Luke Cage in Harlem 1970s, Avengers from 1960's

Some of my 3D artwork, some A.I. stuff and a comic review

February 13, 2023

Hello again, thanks for checking out another issue of John Garrett Stuff.

This week we have a section I call Art Stuff (I know, creative right?), then a Non-Outrage Comics review, and even some writing related updates.

JOHN GARRETT ART STUFF

So to kick it off is a Luke Cage piece I've been working on in 3D.

The Cage figure himself I made a couple of years back, but he only worked for a couple of shots.

What I mean by that is that he couldn't pose easily, and the wrong camera angle would reveal that limitation. Plus the shirt and belt chain weren't rigged up to pose along with the character regardless, so those issues had to be addressed.

To that end, I went back and recreated the shirt from scratch, then remade the belt chain, too.

Finally, to address the posing issue I used a plugin to my 3D program Blender which is called Auto-Rig Pro.

This plugin makes it a lot easier to rig up a character and take them from a static model to a poseable one.

But I still wasn't done. If you see the photo I also added in Claire Temple. This is the original 1970's Claire from the comics, not 'Rosario Dawson' Claire from the Netflix shows.

Back then Claire was a doctor, not a nurse. I don't get why that had to change for the show, but whatever...

The point here is that Luke needed someone to step out with him uptown Saturday Night in Harlem, and back in the 70's that was Claire.

So this image is far, far from done, but I just wanted to show progress at this stage.

Thing I plan to do to this image to bring it to life are as follows:

  1. Really lock in natural walking poses and expressions for Luke & Claire.

  2. Adjust the 'poke-through' issues on the clothing once the pose is set (poke-through is where the clothing collides with the figure and they go right through each other).

  3. Clothing is stiff right now, so I will run a physics simulation to make it fall and fold believably.

  4. Textures and materials on everything need to be adjusted to look as real as possible.

  5. More people and cars need to be added. This is a busy Harlem street.

  6. I imagine this as a night shot. As such the whole lighting scheme has to be changed.

So quite a bit of work remains on this one. I'll be posting back with updates in each newsletter.

For now here’s a behind the scenes shot of the piece in Blender:

A.I. ART RAGE

We all know that A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is all the rage these days, so I thought I'd give my Luke Cage image a shot in Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion is a text to image generator that can come up with photorealistic results if given the proper text prompt.

Another tidbit: I integrated Stable Diffusion into my 3D program, Blender, and it also used my 3D model to work off of.

So what did it come up with? Here goes:

So those first 3 I just put in some iteration of 'Luke Cage comics 1970s in Harlem'. You can see it didn't quite know what to do.

My model was in classic "T-pose", but you can see in my renders that it doesn't look like whoever that dude is. Very odd.

So I tried again:

In these next 4 I typed something along the lines of 'marvel Luke Cage 1970s in Harlem'.

Adding 'Marvel' to the prompt resulted in a bald person who is likely based off of actor Mike Colter's portrayal of Luke in the Netflix series (which I think is not on Netflix anymore, but on Disney Plus).

Anyway this is not what I wanted, so I tried again:

In these last 3 I eliminated 'Marvel & Luke Cage' from the prompt and instead typed something like 'Large muscular black man with afro in yellow shirt open to navel, blue pants and yellow boots walking down Harlem street’.

So that's what it came up with. After that last one I just gave up and decided I was going have to do this one the old-fashioned way.

Why the heck did it come up with shorts??

NON-OUTRAGE COMICS

This week’s comic is “Avengers: War Across Time #2”, the sequel to the comic reviewed last time.

I wanted to talk about a different series, but my goal is to talk about the comics I most enjoyed. So I'm being honest here - this is the one I most enjoyed.

Again, the old-school 1960's vibe of those simpler Avengers comics is something that really speaks to me.

In this issue, after realizing Kang the Conqueror is their enemy, The Avengers rush over to the Baxter Building to beg the Fantastic Four to let them use the time machine confiscated from FF foe Dr. Doom.

When they realize the FF isn't home, they actually break in, tussle with the automated security, and then get dejected and leave when they realize they just don't know how to operate the time machine.

I think the best part of this one was the tacit admission that Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is smarter than both Tony Stark & Hank Pym. I'm not a fan of Reed Richards or the Fantastic Four but it still made me laugh.

Of course The Wasp is the one talking trash as usual. She's another character I have a love-hate relationship with. I might discuss her at a later date.

But for now I have to say again that I would definitely recommend this series. Great stuff that brought me a bit of joy on a slow day.

JOHN GARRETT WRITING STUFF

To wrap this up, for all The Life-Taker fans out there, I just wanted to mention that work continues on the sequel to The Life-Taker, in which The Life-Taker returns to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting populace.

It's called 'The Return of The Life-Taker'. I know ,very creative, but I felt it fit.

I think we're at least a year out on this one but the work continues, never fear.

So I'm out of here for now, I'll be seeing you guys in another John Garrett Stuff newsletter very soon.

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