Still much to be done, but here are a couple sample pages from the graphic novel I’m currently working on. Let me know what you think of the look and feel.
So…what, you may ask, does this graphic novel have to do with Blender? Well, every single model has been modeled and rendered in Blender. The characters were created in MakeHuman and imported and adjusted and posed in Blender. All uniforms/clothes have been modeled in Blender as well. I’m a big fan of using Blender in areas where you might not normally see it being used and I think this is one of them. The final renders are created at high resolution and manipulated in Paint Shop to get the final look. I hope you like…this is something very special that has been years in the making - mostly in the imagination and finally now coming to light thanks to Blender and the other tools.
Good work! I’ve posted a couple of days ago about a similar project. Using Blender to create a graphic novel. How long has it taken you just to make those 2 pages? Im creating the first chapter of mine as a proof of concept, see how long it takes etc…
Thanks! It’s hard to gauge because the modeling and character work has been done on and off over a period of years, not to mention the development of the story, etc. But probably you are asking more about the time it takes to put the pages together with all that background work already done. I would say it takes me roughly 1-2 hours per page as long as I have my render pieces ready. The way I work is place the image for the first panel, create a border around it, then do text and balloons and add any backgrounds. Then sometimes there are some color overlays or cleanups I have to do. Then move on to the next panel on the page.
Working on scene in ship’s arboretum…I started by doing a general layout of what I knew I wanted to be there…a pond, a bridge, sidewalk and tunnel with the idea that a waterfall is running over the tunnel, beneath the bridge and into the pond…
More progress…tried to use the ‘rock generator’ add-on, but had problems to get it to work, so used some rocks that I had previously modeled for my Gobekli Tepe site model.
Looks pretty good. Only problem I have at the moment is that in the first post, the text in the comic is too hard to read. Maybe you could make it a bit bigger or make the letters a little bolder?
Thanks, well I went by what I was seeing in a other graphic novels as far as size. I was actually thinking I was making the text TOO big. Did you click on the image to see it full screen?
btw…the final version is planned to be printed @ 7" X 10".
Some finished renders of the Arboretum scene…first one is the captain (Captain Massey) “fishing” from the bridge. Second one is where character named “Menton” is introduced. In the second one, the stars are not yet added to the background, but one of the concepts of the Arboretum is that it is designed so that it can simulate a day on Earth, showing sky and clouds above…just not a concept that is going to make it into the graphic novel version.
It does take a little time ;). I go through a number of processes in Photoshop to get the specific look I’m after involving filters and adjustments. Then of course I have to create the borders, texts, balloons and any necessary backgrounds and touch-ups.
What is the advantage in making a realistic scene and then putting into Photoshop to filter over just making materials that look the way you want, or at least as far as it’s possible, in Blender?
Blender can’t get the look I’m going for, at least I couldn’t get it to. There’s definitely a lot of very cool possibilities with it, though…check out what Peter18 is doing with his graphic novel.
Here is the start of the Engineering area on the ship. I know, not much to look at right now. The strange looking object is not something that is normally in Engineering, but will be in this episode. My challenge right now is to create enough detail in these sets for the panels in the graphic novel, but not so much that it takes me forever to model it.
Update for today…I spent quite a lot of time learning how to render freestyle lines on a separate layer so I could make them “glow” on the ship image on the backscreen, then decided I didn’t like it and didn’t use it anyway. Then I found out at some point I wiped out a lot of the detail work I’ve been doing on the ship’s cooridor, so I will have to redo all that work sigh…
Stuff left to do on this set…texture the back panels, add some details to the 2 boxes to the left (not seen in this image) and anything else I can think of…
