Renderotica

I've been thinking about creating a comic for some years, but never got around pursuing it. Now I'm hopefully ready to start.

I've started to create a number of Iray renders (currently on #97). What I would like to know is what makes an acceptable comic, number of images, etc. How to convert the renders into some form of graphic style suitable for a comic. Or maybe I should just create a photobook instead :)

Hell, no :) Comic in PDF format.

Edited by user Thursday, August 22, 2019 4:12:58 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Comic life is the way to go..  dozen upon dozen of page templates quick drag and drop and a variety of speech bubbles .  There is also a spell checker for your text and so much more..  I used to spend hours in post work trying to get my comics look sharper  but Comic life takes care of the and gives my panels a nice crispness like never before 

My last two comics in the store have the covers and samples created with Comic life.  It's cheap and comes in both MAC and windows formats

When y old comic system Comic creator got corrupted I thought it would take forever to adapt to new comic software,  but I was so wrong.  Withing two weeks I was smoothing crafting my next comic and one of the web reviewers quickly noticed the difference and said it was like night and day.

You can try the software for free for 30 days  just do a search for Comic Life by Plasq  and since I bought the thing there has been like 4 upgrades and the other day there was a glitch in the load up and instantly a window appeared wanting me to comment on what steps I had taken prior to the glitch and th send the data they collected and my commentary off for evaluation.

I should have made the switch years ago  but I was so used to the ease of my old software and only changed over because I had to  but I was amazed bt what it could do and I'm still learning after a half dozen publication for Renderotica and another site

You can also publish several different ways and the only thing it wont do is zip file your work

Regards and good luck

Shadoman

I have Comic Life for Windows and iPad. I guess there's a Chromebook version now.

Comic Life 3 for Windows feels kind of archaic and clunky at times... but the output is good once you are used to it. Yeah, the speech bubbles and text art are fantastic parts of it. The image filters also are interesting, but I prefer doing that work in GIMP because you have more control.

I think the iPad interface is the best, but the iOS filesystem is more clunky to deal with in many ways unless you have everything in the Cloud.

Originally Posted by: shadoman

Those comic illustrations really look good in the post above.. but I am not after the ultra high color art for my work. so Comic life does great and its heap  like @ 30-40 bucks

My only gripe is adjusting the size of the speech bubbles and text boxes.. the arrows to increase the size has to be just right otherwise you move the whole bubble or box when all you want to do is increase the size,,,  but when you type withing the boxes or bubbles the will increase in size if you over type your narritive . and as I said  you misspell a word and they let you know

regards  shado

 

Thanks, Shadoman and Cheesymaid!

Using it more - frankly I can assemble things it can't do with other software but I like it more and more and will likely buy it.  Already doing serious work on covers now so should at last submit some comics to the store here.

One thing to answer my own question and hopefully keep them from LOSING a sale...

EDIT -> OPTIONS -> UN-Check "Play Sounds while Editing"   - then just close the window.

I mean cool but was freaking me out since usually playing a YouTube video and the sudden ping/stretch sound turned into the most sudden, horrible of static bursts as in when I'd had computers die with the HDD un-recoverable in a SECOND...  (And lesson learned the hard way many years ago, have my stuff backed up on multiple HDDs including "Dead Drop" - can't fail or be hacked if not plugged in...")  EVERY time I moused over a bubble...  Really nice having some soft Progressive rock or a lecture/opinion and "Zork!  Zap!" etc. jerking into it... 

Another thing to people who view this:

WINDOW -> Show Inspector   - pulls up the options that most other software is on the screen or can reach with the strangely absent right click of the mouse...

Beyond that - and before that - the manual - file:///C:/Users/Ben%20Bridenbaugh/Documents/ProgramFiles/ComicLife3Demo/comiclife-3.0-gettingstarted.pdf

This software IS worth it (for $30 stuff, assuming you've created the images already) - but they've been marching to a different drum...  Hopefully I saved them a few sales with this.

BUT - someone with a super-hero suit, some royalty free files for backdrop (or 3d props) and a camera could indeed photograph themselves, paste over backgrounds, add some effects and turn themselves into a comic book superhero VERY quickly with this software...  And, if they had a good story to go with the wonky silly it'd be neat.  I'm more and more into this as a good assembly tool.

Originally Posted by: DoctorJellybean

Thanks all for your advice.

I did get Comic Life awhile back, but got slightly put off by the dated look and looks a bit complicated :)

So, how many images at a minimum in a comic? Or is that a personal preference? Also, any good software\Photoshop filters, etc, for postwork?

>>>So, how many images at a minimum in a comic? Or is that a personal preference?

Leg's gotta be long enough to reach the ground, dick long enough to fit just in...etc.  Whatever works.  And that's up to a storyteller.  Walt Simonson got away with making an entire issue of THOR to be "Splash Pages" once and it was epic.  Tell a good story and use what you have, work around what you don't.

>>>>Also, any good software\Photoshop filters, etc, for postwork?

I've tried a lot of software and prefer "Affinity Photo" - if you check my gallery you'll find lots of work I've saved incredible amounts of time versus many pointless renders trying to get the lighting right or adding critical shadows when I just couldn't get the lights to do that in Poser that time.  I've even put in a few simple guides on some more .... interesting stuff.   Now, given the nature of this site I shouldn't have to warn you my work is adult and pretty extreme at times...  Like on page 8  I pointed out doing a 'mesh warp' for an 'internal' thing which I've used often.  "outtake" one I'd link but get a bunch of "i just ate.." complaints.   Their vector softwware "Affinity Designer" is also excellent - the Publisher pretty good.  I'd provide links but you can search, mods are a bit touchy on that here...  No problem I'd vouch for them without any credit in a second.

Cheap, does 90% of what Photoshop does and 99.9% of what any non  'industry pro' would EVER need or want to do - and free upgrades.  No "Subscription Racket" and they've sworn they never will.  Recent boost to speed which was good already and now "Live" filter effects you can drag the mouse on the screen and watch the whole thing shift and blur.  I have a good $1K Dell but 3 years old but works great with it.

Krita is free but more based around digital painting.  Never tried GIMP myself, nothing bad just haven't.

There's also Dogwaffle/Howler which is a beautiful nightmare of effects and odd brushes...  But a crazy, shiny beast.  I use it now and again, but I'd not do it as first choice.

Some folks get confused when it comes to are panels a render? or are panels a page in the comic

Foe me a panel is a block of content  ergo the render and My max number of panels per comic page is 4 and those usually show moment I ue three small panels for like when someone wakes uo and I do a blur to focus of the eyes. or say an action scene where someone is driving a vehicle out of a garage other wise is either 2 quarter panels over or under a half panel or 2 half panels over and under or side to side but mostly I prefer single panels mainly because I do not like speech bubbles overcrowding the art

I also find that is you are going to have a complex scene that art really take up too many panels the I use a single have panel and narrate a paragraph or two on how the story progresses from point a to b and then continue with the art.

I believe the site requires a story 50 pages in length and since I am a storyteller I do not do the visual type of stories without text Nothing against the artist who do and convey images to speak 1000 word or for themselves  and many are cover to cover raw sex

So for say a 80-100 page comic I do about 70-80 renders. Now that might seem a lot but with the 3D medium some of those images might be duplicates or scenes when one simply shifted the page around for a different POV also one can create what I call stock renders,  Say an airport, planes taking off. a canal scene to give yourself some color.  some one lives in a fancy estate home  simply use a past render   This helps to save time and boosts production time.  Now finding an item you need and simply can't remember where that items is?  well in Poser you bring up the library window and use the search item Say search for Computers in the character or prop libraries and in under a minute or two you have several PC  a few laptops to quickly add to your pre render.

You can create a rough script and Comic Life has a script tool  a;sp to save time create your base figures ahead of time

I take the characters I am going to use and produce a nude version, save to the library  say Valery Nude.  Same character as Street clothes to her and save as Valerie Street ware. remove the street ware and then load up casual clothing Jogging Bra and shorts. Save as Valery Casual and then do the same for Valery lingerie if you so desire.  create another figure male or female and do the same.  once saved you can inject them in any scene.

so say you have a hotel room  Inject the male figures fully dressed into the room strike a pose, render, strike another pose say Kissing and then you simply hide the clothing and bingo you have nude figures for the sex scenes

As you go along it gets easier. In my younger days I could do an 80-100 page comic in 4 weeks and then take a day or two to inject the caption boxes, and speech bubbles and then have the wife edit my work,  do some final adjustments and in 5 weeks the product is ready..  Mind you it took me about 20 comics before I could do this and my first comic took 2 months

Take you time, Use photo shop or Gimp to fix rendered mesh flaws with say a smudge or smoothing tool then send it over to comic life to finish off your product

best of luck on your projects

regards  Shadoman

I use Corel Paintshop Pro which can handle a lot of special effects and editing individual post render pics.  PNG files with visual sound effects and things like bolts of lightning can be overlaid in Paintshop once you get used to its layers structure or more simply in PowerPoint.  It's also available at a much more reasonable price that Photoshop (now a subscription product as I understand) or other picture editing software.

For the creation of comic panels, I use plain-ole PowerPoint, which has lots of text boxes and speech bubbles that can easily positioned, sized and formatted (e.g., semi opaque) and all the fonts available in Windows can be used.  The final PowerPoint slide show can be saved in pdf format.  I used to use dedicated comic software and preset comic panel layouts, but PowerPoint was actually much easier and came loaded on my Office configured machine.

I'm probably one of the few folks who still use Poser Pro 11 and resists migrating to DAZ -- too much of a learning curve and too much invested in V4 models in my view to justify the change.

To speed renders and make my old laptop faster in all respects, I replaced the hard drive with a 1 TB Samsung SSD EVO.  Made a HUGE performance difference.  Installed it myself, 'tho opening up the laptop was scary.  Cost about $150 a year ago.

PowerPoint, like all Office products, has a built in spell checker and resizing text boxes and talk/thought bubbles is a matter of clicking on a corner and dragging to the right size.  It also has access to all the fonts loaded into Windows -- I probably have more than a hundred and add them from free sites as the mood hits me.  You can also re-direct the "thingy" that points to a character, adjust the color, degree of transparency, line size/type, etc  You just start with a blank presentation and specify whether you want the slides in landscape or portrait mode and the general slide size.  Backgrounds are infinately changable and things like logos can be added to slide master to appear on every slide along with date stamps and slide numbers.

I set up a default PowerPoint slide template with the fonts and color schemes and sizes I like and add pictures to it to create comics.  Then, save a pdf "final" version for distribution and keep the PowerPoint file for any future edits if/when edits are necessary.

I like P11 because I'm too lazy to learn DAZ's software, which seems to change every year and force investment in the latest DAZ set of proprietary models, and I've found P11 to be more stable than Poser Pro 2014.  It's really frustrating to work on a scene have Poser crash wiping out a lot of work.  P11 has an automatic save function, but I've not had nearly the same number of crashes with it.  We'll see how Rendo handles the license transition, 'tho.

I can't emphasize how much better my render world became with the $150 investment in a bootable 1 TB SSD.  All graphics programs are memory intensive, and when they fill up your RAM they start hard drive swaps, which grinds rendering to a halt even for the best physical hard drive.