I was Wrong; or, This is What Happens When You're Too Quick to Make a Decision.
In my last blog post, I mentioned that I felt the character designs for my virtual band project were lacking in some way. I felt that translating their design into motion capture animation would be incredibly difficult to do without looking 'awkward,' and I thought the models would be 'lacking in expression.'
Egg on my fuckin' face I guess, lol.
I exported all three of the members of this virtual band into Blender and started messing around. I wanted to see how these characters would look in different poses and eventually, I wondered how they would interact with each other. Since I'm still waiting for Teto's SynthV2 upgrade, why not just... do that? Pose 'em, make 'em interact... fuck it, we ball, right?
So I get to work. The first interaction is between Miko and Roadie.
Kinda cute, but simple. Nothing too crazy going on with posing or expression (aside from Jeff Gerstman's face spliced into Roadie's face), but it sets a tone for how Miko and Roadie interact. The rather blunt discussion about such a personal matter (and Miko's hushed comment about how often Roadie brings it up) sells the idea that Miko and Roadie already know each other very well. It plays a bit with the format, with Miko basically acknowledging that Roadie's face just literally changes to Jeff's in the last panel. Not really anything to write home about, but a fun entry into this format from someone who really doesn't make comics.
It was inspired by a conversation I'd had with a friend, and it... pretty much went like that. Fantasizing about big dicks, me saying I kinda wanted a bigger dick, him mentioning mine was already pretty big as it was, and then me responding with a gif of Jeff Gerstman saying "BIGGER." idk, don't judge me, that's just queerness in a nutshell. You just end up talking about your junk a lot sometimes.
The next comic was more of a question for me. Rather than being inspired by anything in my personal life, it was instead motivated by my daydreaming about how my version of Teto and my self-insert would interact if they knew each other for a bit, but not for a very long time. Maybe a couple months, if that. It led into this comic.
So first of all, the sheet music as notated behind Teto sucks shit. That and the sakura tree are both just snatched off the internet because like, I'm not really planning on any of this going anywhere big where copyright or trademark is that much of a concern. No money's being made off the project, and it likely never will make money, so it's kinda 'whatever.' anarchism, nobody should really own anything, so on and so on.
Anyway, I kinda liked the pose I gave Roadie when she's reacting to getting smacked. It's more like she's being startled than getting actually hurt. I thought about making Teto hit Roadie with her guitar, but 1) 8-strings are very expensive, 2) she likes the guitar more than she likes Roadie at this point, and 3) she doesn't hate Roadie enough to justify using her guitar. Just a simple smack on the face would be enough to shut Roadie up, for sure.
Beyond that, it's another fairly basic 4-panel. Nothing too fancy or crazy, though this time the background changes to get across the mood/vibe of Teto's guitar playing. The interaction also implies Roadie is somewhat familiar with Teto's guitar playing, and finds the style to be rather 'settled-down' compared to the playing Roadie has heard so far. Kinda gets across a hint of what the band's music might sound like.
Then, there's the newest one where all three are present, but Teto takes centre stage.
This one was a big shift in my creative process. Rather than just shitting out something fun for the sake of interaction, I was now looking into improving my posing, expressions and camera angles while also adding a couple simple props. We now have a glossy, textured wooden table, and Roadie is holding a beer bottle. I thought about grabbing assets from a website, but I decided to do it myself. Finding a beer bottle that was unlabeled and also matched the design of the characters would have proven difficult. Rather than spend a lot of time on PBR assets or whatever, I just futzed with the shader on the beer bottle until it kinda looked like one, and the viewer's brain can fill in the rest. The table is pretty high detail - it has a bump map for god's sake - but again, 'fuck it, we ball.'
The poses are a bit more dynamic here. Teto's leaning her face against her hand, and her elbow is on the table, suggesting a relaxed but serious feeling. In the second panel, the hand that was previously resting on her face is now gesturing a bit, pushed slightly forward toward Roadie. Her other hand has now risen off the table in an open palm, as well. The camera is peering over Roadie's shoulder, whose drink is visible through the gap between her arm and her torso. I actually had to move Roadie's arm to keep the bottle in view so the transition from the first panel to the next felt a little more 'consistent.' If I snapped to an angle where the bottle was out of view, it felt like the bottle had just 'disappeared.' However, if I moved the camera to a place where the bottle was visible, the framing of the shot didn't really look right - either Roadie or Teto were taking up too much space in the panel to allow for the incoming text wall, depending on where the camera sat. So, I framed the two characters in the shot the way I wanted to, and moved Roadie's arm into the shot to help the viewer understand where they had moved in the room.
The next panel zooms in closer on Teto's face. At this point the shift in the background is becoming very obvious, if it wasn't in the previous frame; as she discusses a rather traumatizing period of her life as a 'created object' rather than a person, the background becomes more red and intense. Despite this, she still looks relaxed, looking off to the side with her hand once again on her face as if reminiscing positively. Her tone and the background are 'out-of-sync' with each other, suggesting something else is going on. Then, the camera pans back over to Roadie and Miko over Teto's shoulder, displaying the reason; she thinks she's just talking about a weird time in her life, but Miko and Roadie are justifiably horrified. Miko is grabbing Roadie's arm as if for reassurance, and Roadie is daintily placing her hand on her chest, as if a mother was hearing her child swear for the first time.
And Teto's reaction to this is to simply ask, without even adjusting her posture, "...why are you looking at me like that?"
This is inspired by a few conversations I've had with IRL queer friends. Every now and then, one of my friends will mention something from their past as a throwaway joke or a sarcastic remark. And then I'll react with something akin to, "...holy shit, what?"
I've done the same to my friends too, and according to them, this is kind of a common experience for traumatized people. We do these little 'lore drops' that we think is just a normal run-of-the-mill infodump, and then the people around us look all concerned and we realize we actually just talked about some heavy shit totally unprompted. Woops!
I like how that one turned out, and it was the 4-panel comic that convinced me I was wrong to think about using a different style of 3D characters for my band. I realized that I could kinda just... do this. Do I really need mocap if I can just make animatics for my music videos instead? Do I really need to force myself to find a different model base when I could just use the ones I have now? Do I really care so much about clipping and expressiveness that I need to move to a different art style? Turns out, no! There's actually a lot I can do with this style that I find fun to explore so far.
So... fuck it. We ball.