The best thing about the small press is the lack of any intense deadline. It’s partly a product of no one really having enough free time to complete a comic on a short deadline and partly from every one giving there time for free. That’s the practical side, the fun side is the chance to really go crazy and experiment with impractical techniques that you could never get away with commercially. That’s the set up, that’s the kind of opportunity that it would be rude to refuse.

For about the last 10 years I have been mucking about with 3D software, using it mostly for layouts and background perspective. Integrating 3D into a comic page is a bit like using a photograph for a background, it rarely works. I think the Glimmer rats By Mark Harrison is the closest any artist has ever got to getting away with it and he spent years on Durham Red with varying degrees of success. Kevin walker gave 3D what could be considered A brave but massively flawed Stab on his Demonifuge strip, so you can understand why I have been hesitant to try my hand at something that even good artist at the height of there powers have largely failed.

Up until now my largest single project in 3D has been an animation I did at university that had limited construction but lots of animation. This Project for Future Quake is the most complicated modelling task I have ever set myself. I’m going to keep the Blog up to date on my progress so I’m not going to say too much about the Strip now because it would leave me with nothing to write next time, but it’s a story set in space and the section I’m building is a giant automated factory. The big difference this time is that I’m not just blocking in objects for perspective, something to draw over, not for an animation or a computer game or an architectural Pr-visualisation, I’m trying to build a model for publishing, for a comic.

For practicality I’m trying to keep it reasonably low resolution, it’s going to be in black and white so I’m not really worrying to much about texturing except to add detail and I’m not trying to smooth out all the hard edges. It will be interesting to see from hear on in how much of a success or mess I make of what has to be the worst way to approach a comic strip.