Today’s Retropolis Rocket Ship preview shows us the picture’s final lighting – though it’s still not the final picture. I need to render the two layers at their full resolution and when that’s done there will be quite a bit of retouching in Photoshop. It’s also likely that I’ll re-render some small areas (particularly the windows) in slightly different ways. All that work will get combined in Photoshop into what will be the final picture.

Those windows are a tricky prospect. Although I quite liked the way they were looking earlier I need to ensure that the rendered layers are transparent – or, really, partly transparent – so that I can paint the final space backdrop in Photoshop behind the rocket layers. Since my earlier glass materials came through as opaque (in the rendering), that wouldn’t be possible. That’s why I expect to render out a variant for the window areas.

The alternative would be to create the final backdrop ahead of time. That would work, but I’d have a lot less freedom as I did the retouching and overpainting. So we’ll try it this way and see how it goes.

The lighting phase was every bit as persnickety as I said it would be, what with minor changes and test renderings, after which: rinse and repeat. At this point everything is balanced just about the way I want it and from here on out any changes will take place in Photoshop.

In today’s sepiatone update there are a number of big changes. (Click the image to embiggify it). You’ll notice that I’ve now dropped in actual characters in place of all those eerie bone systems that we’ve been looking at up to now: that’s the obvious change.

The other change was inevitable, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen quite yet.

Once the scene passed about two million polygons it started to get difficult to manage. The performance in the viewports (where I actually do the work) has been degrading all along, but once I had four or five characters in there I found it pretty unpleasant to work on the entire scene. It was easy enough to split out the characters on their own and work on them separately but eventually the pieces all have to come back together. With all but one character added to the scene I was already over 2.6 million polygons… and something just had to give.

So the first big task I faced this morning was to split the complete scene into two layers. You’re looking at one of those (in greyscale) above. Everything below the deck and from the rocket’s front window forward is now contained in one scene file; everything else, in a second one. (With a couple of exceptions: you can see that the deck grating is casting a shadow in the image above even though the grating itself is invisible.)

I’ll be rendering these out as separate layers from now on and compositing them together. Because everything splits at the deck line and at one of the forward ribs the “front” scene goes in seamlessly when the two are combined. Which is pretty neat, if you ask me.

Here’s what that second layer looks like, also in greyscale:

I’ve made the modifications to the control console that I mentioned the other day. The characters are pretty nearly there, but they’ll be seeing some more changes as we go. After them, the big remaining thing is the final lighting.

At the moment – as it’s been ever since I started – there are just three lights in the scene. One’s outside the ship, and shines through the windows; the other two are "practical" lights that are mounted just where you might place your light bulbs if you were lighting the ship yourself.

I’ll be adding some more, smaller practical lights and I’ll also veer into unreality with individual fill lights that will fine tune the lighting in specific areas and on the individual characters. That process will take some time – it means a lot of incremental changes and test renderings, which is why I haven’t done anything along those lines yet. Pretty soon, though.

We’re at this Kickstarter project‘s halfway point and we’ve only approached 25% of its funding. That’s a bad sign, of course, though I’m not obsessing about it. Really. I’m not. But if you backers have friends who might also be interested in the project (especially now that the picture is starting to look like a picture) I’d sure appreciate it if you’d spread the word!

This limited edition print project – if it’s successful – is something that I’d like to do again because it could expand into an "Art of Retropolis" book. I’ve been asked about such a book over and over but I’ve never felt that I have enough of the right kind of pictures to justify it. So a series of Kickstarter projects like this one might finally convince me that the book’s time has come. Though, as I look around, it seems like that idea might be premature :).

Today’s Kickstarter Retropolis Rocket Ship preview is rendered in glorious sepiatone because until I’ve sorted out the final lighting it would otherwise be pretty hard for you to make sense of the latest additions: real characters!

I’m still not completely done with the cockpit (that’s a temporary image on the televideo screen) but it was time to start putting genuine people into the rocket. You can’t make out the two down below the deck grating – that pesky lighting business is at work there again – but I figure that this is a big enough change, anyhow. The two remaining ladies should show up soon.

Oddly, what’s probably a bigger change is a very simple rotation of the camera. I’ve been meaning to do that for ages. It just didn’t seem as important as adding all the gizmos along the fuselage. The moment  I finally got around to tilting the camera, though, I saw a big improvement in the whole scene. Still… I’m pretty sure you’re more interested in the dames.

Since the Kickstarter project hasn’t even come close to its halfway mark by now there’s serious doubt about what will become of this picture. I never said outright that it would never be reproduced as a print in the event that the project failed, but that’s been in the back of my mind all along. Fact is, I still haven’t made up my mind.

But if you’ve put off backing the project, this isn’t a bad time to pile on!

I mentioned earlier that I didn’t plan to create any new characters for the Retropolis Rocket Ship picture. Then I showed you the one I made. Well, I guess I’ve done it again.

I’d gotten pretty interested in the new gear – the space helmet and gauntlets – that you saw in that earlier update. That’s how today’s spacewoman started out. With a similar air tank, her new and different helmet and gloves grew into a whole new character.

I have an excuse for that: last year I made pretty good progress on the illustrations for The Riddle of the Wrong Brain (Part Two of The Toaster With Two Brains) but almost immediately afterward I worked out a whole new system for generating character heads, using morph targets instead of facial bones, and the results were so good that I was left staring at my formerly new characters and wishing that I could do them over.

In fact I did do over both Gwen and Nat, who are our main protagonists in that story, and Zeno, Doctor Rognvald’s henchman; but I was still left with a couple of new or newish characters that I’d built with the old system. This character’s head is a replacement for the head I originally built for one of those characters. So on the one hand I have a new character to use in the Rocket Ship picture, while on the other hand I have a new and improved head for Stella Moya, whom you have yet to meet.

I have to admit, though, I’m pretty happy with the way this version of her turned out; I’m sure I’ll be using her again. Sometimes I feel like I’m an old movie studio producer who keeps casting the same lead actors and character actors in an entire slate of movies. This would be one of those times.

Here’s a GIF animation I just cobbled together; it shows the major steps on the way to the Retropolis Rocket Ship print from the beginning up to yesterday. It’s a biggish image, so you’ll need to click on it in order to bring it up.

Here’s today’s update for the Retropolis Rocket Ship print. At this point I’ve left off the wireframe overlay and I’m letting the color speak for itself – not because it’s done, since the final lighting will contribute a lot there, but because it’s narrowing down to something like what you’ll see in the finished picture.

You can see that I’ve continued to work my way forward along the surface details of the fuselage. In fact there are a number of things you see less clearly here than you will in the final picture just because of the lower resolution of the web previews.

In the print, at its full size, you’ll probably be able to make out things like the rows of bunks on the lower deck. They won’t ever be completely clear, because they shouldn’t be, but odds are you’ll be able to peer through the deck grating to make out some of that background detail: the bunks, some piping, and the mechanical gizmos down below the cockpit stairs.

Next up will be some more changes to the control console, some additional stuff on a couple of the shelves, and then the characters.

In this recent preview of the Retropolis Rocket Ship print you can see that I’ve begun to move forward through the ship, adding the gizmos and bits and shiny things that make the ship go. I won’t explain: it’s technical.

Details that you can’t see here – but which may be readable in the full size print – include helpful messages on the readouts that say things like "Consult Manual Now", "Take Immediate Action", and "Abandon Ship". Those engineers at Volto-Vac go the extra mile to make sure your rocket is running within tolerance or, failing that, that you know when it’s time to leave.

You’re going to have to put up with those skeletal bone systems for awhile: I don’t plan to do any more work on the characters until the rockets’s all ship shape. So bear with me.

We’re not quite halfway to the Kickstarter threshold that will unlock the first of the Pulp-O-Mizer custom title rewards. One backer has suggested that I add another kind of Pulp-O-Mizer reward that would have me put the backers themselves into custom foreground Pulp-O-Mizer layers. That’s an interesting idea, but I need to do an experiment or three to decide how practical (and exorbitant) a reward like that would be. Film at eleven.

So today I’m about a week in, all told, to the Retropolis Rocket Ship Kickstarter project. I’m still toning down the colors because at this stage the colors don’t really mean anything. They’d only confuse you.

I mentioned earlier that I started by working on one of the characters. But that’s out of my system now, and so I’ve returned to the rocket ship itself. Backers of my past Kickstarter projects got a little preview yesterday but today I’ve made a bunch of new progress on the interior. It’s got loads of distance to travel yet but the gizmos and bulkheads and what-have-you’s are starting to show up, each in their proper place.

You can see that I’ve blocked in the characters using just the kind of bone systems that you normally wouldn’t see. The skeletons render very quickly and that’s important at the moment, especially in the viewports while I work. You can scroll down to my earlier update to get a look at what one of these ladies is going to look like.

So: still quite crude, but moving along. And "quite crude" is what I promised you’d see while the work progresses. So there you are.

I’m archiving the versions of the file, one or more a day, and producing many of the screenshots and test renderings that I’ll use in the "Making Of" video. I could probably spend a minute or so just on that floor grating!

The actual Retropolis Rocket Ship scene still looks just like it did in the “Day One” illustration on its Kickstarter page: but that doesn’t mean I’m not already working away on it, as you see here.

Because characters are just about the most time-consuming thing I build I had hoped not to build any new characters for the picture. So I did.

If that makes no sense to you, imagine how I feel.

But in fact the space woman we see here at the left uses several existing bits and pieces that I kitbashed and cobbled together, along with a new head, some spiffy new gauntlets, and that all-important air tank, all of which are at least partly new. Oh! And her helmet, too; that one’s been sitting on my hard drive just waiting for somebody to wear it. Of course, I also made it better.

Those are all the fun parts of building characters: the modeling, texturing and so on. The entirely unfun parts are setting up a skeleton and skinning the mesh to it. This is a task that I do slowly, grudgingly, and not particularly well. Somehow, though, it worked pretty well this time, and much more quickly than usual, too.

I have a backlog of characters I built last year that aren’t rigged and skinned yet. I really need to finish them up. Later.

One curious thing about this woman is that if she took her helmet off you’d see that her hair is black and her complexion’s on the dusky side. That glowing glass faceplate really makes a difference. Like the difference between hijacking a rocket ship and gasping out your last few painful breaths in the dark, illimitable depths of outer space, kind of difference.

Anyway I planned to give this weekend up to the IRS. That hasn’t quite happened yet. I do have untidy piles of papers all over my dining room table, and that’s the first step. I need to get them all shuffled behind me so that I can get to work on the rocket ship scene, hopefully in the morning.

So here it is: the Retropolis Rocket Ship Print Kickstarter drive, featuring the kind of "Making Of" video that turns my guts to water, plus – BONUS! – custom Pulp-O-Mizer title rewards that let bloggers, podcasters, bands, and other entities – including other Kickstarter projects – get their own personalized magazine titles for use within the Amazing PULP-O-Mizer.

Everybody who pledges at least ten dollars will get a copy of the video, which – like the picture itself – is a mere gleam in my shifty eye as I write this – and I swear up and down that I won’t hide every stupid thing I do while I complete the picture over the next few weeks.

Contributions of $60 or more will also get the 24" by 18" archival print that, really, is what this is all about. And then – starting at the $2000 funding mark – the custom Pulp-O-Mizer rewards start to kick in.

Backers who choose a Pulp-O-Mizer reward will unlock their own personal Pulp-O-Mizer title graphic. No one else will even see it, but the lucky backers will be able to use their titles within the Pulp-O-Mizer to do everything that the Pulp-O-Mizer does, from rendering web resolution graphics to ordering printed merchandise with their swell, spiffy, and enviable Personal Pulp-O-Mizer titles.

See the Kickstarter page for all the details, not to mention my own late-night FM voiceover in the thrilling project video.