This is a cityscape. Well, it’s the start of one. I was using a “throw particles that suggest glowing bits of a city at the camera” technique for a bit but that didn’t particularly work, so I’m going with using a particle system to grow a city on a grid – only the lights of the city are visible. The emitting surface is the outside of a cylinder – the cylinder turns, the building lights go by in big smears. Needs something else behind it as a silhouette, though, but not just straight sky – more dots, maybe… clouds in the abstract.. I don’t know. Still figuring out where to take that whole scene, feeling out the interplay of technology and art and so on.

My current instinct is to trim down that hallucination sequence timewise, since it’s only really there to induce a particular mental state in the audience and if they resist that induction it’ll bounce them out of the experience entirely. I want to leave more focussed and interesting questions unanswered in the audience’s heads, not just broader “who is this guy and where is he and why should I care?” ones.

I’m trying to fit in a movie every day after work lately, a classic if possible – though it’s usually whatever I can watch on QuickFlix that I don’t have to pay for beyond the monthly subscription. It’s been educational, even if the movies have had nothing to do with the genre and characters and setting I’m working with, I’ve always picked up something – not to mention having enjoyed a bloody good film, too.

I’ve devoted the majority of actual pre-production work time since New Year’s wrapping lines around the main character in the form of ink sketches. I’m still not ready to show too much off yet, but in a nutshell I’ve been drawing different facial expressions and body parts to make sure I have as much of the “character space” as possible. So many times I’ve carved a character out of verts without giving enough thought to all the different faces that character’s going to have to pull, and what their relationship is to one another, so I’m doing a lot more concept art than usual (probably still not enough) to better illustrate what forms and shapes the mesh will have to wrap around. (The mouth is going to be an interesting challenge…)

It’s good fun though; every so often I draw Ktish making a funny face and it instantly cracks me up. But it’s not just trying to make myself laugh – I have to figure out how his face stretches so I can do all that in Blender. The giggles are a welcome side-benefit. 🙂

I’m holding off posting much character concept art here until it’s more final. I still have a lot of bugs to work out of the design and besides which it’s mostly Ktish pulling faces with the odd full-body diagrammatic sketch. Nothing particularly worth showing off yet in that regard; nor is the first draft storyboard of another scene I did on New Year’s night.

Honestly I’m tempted to jump back into development on this first episode and make it much more special instead of leaving it so open-ended. Feels lazy. People are spending two minutes of their precious time with their eyeballs on my humble creation – it’d be a shame not to give them something wonderful in return..