Razorback pic

Here is a picture of Razorback (the hero of my story) and his human friend Matt. They do quite a lot of running away from various things in the story.
I'll be hoping to post a few pictures of other Razorback characters, and attempt to paste these two guys into a proper scene with a background(!).
It's a lot easier to just do pictures of single characters with no background - although I realise that this is bad practice. Drawing figures floating in the middle of a white void was usually sure to earn me a slapped wrist in art classes at school :)

Another guy on a flying motorcycle

Here's another picture, using a character called Wolfgang made by a chap who calls himself Lemurtek (he has done a whole collection of wonderful half-animal characters, available at: http://www.fantasy3d.com/pfiles/thumbs.cgi?characters) The rocket-cycle thing is available for purchase at the DAZ store. I have attempted to do a version of this picture with a city background - however, attempts to paste Wolfgang and his vehicle over the background have been less than satisfactory since he is always surrounded by a jagged outline, and I have no idea how to get rid of it, except to paint it out by hand. Annoying. A more professional artist would no doubt know how to get around things like that.

Some pics

Ok, here is one of my recent images, using a Poser character called "the Freak" (poor guy, it's not his fault he's so big and muscly), and rendered using a technique from a tutorial on the DAZ website. The Freak comes with a whole load of morphs (it took me a while to work out what "morphs" meant) which means you can turn him into all sorts of wierd beast-men, trolls and monsters. Alright, so perhaps that is a bit freaky - probably a good party trick, though. The tutorial can be located at http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/index.php?id=101.
I quite like this guy. He looks like the sort of thing He-man used to get into scraps with.

I'll explain a little about my story. It's a science fiction story called Razorback, and it's about the adventures of a small, green, furry cat-like alien, and his search for his missing adoptive human family. It started out as a comic strip about ten years ago. After about three years, having only got about halfway through a single issue, I decided that, while there are many people out there who are very good at drawing comics and getting them done within a reasonable length of time, I'm not one of them.
Another three years or so later, Razorback still wouldn't go away and leave me alone, so, powered by a second wind, I started again, this time doing it as a written story. Doing it this way, with single illustrations, seemed more realistic, but I've never been very good at drawing figures from my head, and reference material was frustratingly hard to come by. My efforts, through several years at art college, at trying to amass decent reference material, would make a bad story in themselves. One particular afternoon of vainly trying to get a group of friends to be serious and pose for a bunch of photos sticks in my mind as a painful lesson.
Then I heard about Poser. Apparently, it was originally intended to be an artistic reference tool, and it seemed like the perfect solution to the problem. I bought the package, set up figures, added clothes, posed them, and did a lot of test renders.
And they looked too good. Suddenly it seemed like a terrible waste to just put these figures and scenes together and then just draw them. Over time I jettisoned the idea of simply using Poser as a reference tool, and began to seriously consider doing illustrations for Razorback in 3d.

Here is one of my test images for Razorback. It was rendered in Bryce (a great scene-building package, and cheap too), and the render was then filtered using a "Watercolour" plug-in in Paint Shop Pro - there is a group of these plug-ins that you can get called Virtual Painter. The results of using this technique have been variable, and I'm still not entirely convinced by it. (By the way, the picture had to be converted into a gif because the bitmap refused to upload, so the quality has suffered slightly).

Toon shading

Just lately I have been exploring Poser's toon shading options to produce cartoony-looking images, and will attempt to post some of the results here. There is some very impressive artwork on the web, produced by people using "proper" 3d packages like Lightwave, as well as (try not to laugh) Poser 6, which manages to emulate the look of traditional cel animation - in fact, cel-style 3d cartoons seem to be becoming more common now, although it never looks 100 percent genuine. Computer-generated images are just too perfect.