Workflow for Comic Book Project?

The keyword you want to look into is NPR - Non-Photorealistic Rendering. This covers cartoon, comic, and anime/manga styles. Its a pretty big area and a lot of us are working on it. https://blendernpr.org/ is one of the main resources, and also has a facebook group, twitter hashtag, and Discord server if you want to talk to other people working on these sorts of things.

There’s lots of possible approaches. As others have said, you can use blender to create part of the scene and draw the rest. How much you do in 3D vs how much you draw depends on your preferences and skills. I do behind the scenes 3D work on Yuumei’s comics, Fisheye Placebo and Knite. She used to draw the whole thing by hand, but switched to doing full 3D references (including characters) and paints over them to save her drawing hand after getting repetitive strain injury. Now we do fast but relatively low complexity 3D, and she draws the rest. Same overall result, but 90% less drawing work.

You can check out her comics here: https://www.yuumeiart.com/web-comics
(Fisheye Placebo is using this 3D workflow starting at Ch1 part 5. Knite is using 3D the whole time.)
Here’s an example of the 3D, and then the fully paintover:

For my personal work, I mostly work on colored manga stuff, but the problems and things you need to understand are 99% the same. Comics will use more hatching of course, as you’ve mentioned. But you’ll need to learn the fundamentals of NPR either way. Blender has a lot of tools that can help make lineart and hatching, but it’ll be difficult to get an exact match for the hatching you linked because its so organic.

Here’s an example of some pretty heavy/dirty linework I did for an old project using Freestyle and procedural noise (the rest is Cycles render.)


I also did a comic test with this character years back that you can check out on my otherwise very out of date website here.

And if you want to learn a lot more about nodes and toon shading, I’ve got a couple tutorials up on my not out of date Youtube here (this is for anime stuff, but it’s the same node and workflow fundamentals. Its mostly geometry that makes western comics different from manga in the 3D world.)

Toon Shader Tutorial
Using Eevee as a canvas and painting into renders

And here’s some past project info threads (these are for stills, but it’ll give you some idea of workflow stuff.)

Rei Fanart +workflow info
Miku Fanart + workflow info
Workflow info on dealing with rigging and cloth
Older post on using post processing (compositor) to generate lines and grunge

Anyhow, there’s a lot more to say, as I’ve had to solve a lot of these workflow issues for Yuumei’s comics (Rigify is good, but I don’t know about pose libraries.) But this is probably enough to get you started. My main recommendation would be to get into the BNPR Facebook/Discord and start talking with people there.

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