As I’d expected from Darkseal, my new Sci Fi Bling NeoNav for V4 toons up quite nicely in Poser. I picked it on on sale for $2.50, and though I see the sale price has increased to $4.60… but it’s still on sale.
Category Archives: Comics
Brom for $10
Capsces has a small sale of older Poser toon stuff on the DAZ Store, including the useful-for-comics Brom for M3 and his amazing morphs, which are great in themselves but then also give access to various famous faces. Update: no longer sold.
Brom for Poser is currently down at $10 on the DAZ Store. (You’ll only see the discount if you’re logged in). Don’t be fooled and assume this is the just one semi-toon character as shown in the store preview. You’re buying this for the morphs, with which M3 can be hundreds of faces and body shapes. Brom’s head morphs do not require the M3 Head & Body Morphs pack, which is no longer sold.
Below I have Michael 3 (M3) with the regular morphs in Poser 11.2, the Brom head morph set injected, and a custom head preset. Real-time rendered in Smooth Shaded + Comic Book preview, and run by two simple lights.
No re-texturing, just a standard start-up M3 texture. No tweaking of the edges in the Materials Room, which is why the eye-edges are too thick. If you’ve been following the excellent made-with-Poser comic Sonata, you’ll recognise the basic approach.
For some reason such wrinkled and ridged faces look great in Smooth Shaded display mode + Comic Book inks. Unfortunately we appear to lack any mesh eyebrows for M3, that ink up nicely in Comic Book Preview mode.
Here’s a preview of just a few of the many semi-toon Brom presets that ship with Brom…
DAL #42: the Comics issue
The latest Digital Art Live, the free monthly magazine for science-fiction and fantasy artists — Issue 42: Comics.
Moebius style in Poser: demo
Emulating 2D hand-drawn, via 3D in Poser 11. ‘By Moebius’, or as close as you’re going to get to that style without actual hand-drawing. All layers are real-time or near real-time renders.
Moebius in Poser 11 – more refined
This still needs a lot of adjustment for the Moebius-style dash-shading to ‘read’ well when in a comics panel on a 10″ Kindle screen. The same goes for the line width(s). Reducing the image by 50% is a good test, and if the dash-hatching then gets smushed down into a grey haze, then it’s failed the test.
But when seen at this size it’s an improvement on the crude “proof of concept” demo posted here a few days ago.
Moebius in Poser 11 – proof of concept
This still needs to be perfected, but is a bit of a breakthrough in terms of doing Moebius-style dash stippling that follows contours, while indicating 3D volume and shadows.
This is Nursoda’s ‘Loik’ 3D character. Ink outlines from Poser 11’s real-time toon mode (2 seconds render time at 1800px). Moebius-style dash shading via my breakthrough in making and refining a custom Poser Sketch Designer preset (5 seconds render time at 1800px). The two renders then easily combined in Photoshop.
The 3D comic Striker bows out
The Dream is Over: 34 years in the making, Striker finally bows out. Striker was a 3D football (soccer) comic, which I assume was made with Poser. It appeared for decades in the biggest of the British ‘tabloid’ newspapers. All mainstream newspapers are cutting back these days, and the expensive trimmings such as daily comic-strips are often the first to go.
But there’s good news too. The same writer’s comic strip Psycops appeared in the same newspaper and is now to be collected in full. Not 3D, despite the partly 3D front cover, but nice artwork after some early wobbles with other artists.
It’s a sci-fi detective-adventure serial which ran in The Sun from July 1994 to the start of 1999. A female private detective and her partner Gabriel, who is actually a telepathic alien in disguise, battle various ingenious enemies in thriller-style situations.
The adventures are being reprinted in their entirety for the very first time in a 304-page book available as a softcover version. … Psycops will be available to buy exclusively from our online shop from early July … with shipping mid August 2019.
The SFX magazine review of the collected Psycops gave the new book a healthy four stars. “The enthralling pace never slackens … stories actually now seem quite prophetic … elegant lineart” in a Modesty Blaise style.
An interesting British sci-fi curiosity, which collectors will probably want as it may not be available forever.
CompoScene 2.0.x
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Posted in Comics, Companion software, SketchUp, Special Offers and Discounts
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CompoScene is a render plugin, to efficiently export a bundle of multipass renders from SketchUp to Photoshop. Meant for comics makers. Originally $64, now just $16.50. Last updated December 2018.
Free: digital comics-making webinar
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Posted in Comics, DAZ Studio, Freebies, Poser, Spotted in the News, Tutorials
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A free Visual Narratives Workshop on making digital comics, with Digital Art Live. This coming Sunday, 28th July 2019.
Cartoon Animator 4: new 360 head tutorials
Whatever you may think about ‘the ultimate price-tag’ on Reallusion’s software, or the radical UI makeover and new render-engines in iClone, as a company they do provide excellent support and tutorials. And the new Cartoon Animator 4 is fine software which is also useful for comics makers of a certain type. Today Reallusion uploaded an hour of detailed new tutorials on the vital skill of how to set up a “360 head” in their new Cartoon Animator 4 software…
Basics of Head Composition in CTA 4, and Full 360 Degree Head Creation Part 1 and Part 2.
There’s also a new 20 minutes video that dives into the details of all the Face Key Editor Enhancements in CTA4, which offers the user detailed creative control over the resulting frame-by-frame animation.
Release: Moho 13
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Just when you thought Smith Micro was getting out of creative software, with the sale of Poser… “Introducing Moho 13 Animation Software” (YouTube Playlist link). Yes, Smith Micro have just issued a new release of what was formerly Anime Studio, their 2D animation creation software. It’s been three years since the last update. Note that it is not to be confused with the similarly-named 3D modelling software Modo.
I was most interested in the new “Enhanced 3D object support”, though I discovered it to be a “Moho 13 Pro only” feature. Judging by the video for this feature, the user can import and light/shade a simple 3D object in .OBJ, such a soccer ball. But I saw no demo of any exciting real-time automatic application of believable ink lines along the edge line of the ball, akin to Poser’s Comic-book mode or SketchUp. I know there is a Poser import option, but I’ve never seen anyone demo it by giving an imported character more than a very basic line style.
As such, Moho is mildly interesting. But a 2D animator should carefully evaluate the $400 Moho Pro 13 against Reallusion’s latest $199 Cartoon Animator 4 Pipeline (i.e.: Pro) version. The latter is much better supported by add-on content packs, including packs of pre-made motions and characters, albeit mostly costly ones. But Moho seems to have a more ‘pro’ feature set for animation, which may appeal more to trained animators who can make their own content and then make it all flow smoothly. And the Poser import may be useful for you, in that respect.
StyleBlit
StyleBlit, a new… “style-transfer algorithm that can deliver high-quality stylized renderings in real-time on a single-core CPU [and] does not involve any computationally expensive optimization”.
Stylistically the results are still way too flickery for animation, unless perhaps you have an audience used to that rough style. But it shows the state-of-the-art in NPR, and given Adobe’s involvement it could soon find its way to 3D-to-2D rendering for comics production…
And if the maths is open access / open source then perhaps we may also see it in Krita / G’MIC, at some point.
Sonata – new comic, made with Poser
Brian Haberlin’s new Sonata comic-book epic, made with the Poser software and content, has the first issue out and is set to rapidly release further issues over the summer. Issue #1 has had many favourable reviews. It’s broadly a sort-of ‘steampunk girl meets Avatar planet’ setting, and if you’re familiar with the Poser fantasy characters and buildings then you’ll recognise many from the likes of 1971s and others being put to good use. The first issue looks great, is nicely paced, and introduces some vivid characters.
Sonata #1 is apparently being reprinted in paper with a better cover, such is the collector demand, and as #2 and #3 gear up for release.
However, you can get them on Amazon Kindle as digital downloads.
Sonata #1 (June 2019).
Sonata #2 (July 2019)
Sonata #3 (August 2019)
Call for papers: Comics and Technical Communication
It’s from a paywall journal, but this call may interest those reading the blog for my comics-making posts…
“This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly engages comics, graphic storytelling, and creative methods of research and production in technical communication. … In particular, this issue aims to develop a better and broader understanding of the relationship between comics and technical communication, from data comics and wordless comics to the production of digital comics.”
Submission deadline for 500-word proposals of papers: 21st June 2019.
Cartoon Animator 4: the official demo video
The official 4-minute demo video for Reallusion’s new Cartoon Animator 4 (formerly CrazyTalk Animator 3) has just been released…
It’s 2D animation software, now 2.5D on the heads. Just be aware that, once you’re hooked into the Reallusion ecosystem, it can become a very expensive option to get all the features and content packs you want.