Sneak Peek - "Becoming Chooms: The Streetkid" (Patreon)

The Cyberpunk comic won the poll, so I wanted to show some of the stuff I've been chipping away at for it. If you voted for Liara's comic, don't worry, I'll get to that at some point too.

So, if it's not super obvious by the screenshots and the title, the comic is going to be another take on "V and Jackie Become Chooms", which was one of (if not) the first comics of this format that I made. That one was non-specific to which lifepath V was although I implied it takes place during the time skip when V lives with Jackie and Mama Welles.

With this one it's specifically going to be an alternate take on the Streetkid lifepath intro mission! (Before you ask, yes, someday I'll also do versions of the Corpo and Nomad ones too). I guess with this it'll sort of render the previous "Chooms" comic 'non-canon' to my loose sequencing of events in the VxJackie ship series since that one is implied to also be their first get-together, but I'll figure that out another time.

So, about what I'm working on more practically - preeeetty much everything.

I couldn't find any environment assets for the garage so I made it myself from scratch using assets from other random props and stuff cobbled together in what is basically a 3D kitbash.

The thing that's maybe the most noticeably different is the car - it's a Caliburn and not an Aerondight. Like the garage scene I couldn't find any models for the Aerondight, which is the car that V is actually trying to boost, but I did find a blender model of the Caliburn (they're both Rayfield, close enough!) and was able to port it over to daz and manually re-apply all the many (many) various textures and fix some of the porting issues like the car looking lumpy. IYDK Porting stuff from Blender to Daz is notoriously annoying and janky and frankly sometimes just straight up broken, but I got lucky enough that aside from some weird texture layering incompatibility I was able to manage to get it looking spiffy - and it's even still rigged which was a very nice surprise and meant the door was easy to open!

You can see the original reference for the scene from the game here:

Compared to my mock up:

The idea is to get the feel right, not necessarily the details. I learned my lesson from the "Fangirl" set a ways back that trying to re-create environments perfectly can be a bit of a waste of time because once things are posed and I get in closer with the camera and add depth of field and stuff, the details often aren't even visible or distinguishable. In Fangirl I recreated the Nibelheim Inn room almost exactly and in the final comic almost none of those details were even in the background. RIP.

So instead of nailing every detail, I just wanted to make sure a few points of detail were present (the alcove with the vending machines, the VIP signage, and the light sources) and everything else is sort of just to make sure if it's in the background it doesn't just look empty (hence the pipes, the vents, the floor markings, etc). I might still muss with the brightness of the parking space once i'm in there if it's a bit too bright on the models faces, but otherwise this'll do.