Here’s my latest comic: https://inhumaneresourcescomic.com/#/panel/314. It’s been up for days, but I’m late blogging.
Visually, this is one of my all-time favorite comics, though I mostly just stole from good people. I got Tyrael from this sketchfab page. Thank you Harzilla! The Tyrael looks amazing.
Both Harzilla’s Tyrael and my own Julius are pretty tough to pose because they’re plotted in a messy way. They’re represented with many thousands of points when hundred would do the trick and be quicker to render. As a result, when I pose their arms, I do it by tearing the arms off and moving them separately. That would be more clear if I changed the angle on some of these models.
So these are done with a lot of compositing. I went through Polyarc’s VR game Moss with a screen recorder (OBS) on and just looked around. All of the backgrounds in Moss are gorgeous. It’s an amazing VR game. You just want to move in and live in every scene there.
So I picked a spot and captured the image in GIMP. Then I posed Harzilla’s Tyrael in Blender to match the lighting. I captured that and pasted him into the scene.
Then I took the comic as it currently existed and pulled it with me into VR in Oculus Medium. I took a model I made of Julius I arranged Julius in front of a picture of the comic the way you might make someone pose in front of a giant cardboard cutout. Then I took a bunch of pictures in VR using Medium’s image capture. I took my best match and pasted that into the scene, too.
At first, it looks like a collage, and I didn’t completely get past that in every panel. I did three things to make stuff blend.
1) I tried to make sure the lighting in Oculus Medium and Blender matched the scene.
2) I added shadows for people I pasted.
3) I applied blur just to the edges of the images. It’s tough to see, but it makes the images look more like they’re part of the scene with the background.
As I said, these entries are the best I did at making my composite look like a scene.
Thanks to Blizzard, thanks to Harzilla, thanks to Polyarc.