Rune

Page two. I drop a few more questions in the reader’s mind: what can Rune do to prevent the war? Will Jalina return Rune’s affections, or is Justin right about her?

Rune emphasizes the word “brother” in a mocking way, clueing the reader in that they are not actually brothers (as far as they know at this point, anyway). As you can see in the prequel scene where they first meet Jalina, they are pretending to be brothers as they travel across the countryside incognito.

Some notes about the art… Rune and Justin use the same 3D model (Michael 4) and the same skin texture. It’s a common amateur mistake to use a single skin color for all the characters in a comic, but in this case it’s intentional because (as we learn later), Rune and Justin are half brothers. There’s one other character who has the same skin: their father.

When posing them, I used a combination of commercially packaged poses and hand-adjusted settings. I learned somewhere along the way that characters should have a “focus point” for their body language. (I think it was in the Paper Wings Podcast). I gave Rune and Justin different ones to help distinguish them visually. Rune’s focus point is his heart. A lot of his physical posture centers around his chest. Justin, on the other hand, has a focus point at his, er… let’s say hips, which you can see in panel two.

For fellow 3D artists who might be curious, Rune and Justin are wearing the Slicer outfit (with slight modifications). Rune’s hair is Rievel hair, which I selected because it has a fit for Millennium Kids and I knew I would be having a younger Rune in the book. Justin’s hair is Mon Chevalier hair. I used the M4 eyebrow node with trans maps that I drew myself. There was a bug in the model where the eyebrow wouldn’t follow the morphs correctly – luckily another DAZ user had developed a script that fixed it. On that note, I should say I owe a lot to the DAZ user community. They helped me learn the product, they answered questions, they suggested products that suited my needs, and they even (in some cases) made things for me (like the model for the signet ring that the Lords of Valheigh wear). I couldn’t have done this project without them.