Monday, December 28, 2015

Making comics (manga) with Blender


Creating background imagery with Blender's Freestyle NPR renderer.


What a clever use of Blender. The technique is pretty seamless, too. It's not just a flat copy-paste technique...lot of thought put into the integration of the hand-drawn elements with the 3D models, gray-tone, etc. Looks very natural. If you didn't know in advance many elements were 3D models, you probably wouldn't notice.

4 comments:

MrGoodson2 said...

Looks nice. Cartoon renderers in 3D programs are rarely that good. This one pulls off looking like line work.

Surly Bird said...

His technique pretty much nails the traditional black-and-white phone-book manga look. I really had to study the finished panels to see anything that looked conspicuous.

I've wanted to experiment with mixing 3D and 2D for a comic book story for several years, although I was thinking something more along the lines of a Geoff Darrow-inspired 'ligne claire' look. I see lots of potential with Blender's NPR renderer, plus another program called Moment of Inspiration (great for mechanical modeling).

I've also been playing with shaders in Unity that mimic anime cel-shading. There's a great fighting game called Guilty Gear Xrd-Sign that has the look so nailed down you have a hard time believing it's not hand-drawn. The technical artist for that game gave a very comprehensive GDC talk about how they pulled it off and it has been saved on YouTube.

Maybe I'll do a post about it soon.

BDMontag said...

Interesting. I'd hate to have to model the Daily Planet newsroom, but I suppose you'd only have to do it once.

Tom Moon said...

Potentially a great tool for comics Ronnie. I'd love to see you do some comics using it! We don't get to see enough of your original 2D stuff here.