The Far Reaches Webcomic

Yes, they’re not quite in the clear yet, but who are these crazy hit men? We know they’re from Gruesain Corp., but we’ll learn a little bit more about them in the next strip. I thought it was fun that they speak in an alien font. I just imagine them babbling on in a funny high-pitched lingo.

I’m pretty happy with the ships in this one. Originally I was going to model a new ship and I had the design for it. But in the end I decided to retrofit and fix up an older model. That saved several hours of work. I love rendering out the chrome and shiny paint jobs too. That’s one thing that’s fun and easy to do in 3d, once you know how, and that’s very difficult to do by hand.

The city was fun to do too. Now that I’ve got all the buildings set up and textured in Vue, and can just drag and drop or even paint them into the scene. But the city is where I did the most simplifying. At first I was going have foggy clouds covering the bottom area, but Vue wanted to take ten hours to render it. So I said forget that. The final shot used here only took about 30-40 minutes to render (the original size is fairly large) without the fancy cloud effects, and only about 15 minutes to add the sun beams, motion blur, and haze in Photoshop. The trick to 3d is knowing where to cheat.