I’ve played with blender on and off for a while, but I’m mainly more interested in two-dimensional drawing, at least for now.
However I did see a possible use for Blender as a tool in that respect. Drawing characters in poses, especially action poses, really works best when you have some kind of reference. I’m sure you’re all familiar with artist’s mannequins, small wooden dummies on a stand with articulated limbs that you can pose. I have a couple that I use for posing reference.
However they’re far from ideal, you’re rather limited in how you can pose the characters as there are physical limits on how much you can articulate them, plus you’re limited to poses that won’t topple over. I thought that maybe I could use Blender instead as a kind of virtual mannequin, for want of a better word.
I found this rig on Blenderswap and have been playing around with it. I found it was quite a lot of fun to play with the rig, but I also found posing it rather fiddly and time consuming and the more you fiddled with it, the weirder the pose could become. Also the fact that the limbs can pass right through the model can be problematic.
I was wondering if anyone else has tried virtual mannequins like this before? If so, do you use Blender for this, or something else? Are you using a pre-built rig or a rig of your own-devising? Have you found it a useful way of creating poses to draw from? Are there alternatives to Blender that might suit my needs better?
I originally experimented with 3d for just that reason. I was a traditional art hobbyist for decades. Charcoal, oils, pastels, acrylics; I tried them all. My weakness was always perspective and especially multiple vanishing point perspective. I intended to use a 3D program to set up basic perspective for 2D art. As I began to use 3D with it’s automatic lighting and even animation, thoughts of 2D art faded into a distant memory.
Hey, PassiveSmoking! Nice to hear some people still interested in 2d. A virtual manikin is a good idea, but if you’re irritated with the available free rigs then the alternative would be to make your own.
I’m not sure as to any alternative programs that would do the job better. Commercial 3d programs might be easier to work with, but unless you have a substantial budget a program like Maya or Houdini would be a distant dream. If you want to drive through with a virtual manikin then I would suggest sticking with good ol’ open source Blender.
If you are looking for software you can use in lieu of a mannekin you could try DAZ Studio, a sort of freebee Poser. Not bad, if you just want to pose a figure. Free but proprietary inticement warez, make their money selling enhanced version, models, plugins and props I suppose.
But there are a lot of rigs available like those from the BAC (Blender Animation Challenge) Try a search for Pantin
But I think the main thing is to become more familar with how to pose 3D characters and 3D rigging in general. You’ll get the hang of it after a while.
SmithMicro is the current owners of Poser and have released a new stripped down and inexpensive version. This version gets back to what Poser was created for, an aid for traditional artists. In the past I have recommended DAZ Studio but DAZ has discontinued their policy of giving their base figures away for free. The ideas was to pull you in and charging for the extras you may want for them later.
I have found that if your trying to get betting at drawing using a 3d model for drawing causes more problems then it solves. It’s great for those times that you need to get a rough idea of how something looks. For example: what the heck does an ear look like from a 3/4 back view? or if I’m looking straight down an arm what can I actually see? But the issue is you’re trying to learn how to draw a person from a representation of a person, and by the very nature of what your doing you’ll never get as good as you could be. The same goes for working from photographs and don’t get me started on those little wooden manikins. Every artists I know has one (heck I have two) and I’ve never know anyone of them who actually uses it (though I use to have an old multi-jointed Spider-man figure I kinda liked.)
The truth of the matter is the best way to learn to draw people, is to draw people. I know that’s kinda a lame answer but you’ll learn worlds more by observing real people. If you can get into a life drawing class that’s a great help learning about underlying form (and having a person who’ll sit still.) Even if you can’t get into a life drawing class go to the park to see people moving, a bookstore to catch them standing around or just sitting on the bus. At a certain point it’s a good idea to get a book on anatomy, you’ll know when you’re ready for that extra step. In short a 3d application can be a nice help for figuring out some perspective issues you might have but, it’s no substitute for the real thing
I have used in the past the free version of DAZ as a virtual mannequin posing too, only for the perspectives as i had absolutely no care of their modelled texture, clothing etc… when pencilling.
But i quickly noticed that the DAZ engine was really bad in term of performance, as displaying more than one of their “figures” and you’re in for lots of annoying slowdown, making it a pain to pose several people in the same time to get your perspective right. And none of their figure had any kind of lod for crowd posing making the slowdown even increased (i learned they have a decimate tool now , but that’s not in the free version)
I think it’s better use Blender that have now some good free models available with their armature , anime, realistic or comics-like, that you can pose if you need virtual mannequin perspective (and with the Makehuman project it’s even better as you can actually configure your human shape easily before importing it with an armature to Blender).
And Blender have a much better engine that will continue to keep your posing smooth even with lots of characters
PassiveSmoking: I found a pose able manikin rig on blendswap… go to blendswap.com and search for “Chip_3.0”. I believe if you still want to stick around with blender this rig might do what you want.