Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General For Dove's Wings - BG Fan Comic

Xan is the depressive wizard, you save in the mines of Nashkell. Love him.

He always made me think of Marvin the Paranoid Android. Maybe crossed with a little bit of original Doctor Smith from Lost in Space.

I had a feeling that it prolly was the Elf Wizard with a Magical Sword only he can (mis)use

So why has Xan travelled such a long way to what seems a minor Dwarven settlement? (I never specified before, but they're somewhere between Luskan and Neverwinter).

"Courtesan?!?" - "A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do" :P
"Gnome lover" - best insult evah
"I'm so glad we came here" - best line
"... we're all doomed" - vintage Xan

Tav : Never thought I'd ever walk in on a bugbear and an ogre.
Astarion : Oh I've seen worse. Gnomes can be... ugh

Excellent catch! I did not notice the referrence to our Mister Discerning Male Gaze incarnate! I simly thought that to an elf a gnome would be like totally eww ...
Chapeaux bas to your keen eye and to the authoress for her writing skill!

Well, been a little while. Honestly my PC is not really up to these Iray renders, but I'll be upgrading it soon. Also, I was hacked a while ago! Or rather, the password for my email got leaked from my provider, so someone was able to get in and use it to reset passwords and change details for various other accounts. Including Sony, even though I thought I had 2FA on it, but apparently they were able to just turn it off? Even so, everything affected was very good and I got it all back pretty quick (Epic games were the slowest to respond, but came through in the end).

Anyway, Aerie is a character we only really ever saw taking her first steps in the world, and is hugely important to Minsc and Boo. So with Larian's final patch I will shortly start seriously looking into bringing her to BG3 and finally reuniting them.

Just a few more images to finish this scene before Easter, and to test out my new graphics card.

For those interested in the sexy tech stuff; I was running on an 8GB RTX 2070, but it was really struggling with these underground and low light scenes in DazStudio. The pictures would come out very grainy, and I would try using denoisers but of course then they come out blurry or losing some details. Now I've upgraded to a 16GB RTX 5070 Ti - it's that extra VRAM that really matters a lot in Studio. Now I'm not getting the best performance I can out of it since my CPU and Motherboard are still a few years old, but already renders are a lot faster. Still a tiny bit of grain after rendering for a similar amount of time to I was before, but nowhere near as bad.

(Basically, I wanted to get rid of Aerie's cloak for the time being. I think it looks good, but it's annoying to work with, especially since there will be some action bits coming up.)

If can't beat Arun at fisticuffs, slit his throat in his sleep, then.
:P

I'm sure if Shadowheart were there her advice would be along those lines, but I don't think Aerie would go quite that far :P

But rest assured she isn't planning on just taking it until she finally snaps either (like she might have done back in the BG2 days).

Just a little bonus extra. I would obviously like to create a new campaign or mod to finally reunite Minsc & Boo with Aerie, since it would be nice to deliver something that's been waited 20+ years for. One of the big problems that wasn't really an issue with BG 1+2, is voices. So I did do an experiment in generating them:



Yeah, it will just never be as good as real actors. Why does it say 'now and then' like that? I have no idea. It's like it kind of rubberbanded there, stretching out then snapping back. Definitely need another take for that line at least. But with my budget of $0, and likely to be a sporadic timetable, generation like this is probably what I would have to use at least to start with. But at some point I would want to replace it with a real voice.

And here is like the script for the mods first encounter, maybe:



Obviously the thing about modding is you can write whatever you want. You can write 'a horde of ten thousand demons storm the city and everyone poops bricks!' But when you have to actually implement that, you might find that the game engine just cannae handle it. You can maybe have one demon. And it has to be invisible.

Anyway, obviously I'll get back to the comic soon, but right now I'm slowly learning my away around the toolkits and other stuff. I'll post elsewhere when I have something to show in that regard.

Anyone, I'm pretty much convinced that 'AI' - which is badly named because that's not really what it is - is not the future. And so, onwards:

The continuum continuums:

I recently shared the comic so far on Ao3 as well:

Not All Who Wander (I've yet to come up with a proper title, so we'll just go with this for now; it kind of works).

I'll probably wait until there's about 30-40 images before sharing them there, so you'll see them here and a couple other odd places first.

Only other note is that indeed I forgot to check to see whether the students in The Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts (from Planescape: Torment) were referred to as courtesans or prostitutes. Now I think it might have been the later. But yes, if you haven't figured it out, although her relationship with Haer'Dalis didn't actually last long, meeting him and his troupe nevertheless sparked Aerie's curiosity and at some point she visited Sigil, got stuck there a while, and became a Sensate. I'm sure she'll let slip the odd mention of some of the many other adventures she's had in the last century as we go on.

You know I would like to do more fanart of other characters in the series, but these days whenever I ask for ideas most of what I get back is 'um... you could show Shadowheart's feet?' Which... sure. I could. But it's not an idea. I was asking for a freaking scenario you flipping flipper...

Here you go though:



I guess someone out there is getting something out of that.