What do professional artists and companies think of Daz3d for comics?
Sammagi
Posts: 137
In the past couple of weeks I went to a comic con convention in Albany and spoke with artists such as Tod Dezago, Paul Abrams, Paul Harding, Joe Station, and Graham Nolan. I brought my recent rough sketches and my digital work using Daz3d, which they all seem to aware of. In fact, one of the artist was using Daz3d + Blender as reference to draw a mechanical robot. After great feedback, cirtiques, and suggestions on composition (which I also thank mmitchell_houston for bringing it up as well) I felt confident to make and publish my own graphic novel using all my tools combine. Which makes me think about the industry. This made me wonder:
Do professional graphic novelist and companies use 3D programs to produce multimedia content, if so, what do they feel about artists, such as myself, using the pencil + digital, and photoshop as their tools?
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Overall, I am pretty sure many do incorporate some kind of digital media with their workflow. Now as for DS or poser being used, I would think those apps would be much further down the list since they are very specific in what they do and what figures/objects you can use with them as oppsed to a high end app such as 3DSMax, maya, Modo, or even C4d. The few illustrators I have talked to or seen in action tend to use tablets like a Wacom for much of their 3D work. Also I talked to a couple of cartoonists that say many still start the images freehand on drawing boards.
IMO as long as the pencil and photoshop are the main sources for the images instead of purely digital you should be golden.
I have done a number of comics for a website and since I can not draw the way I want to save myself I use Studio exclusively before that it was Poser, I then use a image filter program to give the desired results and Comiclife 3 for page creation, I do have Manga Studio 5 as well but found it to be not as good for what I want as Manga Studio 4 was..
Do you have a link to these comics, as this is the sort of thing I'm trying to do as well. I also use Studio and Comicife3. What sort of filters would you suggest? (I use GIMP).
Not sure I can link to my DA page on here but here is a comic I redid using a new program I just acquired..
But for image filtering I have been using Moku Hanga and Pastello from http://jixipix.com/
The page below I used Pastello for the image filtering..
As long as any necessary content filters are applied to the images it is fine to link to a dA gallery.
I had a look at your DA gallery. Nice stuff. Here's mine: http://stevem17.deviantart.com/
I've found that when using filters the tricky part is knowing when to stop.
I remember Justice League Dark used V4 and M4 for the base of their comics. Zatanna's outfit was actually a combination of PA products.
Guys, you are doing nice work, i also want to start learning drawing comics.
Thank you glad you liked them , your dA page was awesome as well some really nice pics in there.. :) The only reasons I filter is one to get the look I want and two, to hide the imperfections that can show up in the finished render such as poke through and so on.. :)
Thank you for the info I do have a lot of my images filtered but still was not sure.. :)
You got me curious about the comic that I decided to check out the panels. I can totally see it working. Thank you for mention this, This gave me good inspiration to push further in using Daz3d to make graphi novels :). The other two color artworks are my own. One is for a graphic novel that I will draw and publish, the other is a fanart of Princess monoke.
I spoke to a bunch of comic book companies at San Diego Comic-Con and they all said there was too much of an uncanny valley. Then I came back a couple of years later with highly postworked comic style art and they all loved it... I haven't been hired yet but I will try to resubmit. The more comic-y, the better... However, I am thinking of doing my own comic in a more realistic style. I doubt any company would accept it so it would have to involve creating my own buzz and fan base, and if the companies see high numbers, I'm sure they will change their tune. They mostly are still looking for pencillers, inkers, letterers (Really??? Have they not heard of fonts?) They are mostly still in the dark ages.
I've been working in the comic book industry for a few years (6 or 7) and it's very much still old school for the most part. Inkers are being used less and less though. Pencilers and colorists are still very much used and not much is being used in the way of 3D. I'm actually going to start work soon with a fellow Daz Studio artist to create some comic book type of art with his program that creates more traditional looking image from 3D art. We'll see how that goes. I'm looking forward to testing it out and seeing if 3D can be a real option for creating comic book content. :)
Sorry for the revival but just to show what I have been doing the past weeks. I'm turning my story into a multimedia graphic novel using pencil, Daz, photoshop, and blender in one. I'm even writing a lengthy script that will eventually be in storyboarding, as well as a character chart.
Sounds good! I wish you luck! :D
I've been messing with a free software package called FotoSketcher, which might be useful for people making comics. It's basically filters, like you have with GIMP (which a lot of people on here use), but I find it simpler to use than GIMP. Also there's a website called photomania which has a lot of filters, also easy to use. Worth a look.
Thank you SO MUCH for the shout-out! I really appreciate it. Composition of the panels is the thing I struggle with most, and it's also the thing that holds most fan artists (3D and traditional) back. Most of us do a straight-on look, and we don't actually think about the panel as a camera. I've gone back and reread a lot of books on comic design, including the fantastic How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and it really helped me raise my awareness of how to put a page together.
To directly answer your question, Brian Haberlin is actually VERY open about how he uses Poser and Michael 4 as the basis of his new series, FASTER THAN LIGHT. You can read a free story online here: http://www.experienceanomaly.com/faster-than-light/reader?issue=1&page=1 and it's worth looking at. He uses custom, hand-drawn textures to get the lines on his faces, and they look amazing. If you search YouTube with his name, you'll find a lot of videos discussing this. He has greatly influenced what I'm trying to accomplish in comics right now.
What is it you're not liking about MS4? I'm using MS5 right now, and am mostly agreeing with you that I like the other version better (mostly because the "Beginner's Panel" or whatever it was called put all of the controls in a single place, rather than making me have to hunt through sub menus to find settings). I am going to continue using MS5 for the rest of the short story I'm working on (I want to give the program a fair shake), but will probably switch back to MS4 EX after that.
BTW: On the subject of creating comics, here's a page I created using Poser 11's Comic Book Preview and Manga Studio 5. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm really trying to focus on panel composition for this story and am trying to pump up the action by avoiding straight-on camera angles and simple poses.
I like your panel layout. Nice storytelling -- this has a classic CREEPY and EERIE feel to the way you reveal her fangs in the last panel.
I checked out the FASTER THAN LIGHT website and was very impressed with their line of Graphic Novels. Even thought I recognized some daz content in those "drawings".
I am particularly curious about the supplemental Augmented Reality content included with several of the books. Does anyone know how to go about adding Augmented Reality views to a Graphic Novel and does it require use of the 3D meshes and would that rquire a game license? Thanks!
Meant I do not like MS5 as it does not have the drag and drop image into the panel, that MS4 Debut/EX had.. Why I liked Manga Studio more, but since then I have moved onto Comiclife 3 which does what I want and does it much quicker.. :) Love the page has very much a noir feel to it.. :)
Thank you glad you liked it.. Here is my DA page with the bulk of my creations, http://ghastly20.deviantart.com/ .. :)
Wow! Those pages look great, Crow!! I really love the green page! Outstanding work! :D
Wow! Those pages look great, Crow!! I really love the green page! Outstanding work! :D
Thanks so much Divamakeup! Glad you liked them.You can tell that 3D models are appearing more and more in comics, but I'm sure anyone in that industry would love to take advantage of the benefits if it wasn't for the hurdle of learning the medium.
I used to work with a guy some years back that was working on an Iron Man statue for ...Bowen (I think it was?... or any other of those studios) around the same time Marvel's civil war story line was coming out. There's a large top down shot at some point of Iron man sitting in a chair with Cap's dead body lying beside him in one of those comics. That Iron man frame was drawn over a posed render of the Iron man 3D model made for that Statue. I imagine there's generally a lot more of that going on to help draw difficult poses.
There's others that more openly use 3D and you can clearly tell. Brandon Peterson uses a lot of 3D if you look at his marvel work (ultimate vision stuff), be it for robots, backgrounds or some characters. There's an interview with him in which he talks about the 3D part a bit: http://www.newsarama.com/9185-from-x-men-to-avengers-brandon-peterson-is-back-in-comics.html
As long as you can mix or augment 3D and drawn parts to get whatever you need or desire without letting limited 3d or drawing skills limit you, I think it's great to mix both.
Relying on mostly existing 3D content for all your work on the other hand seems risky, as you'll never be able to set your own consistent art direction and locations, and will instead always have to rely on a mix of what's already available out there, letting it control what happens where and how it looks.
I want a sketch feel to any future artwork I would like to produce sometime in the future, critiquing is always appreciated listed below is a 3d asset that I converted to hopefully a 2d format. Let me know if I'm heading in the right direction.
Nice and clever page, 3D effect isn't much more visible on color page than B&W, good job!
Necro FTW! Here we are 3 years after the OP, and my experience is still that it's frowned upon. Has other's experience changed since then?
While we're still in the infancy of the "AI" revolution (though much of what is marketed as artificial intelligence is little more than pattern recognition IMHO), I must admit that the popular "style transfers" done by GANs and other convolutional neural networks are getting better. One problem that I see with the approach is that even if great strides are made in this field (which there is definitely room for and is happening), success will ultimately yield results which anybody can obtain, which lessens their value. The easy "Make Art" button is kinda doomed to fail for this reason. I believe this plays a big part in the attitude towards 3D in comics, too.
Anyway, I've been fiddling with trying to get a computer to draw for almost 3 decades now. I use neural networks to make narrow, focused decisions about which strokes to make. I haven't done any comics yet, but here's a few examples of what my NPR algos have cranked out recently (all automated processing after the 3D scene has been setup):
- Greg
Fantastic art!
I agree with you.
Incredible images! Which neural network set up(s) did you use? :)