I recently hit 10,000 Subscribers over on Youtube! To mark this event, I updated the FREE version of the Manga shader specifically to work with the Eevee Render engine. It’s available for download RIGHT NOW from Gumroad.
Tag: blender
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Mini Cooper 60th Anniversary comics
Earlier this year, I received an email from BMW with an interesting request. The Mini Cooper was first designed 60 years ago, and to commemorate the occasion, BMW wanted to release a book in which people’s personal stories would be illustrated as comics.
They had found me via my Australian Cartoonist Association Artist page and requested a test strip to see if I could produce the style they were after. I produced this short, four panel comic based on the supplied text.
On the strength of that, I got the job, and produced 6 more which would go in the book.
The process was a huge learning curve for me. I am not a car guy. I barely know anything about them, save to drive my kids around in one. I began to learn the difference between specific models, and came up with a method of rendering 3D cars to insert to 2D drawings. At the time, I was developing a shader to do this task. I called it the Manga Shader, and through further development, I turned it into a commercial tool for other Blender artists wishing to create similar comic-style effects for themselves.
The Manga Shader – v3.5 I composited the renders into the comics which were laid out in Clip Studio Pro.
Here’s a quick demo of some animation I did to bring one comic to life for my 2020 showreel.
I received a cope of the completed book, which featured several other stories, artwork and photos from Mini Cooper fans from around the country.
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Eevee Toon Shader Node group
I’ve hit over 2000 subscribers on Youtube! As a special treat, I have created a toon shader for Blender’s new Eevee render engine. The file also has an extra scene and a compositing set up to allow for Freestyle rendering.
UPDATE: Freestyle now works with Eevee! Download the second working file which includes a freestyle pass over the eevee shaders.
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Inktober 2018
I’ve wanted to do this challenge for a few years now, but I never found the time. I know – it’s supposed to be easy; it’s supposed to be fun, and you can be as simple or as detailed as you like. I guess what was missing was the impetus to try a couple of things on top of the actual challenge. Well this year, I found two areas I wanted to improve on, and thought Inktober might just be the challenge to allow me to explore those areas.
What is Inktober?
For those of you not in the know, Inktober is a 31 day challenge started in 2009 by Jake Parker – the artist behind the all-ages comic Skyheart, and other artistic initiatives such as Art Drop. The official list of prompts gets posted in early September, and you have to complete all 31 prompts in the medium of your choice (as the name suggests, preferably inks).
Grease Pencil
Blender is getting some major updates, and add-ons. One feature is a new Grease Pencil 2D drawing tool. Grease Pencil has been around for a few versions, but it was mainly an annotation tool you could enable to scribble notes, draw arrows, etc directly in your 3D scene. A group of dedicated developers and one award-winning director decided to make it much more versatile, and created a suite of tools for 2D animation directly in the 3D environment. Now it may have been intentionally created for 2D animation, but the tools are designed with illustration in mind with a view to then animate those 2D assets.
I needed to try this out. After all, I’ve been creating 3D sets and assets to then import into my 2D work, so if I could work in reverse…?
Blender 2.80 Alpha
The developers of Blender have been posting daily builds for anyone to download and try. The first Beta version will be available mid-November, and the official release will be out some time early 2019. However the Alpha versions have been – on the whole – quite stable, and worth getting familiar with. Some things changed from version to version, but on the whole, the improvements came thick and fast. And Grease Pencil was added just in time for Inktober. I dabbled in it a little, looked at a few demo videos, and thought it would be a great tool to learn.
Gag Strip cartooning
Also at the same time, I’d finally become a member of the ACA and was listening to a terrific podcast called Is There Something In This? hosted by Jason Chatfield and Scott Dooley. The podcast is an entertaining and informative insight into how a gag strip is pitched, then punched up before being submitted to the New Yorker. Chatfield and Dooley bounce ideas off each other and discuss creative angles to get the joke across, how to make it less wordy, and overall, make it something an editor would buy. I’ve learned alot just from listening to them, mostly that a single panel joke is hard to draw
Looking forward to next year’s Inktober!
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Using Blender for Webcomics
I’ve now wrapped on Homebased for 2017 – my webcomic about being a stay-at-home dad. In more than one occasion, I’ve relied on Blender to create some of the sets, or props in order to streamline my creative process and keep up with an on-going three-strips-per-week schedule. Over the years, I’ve refined the process, and to date, I have a pretty simple technique from modelling and lighting assets, to compositing.
I’d like to share some of the recent examples where using 3D backgrounds has helped create some quality results:
Blending them into the style has always been a challenge. I needed to model assets which would render good line-work and that can be composited to produce high contrast images to match the line drawing as closely as possible. Sometimes, I needed to tweak the compositor to brighten up the shadows:
In this example, I used a 3D model because the camera angles were going to change dramatically. I modeled the main set, as well as a modified version with cracks and damage, then rendered line-work which was later edited inside of Clip Studio Pro.
The bigger the asset library gets, the more I can draw from existing props, too, and this is a huge win for getting comics out faster. Assets like cars, buildings, floors, doors, etc all get reused, imported and appended to new set files, as do the compositing noodles which I set up to achieve certain looks.
In the months to come, I’ll be utilizing the Cycles renderer, which opens up some interesting possibilities for better effects, and the incorporation of lighting and shading effects and overlays that should produce some exciting new results.
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Gwan Anthology – Dear Giang
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a short 8 page submission to an anthology all about the migrant experience. I asked my wife if I could adapt her family’s story about escaping Vietnam in 1981 for my comic. She enthusiastically said yes, and so after getting a few details, I created a sci-fi story about a family who boarded a space tug to escape their home asteroid in the hope of reaching asylum.
It was perhaps the most involved piece I have worked on. I used Blender to create the sets and props,and imported hand-drawn images into the 3D environments so that I could use the in-built compositor to create the unique look of the comic.
The overall process utilized sketches done on paper, digital inks, exported PNG files mapped on planes in Blender, then final renders re-imported into panels laid out in Photoshop.
I am pleased with the final results. If I have any regrets, it’s that I couldn’t create a larger story or about 16 pages to let some of the more intense moments breathe a little. As it is, 8 pages packs a daring escape from the asteroid, a bumpy ride through a rock storm, and a tussle with scrappers – it’s a lot to try and pack in, but ultimately I wanted to show that the heart of the story was this one family battling all odds to remain together.
You can pick up a copy from the FORWARD COMIX store