I like this strip. We’re finally getting back to the whole point with Frak and Koda. If you missed what happened in the room earlier, you can find it here, and here also.

This was a challenging page to do within a budgeted schedule. The hardest part for me was the clutter and mess. Doing it in 3d would take an eternity, and carefully painting it would also take a lot of time. Besides, I really hate doing detailed clutter so I kept it loose and cartoony. I like how the hotel room came out, however, especially in the final panel. This is another example (the cop’s cockpit being the first) of using some matte painting techniques in Photoshop in order to save time.

The 3d was lit with global illumination but with no textures on it. Modo (and many other programs) let me render an image pass that has colored masks for each material, such as the walls, the window, the wardrobe, etc. That let me select specific areas in Photoshop with the magic wand and then I applied seemless textures in another layer set to overlay or multiply. Using some of those matte painting techniques, it’s often much faster to do all the work in Photoshop, rather than take a lot of time mucking about with 3d textures and lighting. Adding to the effect was a render output called ambient occlusion. Also called a grunge or dirt pass, it’s just a black and white image that has shading in all the cracks and crevices. When you put this image on a layer above the final render in multiply mode, it adds some nice shading.

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Tags: bentley, Chapter 4, frak, gilrec, koda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.