#tutorial 3d

[deoidesign]

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!

[rapidhighway]

extremely happy to have enough blender skill now to make this shit

[art-res]

3D Room Builder

Faster and easier in my opinion than sketchup!

Can easily pan the camera and practice perspective and all of that :)

https://floorplancreator.net/plan/demo

More useful articles and resources / support Art-Res | my art tumblr | Idea Generator 

 Check out the Art-Res Anatomy Ebook!

[nouveaumoon]

💧✨based off of this illustration by @passionpeachy!✨💧

video compression muted the colors, so here are a few stills under the cut

tiny bonus: happy pride!

[giddlygoat]

idk if i ever posted this? quick notes on my thought process while drawing cartoon hands.

[fiendco]

glass works sculpted by me

[molegato]

Just released a little rigging tutorial specifically for lowpoly characters!

[ectoimp]

Low Polys your Mystery

[art-appreciation-dog]

Common perspective mistakes (proko)

[mr-tsuyo]

i love the style of that 3d render of your character! may i ask how you animated the outline and made the whole thing pixel-y? :0

Very glad you asked!

There isn't many tutorials on how to make this kind of stuff so I am totally glad to be the first one.

BLENDER 2.5D TUTORIAL

First of all

Get your model ready and steady, that part is what I ain't explaing, however if you want it to have these colors, you will have to put this nodes in your texture shader

`[ This is for her red jacket, the lower nodes is for her primary colour and the upper nodes are for her shadows, which also has some extra nodes to give it a comic texture. ]

Quick reminder to give the model some lineart yourself to the parts that don't form its sihlouette, for example her shoes.

Now for the lineart, first of all make sure you have created a black Emissive material and that it has Backface Culling activated

After that go to the Modifier Properties and add a Solidify modifier

Make sure to Flip the Normals, set the Material Offset to where the Lineart material is, and adjust a little bit the Thickness of the mesh, then you will get some natural good-looking lineart like hers.

Now, you could easily be satisfied like this, but now we are going to make it feel like each frame is a new drawing by making her model lineart jiggly

First of all create a Displacement Modifier and give it a cloud texture

Make sure to lower the strenght and midlevel, otherwise it will look like this

Now, create an Empty Plain Axes and go to the Displace modifier, change the coordinates from Local to Object and focus the object on the Empty

And thanks to this adjustments, if you move the empty around, it will create a slight jiggle

Now what we want is for this empty to automatically move around without you having to do anything

Create a new screen and go to the Graph Editor section

In here we will be making the empty move with a modifier

Select the empty and press "I" of Italy and select Location, this will create a keyframe for the empty that we will be able to manipulate

Go to the Editor and ONLY SELECT THE Z POSITION, and then go to the Modifiers tab and add a Noise modifier

Make sure to adjust the Scale and the Strength so that it looks more proper for the jiggle effect, make it look like a rollercoaster!

And now, if you did everything right, your empty will be moving up and down and all around by its own

WHICH also means, the model displacement will follow the path of the empty to create that jiggly effect we crave so so much

However...

The model is indeed jiggling, but it's doing it the wrong way, we are trying to make it look like a cartoon not a gosh darnit gelatin

So to make it jiggle the right way we are going to make its noise feel more STEPPED

Go back to the modifiers of the Graph Editor and add a Stepped Interpolation, and make sure it has a Step Size of 5

And now we finally get the choppy jiggle effect!!

Now you can play around the Displace and the Noise to make it more or less jiggly

But nonetheless, if you followed the tutorial right, you will be gifted with the perfect looking 2.5D effect!!!

Now you can go ahead and try to fool everyone into thinking a 3D animation is 2D

And before we wrap up, one more extra for the one who asked how this is made,

We are going to make the render feel pixel-y!

Go to Render Properties, make sure you are using Eevee, and in Sampling put the Render on 1 and the Viewport on 0

Then go to Output Properties and you can do two things:

1) Change the X n Y to a size lower than 1000 px

2) Change the Resolution % to these numbers (8, 16, 32, 64) This way if you wanna do pixel art you are more accurate

For this render I used the 1st option

And last but not least, in the Output Properties make sure you save your files in the right way with these settings

THen render animation, make an image sequence with all the pngs, and TA-DAH

You get a pixel-y 2.5D animation!!!

Thank you so much for checking, I hope this is useful for anyone who wants to do this stuff, if anyone has any questions don't be afraid to ask, I may have explained some stuff badly.

Anyways have a very jolly day

Tsuyo OUT

[theenbyroiderer]

One more tutorial. I think this is the last one I have for now.

Here's how you stitch a 3D jellyfish. This is a more advanced tutorial. Prior experience with most of the stitches is recommended.

Materials: You'll need several needles, at least one shorter and one really long. I've used sashiko needles in three lengths, 4 cm, 5.5 cm and 8.5 cm. As for yarn, I think you can use whatever you have. Most of it can be done with six-stranded floss, but you'll need some thicker woolen yarn for the fluffy turkey stitch. I used fine d'aubusson (a fine wool embroidery yarn) for the body, six-stranded floss (2-3 strands) for most of the tentacles, a shiny silky embroidery floss for the edge of the body and a couple tentacles, and knitting yarn scraps for the turkey stitch.

Stitches: satin stitch, bullion stitch, padded satin stitch, buttonhole stitch, drizzle stitch and turkey stitch. Please look up stitch instructions on youtube, and do a bit of practice beforehand. This project is probably not a good practice run for these stitches.

Time: depends on the size of your jellyfish. I made quite a large one and it took me about 5 hours to complete.

1. Make a sketch of your jellyfish. At least of the body. Fill this body from edge to edge with bullion stitch, make them a bit longer than the body is wide so that they are somewhat loose. You should be able to get a finger underneath the bullion, depending on the size of your jellyfish.

2. Then it's time to satin stitch the body. For this part it's important that the needle goes through the fabric as close to where it came up as possible. The goal is not just to make a 3D body, but to make it a hollow 3D body. Don't just stitch over the bullion, stitch around it. It's also important to not pull too tight. Bullion stitch of this lenght is rather malleable, so it's a bit tricky to keep the satin stitch even. Hold a finger in the hollow underneath the bullion as you pull the thread tight. This will stop it from getting to tight, as well as make sure you keep the hollow. As the stitching gets thicker the hollow will get smaller, but that's ok.

3. When the top part of the body is fully stitched it's time to do normal flat satin stitch for the bottom part, the inside of the body of you will. Leave an opening in the middle though, you'll need some space for the drizzle and turkey stitch later.

4. This is a good time to give the edge some definition. Do buttonhole stitch around the top edge, then you go around and do another row of buttonhole stitch, kinda the other way around, through the loops from the first row. Hopefully you can see from the pictures what I've done. The bottom edge of the body doesn't need defining and won't be very visible anyway, so I just did some sloppy stitches along there and called it good enough.

5. Now it's time for the tentacles. Start with the drizzle stitch, because the turkey stitch will just get in the way if you start with that... but do remember to leave space for the turkey stitch underneath the drizzle stitch. This is where you need the loooong needle. Pack as much drizzle stitch on that needle as you can. You'll notice that the drizzle stitch wants to rotate around your needle as it gets longer, do let it, that will just help you fit more stitch on there, as well as give the finished stitch a nice curl.

6. When you think you have enough drizzle you can move on to the turkey stitch. You will not need to do a lot of it. You'll probably overestimate how much you need, but that's ok, you can always give the fluff a bit of a haircut later. Do a few looong loops of turkey stitch, a little bit longer than your drizzle stitch. Cut the loops to slightly different lengths, otherwise you'll get a very blocky bit of fluff... tapered is better. Untwist the yarn and separate the strands, draw a needle through the strands to fluff them up.

7. As a finishing touch you can add some long and thin strands around the edge of the body.

Edit: Tfw a post has been up for years before you notice that you forgot a whole-ass step. Apparently #4 has been missing all this time. Oh well.

[tutorialdrawix]

RESOURCES FOR ANIMATION

Book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston

Book The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams

Book Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters by Robert Beverly Hale

Book Character Animation Crash Course! by Eric Goldberg

TUTORIAL VIDEOS:

[mothscotch]

weird guy. peculiar creature even.

[krmayerillustration]

I'm learning Blender, and its the nicest program I've encountered since Procreate. I'm not even a 3D artist. But I think we all deserve to make use of this little tart of a program!

[7goodangel]

Me, several years ago: "I'll never try digital 3D art... just have no interest to learn it. Already have learned other art forms that I barely use anyway... so why add to that ?..."

Me, currently: [Is attempting to model a donut in Blender] "... uh... I can explain..."

[snippit-crickit]

Would you mind sharing how you get that wiggly line effect on your 3D models? It looks so good! Lighting looks impeccable too wow

AY! its one of the 3 main methods of achieving lineart in blender, what i did is i created a Stroke and added a lineart modifier on it... then on top of that i added a noise modifier which is responsible for the wiggle!

like so! heres a video which describes it in detal, hope this helps!