Casting

[DredNicolson]

The thing with background extras is that they're in the, well, background. Distance and depth of field will obscure them somewhat, so adding any intricate details would be wasted effort. It's the same with scenery. A sculpted brick wall with hundreds of thousands of faces and a baked texture of the same brick wall with a normal map will look pretty much the same at a distance, but the latter will render much faster. Now if the characters in focus are going to be close to that wall, close enough to touch it, lean against it, slam their enemies against it, etc. then it stops being mere scenery and has become a prop. Props tend to need as much detail as the central characters manipulating them.

[stereoman]

Hi Dred,
You´re quite right, that´s why a storyboard is a must in any visual production.
The storyboard helps to know what´s in a scene and where, so you need to model only what will be visible, otherwise would be near impossible to deal with a full scene where each model is hi-poly.
Also, each artist has it´s own way to stylize and synthesize things, true to reality can be the work of an architect, but not the work of an artist, in the same way, characters must be stylized, even more if they are in a comic, same for all props.
If you work with true to life imagery, it´s easy to find models of buildings, animals, plants, etc, but this all looks very flat, in the other hand, if you create stylized characters you need to model almost everything with the same degree of stilization, so you can´t use library models, there´s a hard choice here.
This recalls me about some transparent sheets Letraset released, they had a lot of cars, people, buildings, to transfer to your artwork, in some generic applications they worked somewhat, but nobody even think in doing anything serious with this stuff, was just to create fake pages with well looking ink images to show to the client, but not true ilustrations just because they could be used anywhere.

[jujube]

I'm enjoying your thread too, I love the moai man. It's always nice to see variety here.

[stereoman]

I'm enjoying your thread too, I love the moai man. It's always nice to see variety here.

Glad to hear this, jujube, you here are my beta-readers in some way, all comments are welcome and a good help to my work, so many thanks for your time.

[stereoman]

A couple ok Kodo drummers, I think this illustrates my workflow a bit more, at this stage the models still being very raw, but I have all I need except for close planes, at the background and with appropiate lighting should be enough.
But if I need more detail in a frame, I will work the model to finish just in the parts shown to the camera, this includes small details that can be hand painted like wires, jewels, higlights, and so on.
Usually I want to have all the needed images before starting with fine tuning, this first stage includes composition , lighting, and an overall athmosphere, if this all is not done, the fine tuning will become near impossible, I mean I must have all done before the next step, never let anything " to do later", it´s easy to do so, and find a lot of problems.

[stereoman]

Often a full scene can´t be handled by the computer, then it´s time to work with layers, just don´t forget to have your thumbnails at sight.
AS I´ve said, it´s the final image what counts, and this is more related with mood and lighting than with the models themselves.
The third image IS the background for this scene, the next layer will contain the main action.

[stereoman]

I did this one some time ago, even if there´s not a body, I did the clothes over a MH body probably my first try with MH, the head belongs to a small amphibian called Axolotl.