Vignette: The Proposal

Images of characters done with MakeHuman

Moderator: joepal

Vignette: The Proposal

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Fri Dec 13, 2019 12:21 am

One of the underlying concepts of the science fiction universe I am working on is that no matter how much humanity grows in terms of technology certain aspects of humanity's collective personality are not going to change both for the positive and the negative. One of the more positive aspects will be that men and women will always want each other in their lives..


Danko and Aspen have been childhood sweethearts from a very early age going back to when their ages only required a single digit to express. For Danko, Aspen was literally the girl next door.

Both grew up in the government run high rise housing projects on the district between the city and the starport complex which for governmental purposes is outside the jurisdiction of the local and planetary government. It was decided by the city to tear down the project Danko and Aspen grew up in. One fine day when the parents were away working piecework at one of the local factories the children left behind were rousted out of the building and demolition began. Danko took charge of Aspen's safety and the two fled the situation together. Both lost contact with their immediate families and for a while the ran with one of the many youth gangs that infest the city.

Danko stumbled upon an opportunity to raise their standard of living and signed on to an apprenticeship working as a mechanic in the starport facility. Aspen eventually found work first as a messenger clerk (her underage status ignored at the time, she is two years younger than Danko) and they stayed together in housing that was provided by Danko's new employer. As time went on their affection matured from feeling like brother and sister to one another to something more wonderful. Danko has now graduated from his apprenticeship and about a week before this scene was promoted to mechanic second and now takes on work assignments on his own. While not a master mechanic yet by all accounts his mechanical skill will lead to that eventually.

They went out to celebrate Aspen's new job as a scheduling clerk assigning passengers to bookings on starships that take on passengers. As their evening progressed Danko grew more and more nervous with what he planned to do. Finally before he could lose the nerve as the couple walked a path up a hill overlooking the city Danko took a knee and asked Aspen if she would marry him.


the-proposal.png
The Proposal



Now for some technical/artistic stuff and commentary.

The skin shader for both characters is the new enhanced skin shader that gets trucked along with an import through the Blender MakeHuman plugin. I improved Aspen's hair a bit by creating a normal map in Gimp which is something I'm not as good at as I'd like to be but I think this normal map is a good start.

I used for Danko the pose "Baby Please" and tweaked it a bit to my liking.

The expressions on both characters uses the FACS Human expression editor.

Clothing and such were of course contributed assets and needed tweaking to fit the models correctly.

Both models were the product of the Mass Produce plugin to MakeHuman with some minor tweaking to correct issues with the meshes created by the custom targets. (Applying a male target to a female does weird things for instance).

Work was done in Blender 2.81 which I'm learning to adapt to with the new ways of doing things.
Peter L. Berghold <peter@berghold.net> or <Salty.Cowdawg@gmail.com>
Retired IT with 30+ years in the business
User avatar
SaltyCowdawg
 
Posts: 458
Joined: Fri Aug 09, 2013 3:12 pm
Location: Ayden NC

Return to Gallery

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest