Your First Comic:
So, you should be getting more familiar with working in Daz Studio. Today I’m going to talk about about camera positions. Framing your image properly will help save you a lot of time so that you don’t always have to go back and re-render a particular panel. If you don’t have a fairly fast machine, it can take quite a while to render a complex scene.
The first thing we need to talk about is the dimensions of a rendered image. If you click on ‘Render’ at the top of Daz Studio and select ‘Render Settings’, you’ll see what you currently have set up. For starters, I would set the ‘Presets’ to Square 1:1. The reasons for this is that it’s easier to fit a square image into just about any panel. You can play around with this once you get more accustomed to what you want to do but for now I would start off with this setting.
As far as pixel dimensions go, I would start out using 1500×1500. You may want to use an even larger size if you plan on having a panel take up an entire page. The reason for doing this is so that things will look crisp if and when you decide to send your comic to a printer. You are working at 300 dpi or higher for your comic pages, right?
Now, make sure that when you’re rendering an image for your comic that you have the Render Settings set to render to a file and not the Active Viewer. Rendering an image to a file will use the pixel dimensions that you put in the settings. If you render to the active viewer and then just choose file and Save Last Render, the size of your image will be what is currently shown in Daz’s viewing window. Those files can be rather small unless you’re working with Daz maximized on a rather large monitor.
Next we’ll talk about framing. When setting up a shot, you’ll want to make sure the camera is far enough way from a speaking character. Since you’ll be putting in your balloons and lettering after the fact, you’ll need to make sure that you make room for dialog. Now, many of you will be writing your dialog prior to rendering your comic. I personally do things a little backwards but I still make sure that I have plenty of room to put my balloons and such. Sometimes I think it forces me to make things less wordy since I only have a certain amount of space to have a particular character speak in.
One thing that I had a problem with when I first started doing a 3D web comic was that I always seemed to recycle the same camera. Everything was pretty much done from a side perspective. In a way, you almost have to think like a film director. When you watch movies, do you ever notice how the angle of a shot can set the mood for a particular scene? You’ll want to keep that sort of thing in mind so that your comic is more engaging.
Another fun thing to play with when setting up a shot is the camera’s settings with respect to depth of field, etc. You can find them if you highlight your camera under the ‘Scene’ tab on the left. Look to the right side of the screen under ‘Parameters’ and the settings I’m talking about will be near the bottom. There’s a lot you can do to set the mood with these settings. There’s a great tutorial on Daz’s site that explains on how it all works. I would click here and give it a read. If you do work with the depth of field settings, though, your images will take a little longer to render.
That’s all for this weeks article. Keep experimenting and we’ll talk more about putting a comic together as the weeks go by!
