Andromeda pages + mega post update

Hello dear Patrons! 😎

It is time to show you a glimpse of what I've been working on lately. You may know that I said I want to use all the assets I create for the game as well for the comics to create kickass background and immersive scenes. So for the upcoming chapter centered on a new character (Anyssa, the Milk Bearer) I put my hands in the dirt and wrote a lot of lore, rewritten the script, and did a lot of concepts. I generated thousands of 3d assets with AI to populate my scenes and as you can see in the screenshots, it looks pretty good! I know some of you don't like it when I use AI but in this particular case it is absolutely helpful, saved me an inestimable amount of time and allowed me to generated beautiful assets without with minimum effort; as a solo project, this is a very welcome boost!

I'm gonna walk you through all the things I did:

🏠Props:

I generated over two thousands of them locally (furniture, pots, books, scrolls, bottles, lamps, pipes, columns, moldings, etc). They help me populated the 3d environments I create. Here's an example of generated assets:

I batch-optimized all the generated objects in blender (yes, thousands, but it is not as long as you'd think). I had to do that because after the object is generated, there is a bit of cleaning to do, polygon decimation, scale adjustment and origin axis placement (useful for later use in the game engine).

For some other objects I wanted something really specific so I drew them and from that, generated a couple designs, from which I select the best to then generate a 3d object from it.

Some other objects were so specific, I modeled them and textured them manually like this bed from Anyssa's dorm room:

The rest of the decor like the window frame and casings that you can see in the screenshots, are architecture objects I've made last year that finally come in use:

🧍‍♀️Characters:

I also used AI (yes, again) to created different angles of my characters from designs I've drawn, to use later to facilitate the drawing process in my hybrid workflow. I created Loras (Loras are "addon" mini AI models that contains the character design) for each characters.

I then use these for the next step which is the final rendering of the comic page:

From the script I wrote where I describe each panel, I make a screenshot from the 3D environment, bring it in my drawing app and sketch the characters in lines and colors over the background. Then I reprocess it with AI, and manually paint over to fix errors and inconsistencies.

The drawing part is very important because it drives the AI models to do exactly what I want. You may know that AI still has its limitations, it cannot do all view angles, hates characters seen from behind, and is very inaccurate when having two characters interacting or entangled. And considering that most models are censored, it makes it all the more difficult.

But in the end, I think this technique is a nice mix. It gives a realistic touch while preserving the creation process, allows me to work on both game and comics at the same time; while saving time; I mean if we don't count the hundreds of hours put into the preparation work. But that preparatory work is only needed once, and I'm getting much faster at it now. I'm gonna make the whole chapter with this technique, and I'll decide whether to go on with it or not.

🔽 If you are more curious, attached to this post are timelapses of the 3D environments and page 2 🔽

More pages to come soon!

Hope you like! 💖