I’ve been experimenting to see what Krita’s G’MIC-QT filters can do to plain inked line-art output by Poser’s Comic Book Preview. This follows on from my previous test of G’MIC-QT filters on a straightforward 3D Preview render from Poser.
Here’s my test-kitty, a 3D character which ships for free in the content bundle of Poser 11 (in the Content Library under ‘Toys’). In Poser, only thin Comic Book ink lines were output, in B&W. This was to test ‘fattening’ filters such as DAP’s ‘GrNovel’. But I thought it would also make a good test render here, for this test of Krita.
* The first preset I made I called ‘Send to Moebius’, which works for a character filling 1000px on a 1200px height PNG output from Poser. The filter gives the lines a continental comics ‘clear-line style’, akin to the great Moebius — though of course without his distinctive dash-hatch contour shading. It takes 30 seconds to run, at the cost of some jaggies on shallow curves.
Still, for a clear-line style with slight Moebius-style ‘dotting’ of the lines, it’s not bad for 30 seconds on a straightforward Poser comic render. The dotting occurs where there are ultra-thin lines, which may be a method of controlling in Poser how often the dotting will occur when filtered. The same effect can’t be had on a 3600px render.
* ‘Felt Pen’ could also be made to produce dotting, more extensively and more quickly, but it wasn’t a pleasing effect.
* ‘Kuwahara’ on a radius of 1 could also do a nice felt-pen like effect, with less uniformity of the line density. But the problem here was an ugly skritchyness at the edges. ‘Pen Drawing’ was smoother but had more line density uniformity. Neither were really that all pleasing.
* ‘Charcoal’ could make the lines much darker, fatten them a bit and give them a nice grainy look. But again, at 1200px the jaggies are a problem. Better to Sketch into the ink lines in Poser, using the Sketch Room.
* It was possible to have G’MIC-QT’s ‘Engrave’ filter keep only certain fatter lines, erasing others, which was an interesting effect. It ran in about 20 seconds at 1200px. However, it doesn’t seem to have uniformly selected only the fattest lines, making it rather pointless.
So while I’m pleased to get the ‘Send to Moebius’ preset, it was the only nice one I was able to get.