Archive for ‘3D Comic Howto’

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A 3D Webcomic How To: Part 1

June 29th, 2009 | by shaggy
Posted In: News, 3D Comic Howto

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two years since I started BS/OD. While I wouldn’t consider myself a master at making a 3D web comic, I feel that I have a decent amount of information that might help a beginner who wishes to start their own. Starting today, I plan on writing a weekly article that will give the would be beginner tips on getting their own idea off the ground.

Tools:

While there are plenty of tools out there to create a 3D web comic, many of them are either free or open source.  This is a great way to start learning the process without spending a ton of money.  Trust me, it’s quite easy to spend a lot but you can do much of your comic on the cheap if you do a little digging.  Here is a list of free programs to get you started:

Daz Studio 2: This is a great program to start learning to work in 3D.  With a wide variety of available content, you’ll be able to create a wide variety of comics.  Now, while there is a ton of premium content available for Daz Studio, you can find quite a bit out there for free on various web sites.  We’ll discuss finding content in future articles with more detail. As of this article, Daz Studio 3 is available but I would hold off using it for now as it still has some bugs that need to be worked out.

Bryce 5.5: This is yet another piece of software that will give you a good start.  It will provide you with a number of ways to create scenes to put your characters in and it can work hand in hand with Daz Studio. As of right now, though, Bryce 5.5 isn’t compatable with Daz Studio 3.

GIMP: While most people know that Photoshop is the defacto standard when working with 2D, GIMP is a great piece of open source software that can do everything you need.  You will find yourself using it to clean up some things before putting your comic together.

Inkscape: You’ll need a tool to create word balloons and lettering for your comic. After all, your characters will most likely be speaking at some point. While you can do it all in GIMP, you’ll find it a bit easier to make it look cleaner in Inkscape.  In this program, you will also be able to assemble the final panels for your comic.  If you do have a little money to spend, though, I would look into purchasing Comic Life since it will speed up this process greatly. I’ll talk a bit more about Comic Life in future articles.

These four programs will give you a good start but they will take some time to learn.  In the next article, I’ll talk about free content that you can use in Daz Studio as well as some times on putting a simple scene together.

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A 3D Webcomic How To: Part 2

July 7th, 2009 | by shaggy
Posted In: News, 3D Comic Howto

Getting Started:

Today we’re going to talk a bit about starting to set up a scene for a basic comic.  We’ll assume that you have downloaded all of the programs that we talked about last week.  One of the first free sets of models that we’ll use comes from the 3D Bridge Starter Pack.

Once you get that installed, open up Daz Studio and looking for the Emotiguy model under Content on the left hand side.  It should look something like this.  Don’t fret if your content tab doesn’t look like mine since I have a number of 3D models installed that you will not.  Double click on him and he should pop up in the scene.  You’ll want to do the same with his shoes so he’s just not floating around. Well, Okay…he is still sort of floating around but you get the point.

Next we’ll want to go to the Scene tab in the upper left hand corner. It should be somewhere near the Content tab.  If you don’t see it, you can click at the top on View, Tabs and then Scene.  Now, it may take you a while to get around Daz Studio but we’ll only cover some very basics in this tutorial.  If you have more questions on how to use the program, you may want to check out the programs help files or the Daz website.

figure1Now, highlight the Emotiguy and click on the icon the frame icon to bring the entire character into view.  You can look at the image on the left for reference.  This is the first character we’ll be working with.

Right now our Emotiguy looks a bit bored but this is what he’ll look like when you first add him into the scene.  In a comic, your characters need to change their expressions to match their mood. It sounds complicated but it’s pretty simple.

First, you’ll want to navigate to the head of our Emotiguy under the Scene tab.  Once you do that, you will see a number of options on the right side of the screen under Parameters.  His head can be moved around and you have a number of expressions that you can use.  The nice thing about them is that they can be mixed and matched together and this gives you quite a wide pallet.

You’ll want to play around with each part of the Emotiguy and get used to how each part moves around.  For the most part, you’ll want to be changing a number of these parameters for each panel of your comic.  He’s not a statue after all.  Using a consistent number of poses for a character will also help define it’s personality.  Some characters may always look angry or happy depending on who they are.  Any pose you make can also be saved for future use.  You can find out how to do that by clicking here.

Over the next week, I would play around with the Emotiguy so that you’re very familiar with him.  We’ll be using this character a lot over the next several weeks.  If you want, you can also add in a 2nd Emotiguy so that you can start experimenting with having one interact with the other. 

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A 3D Webcomic How To: Part 3

July 14th, 2009 | by shaggy
Posted In: News, 3D Comic Howto

Your First Panel:

Today we’ll talk a bit about setting up your first panel for a comic.  While we will get into some specifics about how to get your comic started, these tutorials aren’t geared towards those who are looking for all of the ins and outs of running a web comic.  There are already plenty of books and websites that cover that subject.  These tutorials are going to give you some things that are unique to doing a webcomic in 3D.  While 3D and 2D comics have many things in common, there are aspects that make it much easier than the traditional comic.  On the flip side, you will also encounter some hurdles.

Example1

Example1

Let’s take a look at example one on the left.  For a larger version, click here.  If you click on the example image to the left, you’ll be able to download the Daz file for this scene. I’ll supply these with each example image from now on.  When I look at this image, there are two things that stand out to me.  One is the lack of shadowing.  The other problem is that the 2nd Emotiguy looks to be nothing but a clone of the first.  These two issues are shown here in a very basic way but they do point out some things that you will probably run into when you first start working with your 3D comic.

While there may be some occasions where you don’t want any sort of shadowing at all, most of the time it makes it look like your characters are just floating in space.  You really loose a sense of object placement without them.  It also just looks all together unnatural. Learning how to use basic lighting in Daz doesn’t take that much effort and for most scenes you can get away with sticking to the three point lighting system which you can see in Example2.  For a larger version of Example2, click here.  Lighting is an art form all on it’s own and it’ll take you some time to get the hang of it.  It can set the mood of a particular scene which can be very important at times.

Example2

Example2

One of the easiest traps to fall into when working with program such as Daz Studio is that a lot of your characters may start looking the same.  Start off by giving them subtle differences changing their color, adding accessories, changing hair styles and use different outfits. In the case with our second Emotiguy, we can change him to another color so that he’d be easier to differentiate from the first.  You might also change the color of his gloves or his shoes.  In the end, your readers will have an easier time figuring out who is who.

Next week we’ll talk more about getting things ready so that you can render a scene. Keep practicing with Daz and feel free to e-mail me if you have an specific questions on anything that I’ve talked about. I’ll do my best to help you out if I can.

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