gone over to a 64 bit OS. There are frequent sighs of relief here in the Secret Laboratory.

I’ve got tons to do on… well, practically everything… but the highlights will be the people on the balcony and what they’re up to, some folks debarking from the monorail, and more, some of which will come as a surprise to me.

The distant buildings are part of my ongoing city model, a necessary and huge asset for my “Empire State Patrol” project. Miles to go before I sleep, and all that.

I’d been planning for this to end up as about an 18 x 24″ poster and print, but it’s shaping up so well that I think I may do the final version larger… about 20 x 30″.

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*So why do I have a “Works in Progress” category here in the blog? Because it’s never too late to change.