Comics are no stranger to Renderosity members. For some of the older generation of Rendoites, comics were the “smartphone” of our youth in that they provided entertainment much like pulling out our phone and watching a video does today. This was another one of those fun assignments too. It’s not every day you get to do such an enjoyable project.
I’m certainly no master of producing comics either but with the help of some software, I’ll at least cut out a lot of sizing and formatting by being able to drop images straight into a panel thanks to an old but still very useful installation of Comic Life. This little jewel takes a lot of the pain and frustration out of working with comic panels in general, reducing the frustration of all that resizing. There are lots of panel options to choose from or you can make your own. All panels are adjustable.
Be forewarned though. Comic Life does not have the best or even middle-range filters for turning your renders into comic book-style images, that is if you are looking for that style. As far as just handing images and those all-important resizable balloons along with numerous highlights, Comic Life gets the job done even if it hasn’t been updated since Abraham Lincoln was in office.
I’m certainly no master of producing comics either but with the help of some software, I’ll at least cut out a lot of sizing and formatting by being able to drop images straight into a panel thanks to an old but still very useful installation of Comic Life. This little jewel takes a lot of the pain and frustration out of working with comic panels in general, reducing the frustration of all that resizing. There are lots of panel options to choose from or you can make your own. All panels are adjustable.
Be forewarned though. Comic Life does not have the best or even middle-range filters for turning your renders into comic book-style images, that is if you are looking for that style. As far as just handing images and those all-important resizable balloons along with numerous highlights, Comic Life gets the job done even if it hasn’t been updated since Abraham Lincoln was in office.
In this case, I came across DocMikeB’s transforming robots in the freebie section. If you haven’t been to this guy’s freebies, then you are in for a treat. The ones I looked at were for Poser but ported over to iClone for composition with no problems. I was even able to export them with some of the poses that were so graciously provided.
They worked well in Daz Studio and tested greatly when animated in Unreal Engine. I had a prop version and converted it to a character if I needed poses that were not provided. In this case, I didn’t need that many poses. Character Creator 4 was the weapon of choice for conversion, and I used Daz Studio for the provided poses.
I work more with aspect ratios than I do resolutions when testing projects like this. If a panel had an aspect ratio of 2:3, then I would render at or near that ratio. With Comic Life you don’t have to be exact as you can resize it even though the aspect ratio is locked. Any part of an image left outside a panel will not be shown.
They worked well in Daz Studio and tested greatly when animated in Unreal Engine. I had a prop version and converted it to a character if I needed poses that were not provided. In this case, I didn’t need that many poses. Character Creator 4 was the weapon of choice for conversion, and I used Daz Studio for the provided poses.
I work more with aspect ratios than I do resolutions when testing projects like this. If a panel had an aspect ratio of 2:3, then I would render at or near that ratio. With Comic Life you don’t have to be exact as you can resize it even though the aspect ratio is locked. Any part of an image left outside a panel will not be shown.
For the cover, I had to come up with a concept and as you can see, I didn’t move any mountains with an earth-shaking design, but I did go my usual route. Simple. I pulled up several existing comic book covers to get an idea of what I wanted then mixed and matched some of those elements with some of my own.
I chose images as the page backgrounds even though they would be covered with the panels. This was more interesting than just white or off-white stock. I kept the fonts to as few as possible and tried not to go overboard with flourishes and unnecessary design elements. We don’t want to distract from the comic book’s story.
I imported the Daz Studio posed xFormers into iClone for compositing and lighting for the panel images. The iClone project was set at the same aspect ratio as the panel in Comic Life. From there it was a matter of coming up with weak dialog and no real direction. This is why I’m a technical person but hopefully, the images will convey what can be done.
I chose images as the page backgrounds even though they would be covered with the panels. This was more interesting than just white or off-white stock. I kept the fonts to as few as possible and tried not to go overboard with flourishes and unnecessary design elements. We don’t want to distract from the comic book’s story.
I imported the Daz Studio posed xFormers into iClone for compositing and lighting for the panel images. The iClone project was set at the same aspect ratio as the panel in Comic Life. From there it was a matter of coming up with weak dialog and no real direction. This is why I’m a technical person but hopefully, the images will convey what can be done.
Everything is editable in Comic Life so I could tweak the layout, callouts, or whatever I wanted to change. It was fairly intuitive too as I’m not really sure Comic Life even has a help section it is so simple to use.
As you see all you need is the desire, and hopefully, a story, along with some simple software, the ever-present image editor like Photoshop, and a few Renderosity Marketplace or Freebie assets to produce your own comic book. And yes, for those of you with kids and grandkids, you can use their photos and pets to make a unique family-centric comic book. You can composite in the free Daz Studio just as I did in iClone and render it out from Daz as well.
As you see all you need is the desire, and hopefully, a story, along with some simple software, the ever-present image editor like Photoshop, and a few Renderosity Marketplace or Freebie assets to produce your own comic book. And yes, for those of you with kids and grandkids, you can use their photos and pets to make a unique family-centric comic book. You can composite in the free Daz Studio just as I did in iClone and render it out from Daz as well.
M.D. McCallum, aka WarLord, is an international award-winning commercial graphics artist, 3D animator, published author, project director, and webmaster with a freelance career that spans over 20 years. Now retired, M.D. is currently working part-time on writing and select character development projects. You can learn more about MD on his website. 
Comments