The Start of Something Small - Character Development - Taking Flight, Facial Expressions, Wardrobe Changes, Evil Aphids and Adding The Second Spryte - Part Three

In this series of Spryte character development, I accomplished a lot while creating the three scenes below. Firstly, the excellent backdrop was provided courtesy of @englishtchrivy via her post: SMARTPHONE PHOTOGRAPHY : Speckled Bush Cricket . I happened upon her work while carousing the NEW Feed and am glad I found her stuff. This particular set of images matched up perfectly for the initial story line I wrote for The Start of Something Small . Her photography was excellent capturing the cricket in such detail and made for a really nice render with the Sprytes.

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In this first scene, I continued with the work on rendering hands in DAZ 3D by attempting to have her right hand cupped to her mouth, trying to add to her look of horror. The left hand was an effort to have her pointing at something, in this case, the menacing Aphid that's invaded her pristine world.

This was also the first time I worked with facial expressions in DAZ 3D. It was pretty easy to increase her look of surprise, which looks pretty realistic. Additionally, it was meant to be the focal ppoint for this scene.

I worked on the positioning in the scene, in combination with the backdrop to make her look as if she was slowly floating upward as she's scared to death by seeing something she's never seen before. I also worked with feet adjustment in an effort to make the next scene, flight, seem more realistic.

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The next scene has the Spryte take a different angle and do something I've been really wanting to work on: flight. I plan to do a lot of things with "superhero" type characters with these renders and flying is sort of a no-brainer. Making her appear to be flying was an effort in making adjustments to her overall angle, hips, back, legs and feet. Not too hard and much more rewarding than just buying the flight poses I think. It also gave me a chance to play around with different motions for her.

One thing I did was bend her at hips to the scene right and moved her that direction. I'm imagining her flying slightly into a different position to get a better look, but that will happen when I try animating these characters.

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I accomplished a lot of things I wanted to in this final scene render. First, I added a second Spryte for the first time. Doing so enabled me to make a different color to the Spryte outfit, as well as try some different facial expressions and make-up.

The new Spryte is a more aggressive than the first and I think I'll rip-off the Planet of the Apes concept of having different sects of the Spryte society wearing unique wardrobes. In other words, the scientists might wear the original green, the warriors black, mythical could be reddish, and maybe politicians orange...in props to the immortal Dr. Zaius :)

Adding a second character to the scene proved difficult in that positioning them just right meant working with each separately and not messing with the other. It was a bit tricky, but I had to be patient, edit them the way I wanted them to look in the scene, and place them using the XY coordinates.

I'm also fairly pleased with how the aggressiveness and fighting pose i managed with the black Spryte. When I came up with the idea for the Sprytes, I worked in the battling with the Aphids as a way to make things exciting. The story could still work that way, but I can also see where this could work a little tamer and be more of a happy tale.

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I hope you enjoyed the scenes I've created here. I think I'll work on another video showing how to make them do some of the poses and scenes shown here. Thanks to all who've read and voted for these posts, I really appreciate it. DAZ3D can be a joy to work with, but at times be pretty challenging.

Previous Work In This Story Line

The Start of Something Small

The Start of Something Small - Character Development of The First Spryte

The Start of Something Small - Character Development of The First Spryte - Part Two