Inefficient Landscaping

in which our hero builds a set in the least efficient way possible

Dear Readers,

My wife has to remind me often that there is no “wrong” way to do art. My belief that I’m doing things the wrong way is so overwhelming at times that I feel like I can’t even continue breathing until somebody reassures me that I’m not an idiot. It’s the price you pay for loving me, I guess.

But even if there’s no wrong way to do art, there are certainly inefficient ways of getting things done. And I think that’s what I’m really worried about. As a guy who is fixated on how unjustly short life is, I find inefficiency intolerable. So when I think I’m guilty of it myself—inefficiency, that is—I get angry. Incredibly angry.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the landscape for the opening shot to the forthcoming Blood of Seven Queens #7.

The process began in Daz Studio with me cobbling together 3D elements to match what I’d described in the script. When that got to a certain point and I was flustered by how crappy I thought it looked, I decided to try and map the city out from above first—to give me a better idea of what I was shooting for. I opened Adobe Fresco on my iPad and began to sketch a coastline based on the work I’d done in Daz.

At some point while watching too many YouTube tutorials in my search for an answer to my problem, I stumbled across a method which would let me take the top-down drawing I’d done and extrapolate it into 3D. I was very excited. Then I tried to follow the steps the YouTuber outlined, and, well… I ended up yelling at my computer and myself for a good few hours. Eventually, I figured it out, but not without worrying my family a li’l bit in the process.

Today, after taking almost a week away from all things art, I took two additional steps. In Blender, I took the flat surface of the 3D model and roughed out some basic elevation. Then, in a program called Gaea, I ran my rough idea through a series of erosion filters to finish it up.

To finish it up for now, that is. There’s still loads more to do, including the hardest part: adding in all the fucking buildings.

This is not how a traditional 2D artist would do things, Like, at all. They’d just paint the damn thing, focusing on the important bits and illustrating the other bits only as much as necessary. But I’m a weirdo and I want consistency and continuity and a very stubborn part of my brain decided that working in 3D was the way to do this. And so, here we are.

That said, I suspect not even the folks at professional movie studios do things this way with their big fantasy or sci-fi epics. Trouble is, the stubborn part of my brain is not ready to listen to reason. Because he’s not just stubborn. He’s obnoxiously certain that he’s figured out the way everyone else should be doing it—the way I should be doing it if I don’t want to seem lazy.

le sigh

And that’s just one of the projects I’ve been banging my head against this month. The other, which involved sculpting hexagonal city blocks, is a story for another time.

Yours,
Chris