Updates, News, and Renders. (Patreon)

Issue 8 of Arkuatica is complete and I'll be sending the issues out on Sunday.  Now that the issue is completed I'm going to do another series of single page, or double page comics for Arkuatica. Only this time, I'll upload them here, as and when they are completed for my $3+ patrons. It's going to get TF'y!

Sorry, no sketches this month, I haven't seemed to have had any bursts of desire or inspiration to illustrate anything. Commissions and Arkuatica are the only things I've been working on.

So instead, here's a recent photo of my current workspace, and a bunch of test renders of things I've created that are aquatic themed, since I started to use/learn Blender. Learning in the pursuit that one day, I will be able to start making Arkuatica into an animation.

Top left are two of the first underwater renders, this was the result of figuring out how to create a realistic underwater look.

My Arkuatica fish should have webbed hands, so this is the result of wanting to see that in 3D, but I also figured out that the webbing needs a little depth in order for the subsurface light to shine through it. I also aborted trying to "UV Unwrap" this hand mesh so I could texture it... the hand a very complicated structure. This was meant to be Tola's hand.

An attempt to recreate the look of the transformation pearl from my illustrations. This result is not bad, but it's not right.

The two surface beach renders are the result of my thinking "If my technique for a realistic underwater sea looks right, then it should look right above water too." And it does! Caveats being that the sand by the shoreline should be smooth and wet too, but this stuff won't be necessary until Issue 5 right?

Whilst messing with wave and noise textures as a displacement on a mesh I realised I could probably use that to create a sea sponge, this is one result, but the mesh is so high, it still looks like a solid mass when looking at it in wireframe mode. So would need to redo the topography manually to bring the vertices count down to reasonable levels.

Last render is just a showcase of all the free 3D models of corals and tropical fish I've collected. I thought I'd get them now for the future. One day I'll need to create more variants of these and learn how to rig and animate the fish.