ruaidri
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Comic Page Breakdown
🕑 Added 2023-07-11 18:32:38 +0000 UTCI know the content isn't to everyone's tastes, but I still figured you might be interested in seeing the process I've been using to make these comic pages lately! It starts by just getting a sense for what I want to show this page and how I'm going to lay everything out. Once I've got a solid sense of what's going to go where and what the panels will roughly be shaped like, I go about creating the poses in blender and rendering them out in three separate layers, one with just the background, one with just the characters, and a third ugly one in greyscale. Since I have the characters set up to be flat-shaded in blender, that means I get no sense of depth or detail at all- if for example Kat's hand were to overlap with her leg, since her stockings and gloves are the same colour, they visually just disappear completely in the render. To give me some sense of detail I render out a simple greyscale shaded version of each frame just to use as a reference for details.
I render the characters out separately from the background just because it makes working on them easier. Digital artists will know this well, but for the rest of you, you can use the character-only layer as a mask for the shading layer and not have to worry about "staying inside the lines", the computer will just not colour in anything outside the area the characters take up.
Once I have all the images rendered, I compile them together and crop them into their respective frames, and I'm left with what you see in the second from the right example image, and from there the 2D work begins. Some hand inking and some basic shading later and viola, comic page!
Comments
Ma'Jeera
This is soo good! I like this a lot :3 Well done!
Stargazer
This is super cool
Ruaidri
Aw, thank you! :3
Jackson triggs
Yo uhh, this is probably the best work ive seen comic wise in the better part of a year! Love the 3d mixed with outlining and drawing.
The Balkor
Yeah, I think it's a neat idea, especially if in the future you have an idea for a scene or even a story if you ever wished to come up with one.
Shiloh Fox
This is such a neat process! I'm super interested in how you further develop it and work out the details. It certainly looks like a great way to use the best of 3D and 2D together to make a scene. Exciting!!
Gamer Vane
Hey man use whatever tools work! I find my 3d spatial reasoning much more solid than 2d, so I agree that laying a rough version out in a 3d oriented program just seems so much easier for me to get my brain around. also can't overstate how much I dig all the characterization you get out of your expressions, as you always do. It's so damn fun to see!
Ruaidri
I sorta work on the poses and the camera at the same time. I've usually got a solid sense of what I want the panels all to look like before I start doing any posing, so I can generally narrow down the focus to only the bits that need to be on the camera which saves a lot of time, but once I see the poses I'll sometimes adjust the camera angle or try a few other angles out to see if they work better, so there's a bit of back and forth until I get something I'm satisfied with.
Ruaidri
For me personally it's easier because I'm not really great at drawing consistently over a large number of images, or... at drawing backgrounds at all, really, hah. In fact I find both things very difficult and stressful. This removes 100% of that and once I've got the characters and background made in 3D and set up for this style, all I've got to do in 2D is some simple tracing and shading. Someone who's a lot stronger in 2D might find it unnecessary but for me this makes comics a thing I might actually want to start doing more regularly again, instead of just a nightmare. :P
BreezyBreeze
This is a really cool process to see and makes a lot of sense! Do you setup the characters on a timeline then in the poses that you want and get the camera angles you want for each moment of the scene? I imagine this is a lot like animating in the setup except you donβt have to worry about the betweens?
Gamer Vane
Oh shit dude this looks cool as heck. Would this be intended as an alternative method to make more comic panels more simply in some way? Or is it actually more work to do, but for a highly distinctive look?
