| Detail of Panel 100 of Chapter 10 - 2019

Starting into a New Era

he production of Chapter 10 was extraordinary in many aspects. First and foremost, it was the first production since 2010 that was not executed on a full-time schedule. Since there didn't exist a complete production budget to work with, the production was financed through a monthly budget provided by fans via the crowdfunding platform Patreon which allowed for about one production day per week on average. In order to create frequent rewards for the supporters, Chapter 10 was the first chapter of the Wormworld Saga to be pre-published in page increments. This new routine had all kinds of implications for the production workflow. First, it called for a paginated layout, which I had never done before. Up to that point, all page layouts had been created by my print publisher in preparation of the print editions of the Wormworld Saga and I never had full control of that process. For Chapter 10 I created my own page layout and it felt quite liberating to do so. In fact, it felt so empowering that I decided to adapt ALL existing chapters into this new “official” page format. That was the birth of the paginated PDF Collector’s Edition of the Wormworld Saga.

And there were other ways the page by page release impacted the production workflow. Instead of writing and sketching the whole chapter in advance in a preliminary form, like I did on all preceding chapters, I created Chapter 10 scene by scene. A scene typically consists of 6 to 12 pages and I created the preliminary version and all needed concept art only for the next upcoming scene. Given the fact that the production spread out over several years, my approach towards the concept art and the preliminary version changed from scene to scene.

Rise of the Third Dimension

An ongoing theme in my Making Of articles is the growing importance of 3D graphics in my productions. What had started with a very rough 3D model of Janaka Jiivas room in Chapter 4 has, over the years, developed into a fully fledged 3D pre-production workflow. For Chapter 10 I further expanded my use of 3D graphics to flesh out the world and the characters of the Wormworld Saga. For the scene in which Jonas and Otomo encounter the ravine, I created the first natural environment in 3D. Up to that point I had only used 3D for interiors or cityscapes.

The 3D model enabled me to find interesting camera angles for the different panels without compromising the spatial integrity of the scene. In natural environments it can be tempting to take shortcuts and just put some random plants into the background. However, I care a lot about the consistency of my backgrounds because I want the world to feel real. I embrace the fact that modern 3D tools enable me to create even complicated environments in a relatively short amount of time. And since some of my tools even let me work in virtual reality, I can literally step into my own world to flesh it out.

As you can see in the above images, the characters in the ravine scene were merely stiff dummies that only indicated the size of the figures and couldn’t be used for anything else. For the following scene I wanted to step things up a notch. For the first time ever, in the history of the Wormworld Saga production, I created poseable figures of all characters involved in the scene and that made a huge difference for me.

Having poseable characters to experiment with, greatly enhanced my workflow. Now I could have my figures act out specific situations and move around the scene with my camera to find the best framing to portrait these situations. It felt like being on a movie set and planning the shooting of an actual scene. This setup also enabled me to use an alternate approach towards my preliminary version of the scene. Instead of painting the prelim from scratch I rendered the different shots in 3D and only retouched details like facial expressions or hand gestures. Even when I was not working directly on panel illustrations, I started to really enjoy the possibility to explore all kinds of views into my world. The following series of images are all different views of Muhadra in his studio. None of these images made it into actual panel artwork but they all created a sense of space for me in preparation of the scene.

Building the Worm Mountain

Ever since Jonas and Raya arrived at the Worm Mountain and entered the city of Kingspeak I dreamed about having a model of that place. Back in those days I wasn’t relying on 3D models for my pre-production that much. A model of the throne room was the only 3D object I created for Chapter 6. For the establishing shot of the palace arcades scene I wanted to feature a full view of the Azure Palace and I decided that I didn’t want to eyeball that. I needed a model of the palace but that wouldn’t make sense without having at least a rough model of the Worm Mountain, too. That’s where I started to create a model of Kingspeak, a project that will probably take me many years to finish but for my establishing shot I actually didn’t need a complete model of the whole city. I started by defining the proportions of the Worm Mountain. In order to have some kind of reference I projected a satellite photo of my hometown Warendorf onto the area. I also added a model of the Eiffel tower because I know from experience how big this building is and it provided an additional reference to get a feeling for the scale of Kingspeak.

After the main proportions of the Worm Mountain were defined, I added all the buildings that already existed as 3D models, namely Muhadra’s facility, Otomo’s house and the East Gate. Then it was time to build the Azure Palace. Chapter 6 featured several views of the palace and my goal was to recreate those views as accurately as possible. I started my work with the palace square and all the buildings that are visible from the square. After that I was pretty free when it came to designing the rest of the palace. All I knew was that the huge garden had to go somewhere in the middle of the space.

Into the Lion's Den

In Chapter 10 we discover the secret hideout of the Dark Minions and we learn that they are actually Scrats that have established a hidden homebase within the depths of the Mushroom Forest. For the first scene, in which Raya arrives at the Scrat’s hideout, I didn’t have a 3D model of the location. The two concept drawings shown below were my only preparation before illustrating the scene in front of the main entrance. For the final scene, in which Jonas and Otomo prepare to invade the Scrat’s hideout, I created a 3D model of the nearby surroundings. Over 2 years laid between the productions of the two scenes and I’ve grown used to having at least some sort of 3D scene to prepare my shots. Also, I could already anticipate that the location would play a central role in Chapter 11, so the time was well invested.

New Characters

After seeing all the 3D renderings in this article you must get the impression that I’m turning my back towards drawing but that’s far from the truth. Even if I started to use posed 3D figures to plan my shots, I’ve got no plans to replace the craft of drawing with 3D graphics. I do actually plan to make more extensive use of 3D for background art, probably even to the point where I might paint directly on top of a rendered image, but all characters remain to be 100% hand-drawn. It would actually be too much trouble to refine 3D characters to a point where they would be suitable for appearing in a panel artwork. That said, let’s close this Making Of article with some concept drawings that feature the new Scrat characters that appear in Chapter 10.

The Bottom Line

The production of Chapter 10 was very different from all other preceding productions. The part-time schedule and the new page release routine mixed things up for me quite a bit. This is even reflected on my clipboard on which I normally plot out my progress. At some point I abandoned my paper schedule because my progress was sufficiently monitored and documented through my weekly Patreon posts. The production of Chapter 10 spread over 3 years and 4 months and while this was much too long to represent a sustainable model for the future, Chapter 10 has been a breakthrough in that regard that it was the first chapter of the Wormworld Saga that was 100% financed by the fans via crowdfunding. And it actually is the longest chapter of all, surpassing even the gigantic Chapter 6 by 2 pages. All in all, I worked 722 hours to finish it.