Echoes of Darkness

I’m not sure how to categorize this. It’s an homage to an homage? From 2008 to 2010 I created a series of graphic novels entitled Across the Universe and its sequel Echoes of Darkness. They were basically my idea of the third Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic video game that we never got to see. I don’t even remember what happens in them because it’s been so long ago. (I did manage to find all the pages on an old hard drive, and I posted them for download on my personal blog in what I’ve called my Archive of Old if you want to see them and some other old stuff of mine.)

Anyway, this artwork was inspired by the cover of the second novel, Echoes of Darkness, which I always thought was really cool. I couldn’t get the original main character model to work (which I did find on an old external hard drive), so I recreated a similar looking Jedi using La Femme and tried to make her outfit look like the original with a lot of kitbashing and retexturing. I did however manage to find the original lightsaber props that I created back in 2008 and that’s them in this artwork with new Superfly materials!

I rendered this in Poser 12 with Superfly. I only used one tiny area light that covered her face and was set to a very low value like 1% or 2% intensity. The main light sources were the emissive material on her lightsaber blade and then two large curved IDL props on either side of her, one blue and one red. I rendered her on a plain gray background. Before taking the render into Photoshop, I tried out a new tool called ON1 NoNoise AI to try and take out all of the noise from the render left by the emissive lighting. It did a pretty good job! In Photoshop I did a lot of postwork. I overlayed the stars and color nebula backgrounds onto the render and cut out the main figure using Photoshop’s tools. I enhanced the lightsaber blade with a brush and layer styles. I added more red and black nebula/smoke/clouds with brushes and layer styles over the background for more “Dark Side Energy”. I then used a Photoshop action to add some drama to the image. Finally, I took the image into Lightroom to enhance the colors and contrast.

Most of these items are available from the Renderosity Marketplace (unless otherwise noted):

• D9S Angie for La Femme by Dream9Studios
• Stellar by Designfera
• Hr-234 by ali
• DMs Cube by DM (just the blaster)
• Necklace Collection 1 by Afrodite-Ohki (just the chain)
• Lighting Props by Biscuits (from Patreon)
• MRL Romance Collection 4 by Mihrelle (no longer available)