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This ios the debate I have with myself with all of my work. Is it too CGI? Should I redraw or ink more of it? Is it too flat? Is it too cartoony? Is it too realistic? Should I hide more? Am I hiding too much? In the end I always find the look I want for easch piece or project, but the minutae consumes me. I like what you did here with the filters and inks with the CGI together, the blacks make the colors around them pop.
I don't think there is a wrong or a right way on how much you leave it in the originaly rendered looks or rework it completely with the render only as the reference to work with or anything in between. It's a decision to make and then to keep it consistent within itself and I've seen people do amazing things here.
I know there are some prejudice against comics in fully rendered style out there, I still went that way because it pleases me to work with that style. In the end it's the story that will draw you in and the art should be supporting what you want to transport in the story
I absolutely agree about the prejudice against CGI, but I've never fit in with people in the comics industry anyway, so I decided to stop wasting time worrying about them and just make my art.
I think it was Space Viking who pointed out earlier that with more comics readers growing up accustomed to 3D video games, the more acceptance CGI/rendered style aesthetics will gain in this static image medium. At the same time, styles follow a long life cycle of peaking, falling out of fashion, then re-emerging once more as fresh and exciting to a new generation. And, yes, agree: storytelling still matters. It's the core experience that draws readers to this visual medium again and again.
On my part, I've settled on an NPR/manga style as a matter of production economy. The spare details leaves more time, energy and mental space for crafting the story.
Cheers!
Thanks for the comments guys (err I suppose girls also?). As I said, coming from a comics background in the 90s, I kind of lost my ability to "draw" the way I used to. Being older now, I am not not sure I have the patience (or time left LoL) to "re-learn" to draw but have stories to tell. That said, re-inking a lot of this, is quickly giving some chops back. Every page I am re-inking more and more.I started doing about 30%, now am doing more than 70%. My art is attempting to look like a comic because that is what is pleasing to me. Being an artist from the 90s, I always wanted to look like 90s era Jim Lee X-Men. I have actually developed a NUMBER of methods to get comic like results. With this new comic, I am kind of going for a 1980s Heavy Metal Magazine look.
All this said, I do not personally have an issue with the more realistic comics... most of the issues I have are just artistic. flat camera angles, bad poses... and a LOT of lettering that is way to huge and obviously done in Photoshop and not Illustrator like a real comic. There is a lot of stuff posted in here I really dig. A lot of nice work. A far cry from the "comics" I saw here 10 years ago. You folks are taking it all to a whole new level. I am looking forward to picking the brains on a few things t you are doing. The industry will not be able to ignore us eventually. Something will hit kickstarter or something that makes an explosion.
Not meaning to dismiss anyone elses work (I will probably ask more questions to several of you)... but CSAA... what are you doing to get those black and white tones and the line work? They are stunning.
Also, Space Viking (Chuck Austen)... I am familar with your actual comic work. Can you elaborate on the industry? Would something like mine would be more acceptable? Or would they just shun it also? I am asking because my original plan when this is done is to print a couple hundred copies and pass them to company people at Chicago Comicon. If that is a complete waste of time, perhaps I will just kickstart it. I am taking some classes from Steve Bryant (Creator of Athena Voltaire) at Illinois State University who has had some success with Kickstarter and is trying to convince me to go that route.
CSAA is correct... but understated it... Story is almost ALL THAT MATTERS.
EDIT: Oh side note... I am getting so much better and re-inking this stuff, that I am starting to toy with the ideo of actually COMPLETELY inking the whole thing and just using the main part as a reference. I would not have even considered this earlier this year. However, this project and its process is set in stone. It is important to me to not change the process mid story (meaning story arc) so it looks similar. Nothing was more distracting than the artist in your favorite series switching suddenly LoL.
Sorry... further EDITS: Mike and Linwelly... YES! Do what makes you happy and pleases you. That is LITERALLY first and foremost what art is. Do NOT listen to the naysayers. I am not in ANY way trying to undermind your choices with how I do my comic. This "anti CGI" thing or whatever it is... is crap. It is just the old guard not able to adapt and crushing what they do not understand.
This is what I was talking about in my longer previous post. What in the hell are you using for these black/white etc and linework??! I know you are using halftones... but that is not what I mean. None of it looks like Daz at all except maybe a bit of the faces. How are you getting the line separation? Are you drawing this?
Sorry I know I am dumping a lot of crap... but if none of you have seen this, you should check it out. I am sure you are familar with Nate Piekos and his company Blambot. This is his book. It is like my bible for lettering...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534319956
I definitely recommend getting familiar with Blambot esp since all the indie fonts on that site are free for indie comic creators even when you are making money with your work, and there is some magic stuff in those fonts
Yeah, between paid and free fonts, I have over 100 fonts from them. Comicraft I only have a dozen or so.
This is a GREAT book! I ordered an autographed copy from his site. BTW, blambot.com. If you cannot afford his book, Nate has 22 tips for letterers here: Better Letterer – Blambot Comic Fonts & Lettering.
He also has some FREE fonts that are very good. If you haven't signed up for his newsletter, you should do so that you'll be notified when he has a sale. His end-of-year sale usually happens around Black Friday or in December.
You neatly summarized the issue that most comic book readers have with 3D comics: Even if the renders are great the comic book craft skills are poor. By this I simply mean that most (and I'm sorry to say, I do mean "most" and not just "many") 3D comics look like they were done by someone who doesn't read comics and, tellingly, don't know who the great comic book storytellers are. Names like Eisner, Miller, Finger, Kirby, Toth, Trina Robbins, Marie Severin, Steranko, Buscema, Sim, Lee, and so forth are unknown to them. Or, if they do know them, they haven't studied their work on how those old guys defined the medium in terms we're still using today. Just reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics would go a long way to improving the knowledge of what comics are and what they can do.
Anyway, I'm sounding like an old grognard ("Them kids today with their digital whozis and Undo functions... back in my day we used Wite Out and LIKED IT!") ;-)
Seriously, though, It's the comics part of "3D Comics" that most traditional comic book readers don't like (and this is based on my discussions with various comic book readers online, at my comics club and my local comics store).
PERSONALLY, I like any comic that tells a story well. That could be in terms of great characters or fantastic action (and if it's a superhero comic, it should have both). The art style matters, but if it's suited to the material then I shouldn't really notice the style being used.
One idea I have for why traditional comic book readers are more resistant / critical of 3D comics is that there is a disconnect between the quality of the single image and the (for lack of better word) sloppiness of the storytelling. By this, I mean the readers see great looking still images with completely fleshed out backgrounds and every little detail is there. Honestly, I've seen some rendered comics that are almost photographic in their appearance. And then that almost-perfection clashes against poor craftsmanship: stiff poses, bad lettering choices, panels that are clearly a re-render of the previous panel but from a different angle (yeah, this can work in a slow-moving scene, but too often it doesn't advance the story and upsets the pacing).
Anyway, that's just my take on things.Thanks for stirring things up and keeping the conversation going.
PS: Y'know, I've always wondered what Richard Corben would have done with 3D comics. His style was sort of a brutal realism and I think he could have really gotten good results with Poser or Daz Studio.
You summed up the job of the comic book artist PERFECTLY: The job of a comic book artist is to know what to leave in and what to leave out.
HEY THERE. I read your material and visited your Website. Cool looking stuff. I'm tied up with deadlines right now, but I will drop you a longer, more personal note in the near future. I'm always excited to work with Public Domain characters and story ideas.
Yes... or, they just do not understand what makes good cimematics. A knowlege of film would even help. I have a lot of friends who actually DO read comics, but seem unable to understand why they like some art versus others. Even in real comics. They are just not versed in artist compesition of a shot. The flat angles are the worst that I see. Boring, flat on shots. And by flat shots, I kind of mean like POV shots of a person standing in the scene... eye level, "flat". These are fine from time to time, but when you see them 2 or 3 shots in a row... uggg. Spend some time... move around... go up, go down. tilt into a "Dutch Angle"... something. Look at movies and where they shoot from. I will actually spend quite a bit of time... thinking on the angle. And THEN even saying, "you know... this persons position in the scene actually does not make sense on how they where in the last panel, but artisticly it looks better to slightly move them." So I do because it makes a better shot. I think sometimes people (because it is 3D) get to wrapped up in it being reality, like video game. These are STILLS. If it looks better to move them slightly in one shot... then back for another... DO IT. When drawing reality, artists are never limited by this kind of thing. ALTER reality to fit the mood, shot and compesition.
Understanding Comics is pretty dated in some ways, but it is a great primer... plus it is a fun read, being drawn in an actual comics format. It is my text book in my current Sequential Art college class. I would say Drawing Words and Writing Pictures is a bit better more modern text.
I guess I will toot a bit more about my past since so many have done it.
When I started drawing comics in the 80s, I was pretty guilty drawing-wise of pretty boring "Flat" shots. At some point in high school, I got into photography and this sort of changed things. It took a few years to get back to drawing but I started to draw again in the 90s and now I relaized this could all be applied to drawing. Why I never realized it I will just chalk up to stupid youth. My angles and shot choices then, had more to do with my learnings from Hitchcock, Scorsese and Tarantino than Jim Lee, or any of the comic greats.
Fast forward about 10 years... I was writing screenplays, living in Chicago and such and a small video game called Half-Life 2 came out. The story blew my mind and I was inspired. I wanted to create something... but what? No one reads fanfiction other than other fanfiction people.
Enter GarrysMod. A mod for Half-Life 2 that allowed you to manipulate things within the Source engine for Half-Life 2... including figures. A healthy commutity of comic makers sprung up around it. I proceeded to create and write a kind of semial work around using GarrysMod called Apostasy.
Apostasy was featured on numerous websites, magazines and even Attack of the Show featured it on G4TV. In fact... all of this going on, is what lead me to discover Poser, then Daz in the early 2000s, looking to create something that was my own intellectual property... and here we are today almost 20 years later. In fact, if you look at "Apostasy Zero" The unmasked face used on the cover and in the issue is from Poser and Photoshopped in. Cannot remember the firgure. It was Poser 6. David maybe?
There is a fellow GarrysMod comic creator who has cataloged all this on his webiste. My old Apostay comic made in GarrysMod and an interview can be found there (including its POORLY made Photoshop dialog ballloons (LoL):
Metrocop's Site
Apostasy on that Site
Interview from 2022
I've read through the first two issue of Apostasy, and let's just say, well done! I am really enjoying the story thus far. Also like how you have incorporated familiar charcters like Kleiner, Mossman and Barney into the narrative. I'm almost expecting to see Gordon or Alyx running on some rooftops in the background at some point. At this point I have to make an assumption that the buggy is the same one Freeman eventually makes use of in the canals during the second game, making this prequel even more involving and well developed.
If you are going to do fanfiction, it might as well be for one of the all time greatest video game franchises.
Thanks for the comments. That was SO long ago. Yeah the buggy ends up staying there and is given to Gordon, etc. There is a subplot where Jack has to get missles for Cubbage, that Gordon uses later, etc.
Looks similar to the effect of a daz render filter I've played around with a bit. https://www.daz3d.com/manga-style-shaders ;
Awesome, I look forward to it.
Awesome, I look forward to it.
All good recommendations, I'll add the other 2 books in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics series as well: Reinventing Comics and Making Comics. I enjoy the conversational style of his work.
I'll pick up the book you referenced. I'm always interested in reading about comics and the theory behind them. Will Eisner and Stan Lee have both produced really great books on the subject (I still think How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is a very important book for all aspiring comic book creators to read – its explanation of composition and storytelling is still valid and it teaches it in a short, concise manner). But a question: When you say Understanding Comics, is outdated, are you referring to his discussion of tools and technology? Or something else? And when you read it, were you looking for something more functional and hands-on (whereas UC is primarily a theoretical work)?
And you're absolutely right about 3D comic creators needing to study cinematography. Framing shots is a necessary skill when making any sort of visual art. And since 3D software draws heavily on film (cameras, lights, etc.) the study of film making would help a lot. And yeah, I also know many people who read comics never make the cognitive leap between consuming comics for pleasure and dissecting them to figure out what works.
I also get what you're saying about some 3D artists being slaves to reality. Reality should always take second place to the needs of the scene and the framing. In other words, if the background is cluttered or the lighting is wrong, it is up to the artist to fix those things.
Yeah I have played around with that one, there is also Visual Style Shaders and one I got WAY WAY back in the day called LineRender9000
Not sure though. My experiments with those did not give me very usable results. Using those you kind of have to go with a whole other method of looking at lighting. I need to play around with these again though sometime.
Oh man! You aint kidding. I need to buy a new copy. I got mine in the mid 1980s and it completely fell apart. That book is arguably the most importat comic creation book ever written. When it came out in the late 70s, there was NOTHING like it. AND continued to be nothing else like it until the 90s.
There is a lot of Time and Space storytelling things referenced that are pretty technology dated. Gen Z kids won't neccesarily get why that works in a story. I cannot remember ones off the top of my head but they were things like payphones, landlines. In my class alone, the teacher has had to explain a couple times in lecture what something was to the kids.
There is also some pretty 1990s standard comic tropes that are quite the same anymore. Again, I would have to go look the book over again.. plus I really only read the first 50 pages or so in this book due to our inclass lectures.
Comicly on another note. My teacher had me give a 1 hour lecture on Daz in class.
BrashFink & mike_42547761,
Sorry for the late response. I've been out of town and have had spotty Internet access.
As per the annotations I add to the images I share, I use Daz assets imported into Blender for rendering. In Blender I use the Lightning Boy Studio shader to achieve the cel shaded / non-photorealistic look approximating an ersatz Mignola-cross-manga aesthetic.
LBS handles the line art as well as the flat black and white shades. To take these a notch higher, I rely on textures from the Daz assets, chiefly normal maps. Typically I render two versions of a scene, with the Blender lights offset slightly to produce two chiarosuro variants. Clip Studio Paint comes into the picture when I merge the renders, adding hatches, stipples and gradients as I see fit. Because I'm lazy, I also use CSP brushes to create the background.
I've been refining this workflow for more than a year now. It goes without saying that the quality of the Daz assets, combined with the versatility of the LBS shader, affords a broad range of visual styles to play with.
I'm glad I took the chance and invested time and effort in learning how to use these tools.
Cheers!
Comicly on another note. My teacher had me give a 1 hour lecture on Daz in class.
I think that makes sense. I think the best way to get better at making comics is to make comics. Sure, the first one(s) might be a little rough, but you get better as you do them.
The comic pros all disavow and are embarrassed by their early work. Fans note the updated looks and progress, but it's not as big a swing as the creator themselves think.
Secondly, CGI and Traditional comics are made in different mediums. The parts about good story-telling are universal and apply to everything, but it's limiting to focus so heavily on hand-drawn techniques as the default system for everything.
The ideas are the same, but the tools and techniques are completely different. So the big question is ...
How do I do that or have that effect with the CGI-digital tool set?
Today's creators expect VIDEO and REELS for everything.
And here, on this site, it's about using Daz Studio for all these solutions. What can DAZ do?
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When I started making comics using Daz Studio, I wish there were the kind of resources there are today.
Absolutely facinating! You have given me something else to play with. Thanks for the info!
EDIT: And ONLY $30??! Sweet!
I have just watched half of the first video... this is making me seriously consider restarting my whole comic.
I love this thread.
@mmitchell_houston
When you say "Seriously, though, It's the comics part of "3D Comics" that most traditional comic book readers don't like (and this is based on my discussions with various comic book readers online, at my comics club and my local comics store)."
What are these 3D comics that readers, retailers and your group are familiar with? I have yet to go anywhere and have anyone recognize a style as CGI or 3D. Everyone asks HOW the stuff was done.
Right now, the assumption is AI. And the ONLY title anyone references is that Ironman book.
If there's a 3D comic or a group of comics that are in front of retailers, readers and your book club, enough to generalize, I need to see what that person is doing.
Who's out there with 3D books that you keep referencing?