The Devil's Broker

[Perihelion]

Now with vegetation.

 

[Perihelion]

And done. That one was a lot of work. On the plus side, I painted a full skybox, so I can probably just recycle it for future backgrounds.

 

[Perihelion]

Cool, I got the first character portrait from the character artist last night!

 

[Perihelion]

I set up a bunch of Live2D deformers with it.

This gif of the blinking sucks, so watch this mp4 instead: https://i.gyazo.com/ec159248d19472e9e95 ... a1f710.mp4

Something about the way his mouth opens isn't quite right, but I'll get the artist's help and fix it tomorrow.

Edit: Fixed now!

And here are a few expression tests.

 

[Perihelion]

Haven't posted an update in a few days, so I figured I would. Still working on this! Progress has been slower since I'm back at work after the holidays. I'm in the process of finishing up the second draft of the story this week.

 

[Perihelion]

Woo, I finished the second draft of the story last night! Finally. I feel good about it overall, but there are a few structural things I'll need to dig into more. Reading some books to help with revision.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

I love the exteriors.

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

Keep at it Peri! Love your progress!

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, I'm gonna fix my story, dammit. I have this on my wall now and a bunch of index cards I'm going to stick to it:

I need to come up with a good logline before I seriously try to fix it, though.

The beats are Blake Snyder's story beats from Save the Cat! (which is a great book and I highly recommend it), plus some other things from other books on structure I've read. I may not follow it exactly, but it's helpful to have them there as a guide. Each row is an act, except act II is split into the two middle rows.

Edit: Okay, here's the current shape of my story, color-coded by most important character in the scene.

What we can see from this supports my intuition that the first and third acts are pretty solid, although I'd like to have a better hook in act I (it opens with an action scene, and I think those are hard to make interesting before you know characters and stakes), but the middle section of the story needs work. For example, my B-story is weirdly placed, and I don't think I'm going to be able to hit the B-story introduction beat at the beginning of act II. I know act II needs another scene for pacing reasons, but the beginning of it is pretty crowded so I think I'm going to move the pinch point or introduce another one. Also, my act II part two is a desolate wasteland that is going to need to be completely overhauled. I'm not currently doing a good enough job of escalating the stakes or establishing the antagonist as a credible threat going into the finale. The scenes that I have there right now are short and mostly exposition, so I think I'm going to need to cut those down and rework them to be better somehow, then add a completely new sequence for the bad guys close in beat. I also need my pre-act III nadir, which somehow I completely missed in all of my prior planning, urgh.

When I'm done, each scene will also have notes for conflict and emotional change. One thing I learned from my reading about structure is that every scene needs to have a mood swing from happy to sad/bad/whatever or vice versa. Luckily I think most of my scenes have conflict, but I'm missing this mood change in a lot of them, so it's going to take some reworking.

Writing is hard, by the way.

 

[Perihelion]

Also, I'm having a minor personal crisis about releasing a kinetic novel. My market is already extremely small, and making it a kinetic novel is probably going to make it even smaller. I don't really want to add in choices because I don't like them, but it's probably a good marketing idea, so I'm thinking about it. It's not a disgusting amount of work if I just do bad ends + alternate endings instead of multiple routes.

Edit: I've thought about it more, and I think I am going to add choices. I'm warming up to the idea. I think they'll add a lot of tension.

 

[Perihelion]

Starting another background. This composition is boring, but if I pull the camera back more, I need to add more stuff to the scene. Hmmmm.

Edit: Probably do something like this and figure out something to put on the left.

 

[Perihelion]

Gah, I can't figure out a good angle.

I want it to be fairly close to the bar since you're sitting at it in this scene, but a zoomed-in shot like you'd see if you were sitting at it is boring compositionally.

 

[ZenVirZan]

I like the last one the most. You feel more attached to the scene in that one compared to the others.

 

[Perihelion]

I think I might go with something like this:

Edit: Now with more stuff...

 

[Perihelion]

Today's update. Using VRay for this one because I needed area lights for the bar, so most of my time tonight was spent reconfiguring the five million bottle materials to be VRay. I'm a little concerned the photoreal glass is going to look odd, but uh, whatever. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure why the glasses on the back counter are strangely dark on the inside. Also, I suspect I might need more lighting of some sort within the bar itself.

Tomorrow I'll finish swapping out the materials for less shitty ones. Not sure what I'm gonna do with the bar itself. Maybe like a dark mahogany? It's attached to a hotel, so it should look nicer than it currently does. Also, it needs more lighting. Maybe I'll add some overhead lights or something.

 

[Toams]

I sometimes find black glass occurs because of a limited amount of reflections. If the render settings allow for 5 reflections before the ray stops then after 5 bounces it'll just return black. However, this may not be the case here since a lot of other glasses are rendering fine. Try checking if you've accidentally put two glasses in the same spots.

(If you've also put something with a transparent material in the glass, that really ramps up the amount of reflections needed before the rays break free. Workarounds include turning off internal reflections for materials, setting refraction index to 1, or allowing for more reflections in the scene.)

 

[Injury]

Maybe strips of small directional lights to point towards the labels. IDK. Might mix with the back lighting from the bar pretty well..

 

[Perihelion]

Thanks for the tips, Tomas! Unfortunately increasing bounces to 12 didn't fix it, and there don't seem to be two copies there, but it's possible there's something weird about the geometry. I'll try messing with it more tomorrow.

Still very WIP, but here's today's update:

Now I have another problem in that my metal looks sparkly. Tomas, I don't suppose you have any idea why this is? I tried increasing subdivisions on the material, but it didn't help. Oh, wait, I bet it's probably because the lights don't have enough subdivisions. Errrr, I'll try that tomorrow.

Also, urk, iterating on VRay scenes is annoying. Renders take so long.

I'm not done with all the materials for the scene yet, but here are some future plans beyond that: adding some gloss to the wood, also faint reflections in a separate pass probably, making the white wall behind the booze a mirror, making the stainless steel not look yellow (it's because the hanging lights are yellow, but Pencil+ apparently doesn't do light color anyway, so the metal just looks weird), making the walls more interesting somehow (wallpaper?), adding more lighting still, make the bottles more translucent, and....doing something with the ceiling?? It looks really boring, but I'm not sure what to do about it. I can make it a bit reflective, which will help, but it won't solve my problem.

Not sure I like the color scheme. Any comments?

 

[arev]

Turn on "Sub-pixel mapping" in the Color Mapping tab of Vray's settings. This should fix some AA artiffacts on the metal and lights. Beyond that - only subdivisions can help you. If you're using adaptive subdiv - try to increase the max rate. As for the glass turning black - there's a material property called Exit Color - change it to something lighter and see how it looks. You can also try a trick... put some spherical HDRI map to the Environment slot. This should replace the exit color with mapped reflection (I may be wrong about this one, since it's been years since I've used Vray).
As for the scene itself - I think the wall is to bright : )

 

[Perihelion]

Oh, thanks! I'll definitely try that when I get home.

When you say the wall, which wall do you mean? The blue wall, the wall behind the booze (I'm gonna change that anyway), or the teal lights?