Comics with Daz Studio
will2power
Posts: 270
I wanted to make a comic book. You know --like the ones we used to make to amuse each other in high school/jr. high school, only here's the thing --I never thought my artwork was good enough to make it work. That's why I got into 3D. I wanted to make a go at visual storytelling that wasn't going to be hampered by my artwork or lack thereof. A lot of my work in Daz Studio has been in preparation for this. You can consider this image kind of a storyboard for what I have in mind. It's not the final form, but I thought it would be nice to give a glimpse at what went into creating this.
I purposefully did not include the dialog. This was because I didn't like how the panels turned out in this instance for a final first draft, and I didn't want to give away that much of the story. I just wanted to see if anyone else was going to be able to follow along with what I had in mind just from the images.
All the figures are Daz Studio Genesis figures with Age of Armour's Subsurface Toon Shaders applied. These are raws with no postwork applied. Rendered in Daz Studio 4.6 3Delight Renderer.
Coming up with the overall design has been a painstaking process and I'd like to thank all the Daz studio/Poser vendors who've taken the time to create great props and sets to choose from. They're far too under appreciated in my opinion.
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Comments
I did the panel layouts with a program called Plasq Comic Life 2 for the PC. It's pretty basic --actually it's a program my daughter uses sometimes. It's all right for placing images in the panels, but truth be told, I'm not going to use it for a full fledged comic book. Well let me put it this way, if You plan on using your images statically, then it's more than fine for a simple photo story. However, if you want to do anything more than produce word balloons, you're going to want to look elsewhere for something a bit more robust. My copy of Manga Studio 5 should be arriving today --I'll let everyone know how it goes when I try this again with something a bit more robust.
Great stuff, and it's also great that you've decided to make your comic. In this day and age, there's nothing stopping us, except us.
I like what you've got so far. I'm definitely interested to know what's really going on. I think I can see what's happening, but I'd be curious to read the dialogue and see if I was close.
I haven't used Manga Studio, but the good thing about it is that so many do use it you won't have any trouble finding tutorials and help. Best of luck, I'll keep checking for more updates!
I like the look of it. You can get a sense of the story just from the panels. Which is good, pictures can always convey more story than dialogue, and the panels look fairly full, will you have enough room for your dialogue bubbles? One thing you've sort of alluded to, and shows your maturity as a creator, this is only the first of many draft, that's a good attitude. Get an editor involved in the process if you haven't already. Those fresh pair of objective eyes make a huge difference in fine tuning the flow of a sequential art narrative. Here's hoping Manga Studio 5 delivers the production organization you expect.
This was the first time I actually put the renders in frames, so it's more likely to change as I move forward. There's a lot of dialog in this first scene and I believe I'm going to have to add more panels to get them all out. I'm treating this version as more of a storyboard than anything else. The renders themselves I did fairly large so that I'd have some room to play around with re-sizing them and keeping the detail. I usually try to map the dialog out in who's speaking and then go back and add or remove panels to get a sense of the flow of the conversation. I want to give it somewhat of a manga style in the panel layout, but not the characters themselves. So there will definitely be more panels in later versions.
The funny thing was this all started because of my daughter and Comipo! She knows that I write, and she wanted me to do a story for her, so you'll have to excuse the shoujo -esque feel. It's actually on purpose.
Hint: I love what you've done. Here is one thing many, not all, people need to remember when setting up renders for panels. Dead space for your Speech and thought bubbles. That also helps you save on render times. Do not bother with detail if it will be covered later.
Hint 2: Having the BLURBS written by panel also will help you as you do each render.
Progress continues. I spent a lot of time working on laying things out. As it turns out, rendering a single image is infinitely easier than trying to put four or five on the page together and get them to work well with one another. You're right --screen real estate is at a premium and I found myself coming up with my own way of laying things out without trying to follow some preset pattern. I found when I stopped trying to fit is and just layed it out the way that I wanted, it came out much more to my liking.
I can see though that the way that I think makes Manga Studio 5 a bit more problematic to work with at the moment. It has a learning curve, but I found that because it's geared more towards drawing, the way it handles images you import really wasn't to my taste. I'm not saying that I wouldn't use it -but more like it looks like I'm going to have to wait for some more formalized training to appear before I could consider it a useful tool for what I'm doing.