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The New Days' new look!
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Also, use PNG for WIPs since it doesn't have as much loss as GIF and JPG.
Also, what I am presenting online is an exported layered 1000 dpi image with lossless compression and separate line, colour, shadow, glare, and text layers. The New Days is, after all, destined for print...
MKR: Which face are you referring to and what do you mean by "bleh"? I fear I might be missing your point.
ManonvonSuperock: Suggestion taken. But I'll be worrying about that sort of thing way down the road...
Davoid: John is 6' 7 1/2", but he appears even larger beside 5' 4" Ned (who is also a few feet further from the "camera"); your response is the desired effect
GIF and lossless compression do not fit in the same sentence. If you have a higher quality source, post it, not this dithered atrocity.
Also:
Edit: And
255 colors! That's nowhere near enough information to be representative of the image.
Also, I'm afraid I don't get "braindeadface."
Edit: The JPG you posted makes it look worse. Maybe you've just chosen weak colors...
I would just like to point out the irony of your comment. Look at your avatar.
Come on man...
Gif is THE internet format.
No, that isn't ironic. Ironic would be if I had claimed GIF was preferred. Trust me, the second IE and FF support animated PNG, I'm switching my avatar. GIF was the internet format of 1995. JPG is the internet format of 2007, and PNG is gaining speed.
/sarcasm
Well that's a pallet of a different color!
Obviously you do at some level, since (unless my ctrl-f function has failed me) you're the only one who had even brought up the term at that point.
And as for the "new look", well. It's pretty much the old look, only now it's threeeeeeee deeeeee. Which is to say, is no more or less interesting or engaging than its predecessor. The dull color choices, dead lineweight, unexpressive, blandly designed characters are identical to what you had before, making the switch an entirely neutral action.
Let's talk color schemes and lighting choices first: right now, if I had to describe what your colors remind me of in 4 words, those words would be "Windows Three Point One". It's gray. It's sterile. It doesn't serve to convey a mood- it doesn't have any life or character to it. There's one light, and it's just flat white. Now, unless I am mistaken here, this is taking place in a garage. Garages have a certain look to them, lighting wise. Either you've got the yellow-tinged light bulbs on the ceiling, the lights on the garage door opener apparatus, or you've got light coming in from the sun and sky from the open garage door and/or any available windows, provided it's daytime.
What you have, however, is a lighting scheme that doesn't bring across any of those things, and doesn't really make any sense. Where is the light coming from? Why is it coming from there? Why on earth would somebody light a garage to apparently illuminate the ceiling beams more than the floor and walls? Who knows? The result is the audience feeling that the art is completely divorced from reality (this is not the same as being "stylized" before you throw that argument back at me) and effectively kills any sense of place or mood.
Unexpressive characters: Well, I mean. I guess the two guys in the background I can't complain about so much because you can't really see what their expressions are, but that guy in the front, well. Basically it looks like you took the pose from an ancient Egyptian sculpture (this is not a compliment, in case that's not clear) and grafted a Ctrl-Alt-Del level facial expression on it. It doesn't get across that the guy is alive. Contrapposto! Move him around, push the expression so it reads clearly! Your art makes it seem like he could be saying anything in any tone, not expressing this one specific thought right at the moment.
And this crap about .gif vs. jpg vs. png vs whatever who gives a fuck guys seriously? It's like complaining about the quality of a book because of the paper it's printed on. Let's talk about if the writing's good or not first (so to speak), shall we?
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That's actually my fault - it's the file name I used for the image since it seemed to fit the expression, and it's visible in the color pallet screenshot.
Building a functional car from scratch can literally cost millions of dollars, not to mention tons of manpower. And if these guys are talented enough to build a vehicle from "rough blueprints" they should get into the car business, not waste their time trying to steal whatever they are trying to steal.
And if they have the resources to steal manufacturers blueprints from a major automotive manufacturer, they should consider doing that full time instead.
Anyone with even the slightest bit of car knowledge will know that your premise is laughable. I'm not trying to be mean here, but I don't know how anyone could reasonably accept your story.
Keep in mind, print and web both have special needs. You shouldn't make a universal setting to satisfy both media. If you put crazy high resolutions online your file size will be ridiculously large and would take for ever to download. Set the resolution for web at 72. If you're sending something to print, 300dpi is more than enough.
Back to web! Have you explored Photoshop's Save for Web feature? It lets you preview how an image is going to look in the internet friendly formats. You can even control the compression. It's fantastic!
Guh. Fine, I'll revise my statement:
"He really does have a brain dead look, MKR is right."
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":O"
The shadow layer is just incorporated as a standard brightness decrease; I've played around with other ways to make the shading more saturated with the shade layer's data, but when it came time to exporting the finished comic, I chickened out. Perhaps I'll post the comic with some different shading types in this thread soon...
Once upon a time, the garage in the scene was a normal, window-less one... but it's been thoroughly modified: the makeshift second floor, the walls and finishing painted a near-black colour, the illumination from the non-Edison single point of light on the wall across from the vehicle, etc.
I am obviously no expert at making 3D faces emote. But off the top of my head, moving John's eyes from the "home" position slightly and a touch of asymmetry to his expression should be a step in the right direction...
I've written down the suggestions about the face and the dead lines.
NibCrom: I won't bore you with story elements that could clarify a few things, but your case isn't entirely devoid of interest, so I took note of it.
MagicToaster: "Save for Web"? I'll look into it.
Epi: I noticed that before I started this thread and it's scheduled to be fixed. I was wondering when it'd come up, so you get a cookie.
something as basic and as necessary as level adjustments shouldn't be put on the back burner.
your old, 2d comics suffered the same thing. You either had little to no contrast (even if it is night time), or way too much, (as someone else mentioned stray away from the win 3.1 default colors)
people do not have cyan eyes.
Before you start turning your comic into what looks like reboot fanfiction, i think we can all agree that you should focus more on your visual narrative skills. That way you're not limited by what you can or cannot yet accomplish in your 3d graphics program.
you need:
- memorable character designs
- meaningfully exaggerated facial and bodily expressions
- dynamic positioning and layout
- a more visually friendly color palette
- more succesful gags
- a more interesting plot
Also, i couldn't help but notice your change to 3d coming at exactly the same time as the introduction of your first vehicle. which leads to the assumption that you aren't comfortable drawing cars. The best suggestion would be practice until you are, but if you can't do that, trace your renders by hand and use that instead.
It's not an issue of it being 3d or not, you need to study expressions...and anatomy for that matter. The reason you don't know how to emote in 3d is because you don't know how to do it in 2d. also your shot compositi...
actually u know what.
just keep practicing.
at the rate your going, it shouldn't take more than 10 years or so for you to get passably decent (you should take the suggestions offered in the forum and STUDY, or that last remark might change from a backhanded insult to a reality).
Incidentally, "people" also don't have eyeballs that are 1 1/2" in diameter either. But hey, it's no skin off my back to decrease the saturation of Ned's eyes.
And you're wrong about when I first started using 3D. I first used 3D in this strip (though the characters were merely loose proportion wireframes at that point).
Moreover, when it came time for me to first draw the vehicle, I knew it would be appearing in several strips from now. I was like, "There is NO WAY I am going to painstakingly line-draw, texture, and shade something with geometry as intricate as a modern vehicle by hand over and over again! Why waste so much time drawing a solid object with complex geometry over and over again when you can model it and a computer can crank it out with whatever angle, shading, etc. you need in a wink? It's a matter of practicality." Sure, it took me a while to model, but that patience will still pay off in the long run. Besides, my experience gained from modeling the vehicle alone has already scored me a few grand in commissions.
lilchingch0ng: Just keep practicing? O, I intend to!
I don't know, because repetition is the only way to improve as an artist, which you drastically need to do.
I gotta agree with this point. Computer programs are extremely powerful but they aren't a replacement for working physically with media. It is imperative that you understand where different tools of a program come from and why they work the way they do if you want to master them digitally.
This is the reason I practice drawing+coloring on paper before ever touching a tablet.
This is also the reason I worked with cut/pasting method and a printing press for a long time for graphic design before arranging things on the computer.
Your comic looks horrible. The hand-drawn elements are amateurish and very typical of beginner webcomics - they're poorly drawn figures and landscapes that lack the style of decent 2D cartoons. The abstraction going on doesn't emphasize or help the characters emote or express their actions at all, instead they all have perpetually blank expressions on their face that clash jarringly with what they're supposed to be saying.
On the subject of jarring clashes, your attempts at blending 3D rendered elements and backgrounds with hand drawn 2D portions have all been failures. Having looked through your archives, I can't find any comics where your use of 3D has helped your comic look any better. At best it's ignorable, but more often it will actively detract from the comic because of the jarring juxtaposition of flattened 2D drawings that are out of perspective with the computer generated backgrounds.
The 3D backgrounds themselves seem like a bad concept. A well drawn comic can get away with spartan backgrounds, yet still give the impression that the characters are in a fully realized environment. However by adding 3D elements into the mix you're automatically creating an expectation of realism in your comic that is beyond the scope of the modeling skills you've demonstrated in the comic so far. Because of that, your backgrounds look dull and spartan - there's no sense of style or abstaction, only cold hard lines that cover the boundries of the untextured, flat surfaces your characters are stuck in.
Good 3D cartooning is admittedly very difficult to do. It takes an incredible amount of skill to make a three dimensional object rendered by a computer appear in a way where your brain is satisfied with simply abstracting it as a human-looking form, so that the gross exaggeration used in cartoons looks deliberate, instead of appearing as a bizzarely misshapen human figure. In the end, it is far, far more simple to improve your 2D cartooning skills, and vastly less time consuming, even when you factor in the time to re-draw each frame or cell. Remember, work like that Pixar project above took a team of artists several months (literally hundreds of man-hours of work) to model and rig, and these people are the cream of the crop when it comes to 3D illustration and production.
Other have already mentioned your misuse of a proper colour palette, but this really does need to be restated: I'm not sure what method you're using to colour in your comic, but you need to find something that's more accurate, more interesting and more colourful. You can do a lot with a muted palette, and create some spectacular effects if you use it properly, but your comic isn't doing that. The complete lack of contrast creates no visual interest, the compositions are boring and lifeless, and there's never any implied action or motion going on.
I can't really offer you any suggestions to improve your writing, but I can't tell if I was intended to find any of the strips amusing. There don't seem to be any real punchlines, however the story itself doesn't contain any real action. There just doesn't seem to be much entertainment value anywhere in it. After reading through your archives I can't find anything that made me laugh or even crack a smile, I was generally more puzzled at the end of a strip than anything.
Finally, your website design is bad. Not only is there no unity in the presentation of the visual elemnts (consistency between the title bar, the background colour, the use of fonts and inverted colours in the navagation screen, etc.), there doesn't seem to be even a hierarchy as to what goes where. I'm assuming you want the comic to be the most important part of the page, but it's shunted off to the far left of my monitor, while a far more interesting picture of Sherlock Holmes is on the right drawing my attention away from it. Your links are on the same reading plane again as the words of your comic, but the list isn't contained - it ends up leaking underneath the comic . This breaks to varying degrees, depending on the height of the comic in question.
Aside from what I mentioned above (art, writing, website) your comic is okay. Hopefully you can update it a few more times this year and show some real improvement.
...I'll read the newest posts after I've enjoyed a good night's sleep!
--
OK, where were we...
ManonvonSuperock: Actually I find that the potential for artistic growth works better than ever with 3D. For example, after letting the model of my vehicle marinate for a few months, I was able to go back and conveniently fix several subtle imperfections. Also, John's body has already had similar improvements done to it after I made the current strip and before I even posted here. Naturally, this'll be an ongoing thing...
furiousNU: I am confident I "wasted" enough time with inferior artistic technology on the older material for The New Days and creative projects before that; now's as good a time as any for me to move on.
Rolo: To re-iterate: I suggest you not get too attached to the older strips, or even the current one. It's always been my plan to redo the older material to whatever standard I reach when I've finished the material for the first book. And I'm not just talking about redoing the artwork, EVERY aspect of the comic will be redone. The only thing I didn't plan on is getting as good as I currently am at this point (of course, why stop there?) But hey, this makes my investment in 3D all the more practical, because when the time comes to redo the older material, I'll have all the models, settings, poses, etc. to work from to make the process a lot more straightforward than it would have been.
Among the many reasons why I'll be sticking to 3D, it's been my 3D talent that has earned me money recently, and my 2D talent never earned me any; money talks and bull$#!+ walks!
And I'll see what I can't do to make my site more accommodating to people with monitor resolutions at the far end of the bell curve.
MKR: The archive navigation should be on top; I hate browsing archives where the changing heights of the comics makes it bounce up and down. I also hate having to scroll for it at every page.
You're practicing your 3d modelling techniques. Great. Keep at it. But stop making this horrid thing. Or, as a compromise, just stop brining it here until it's of a suitable quality where I don't feel the need to start going on a huge rant about lighting, anatomy, facial expressions, etc. I'm not going to do that because I already know that it's a waste of my bloody time. You have no intention of taking the advice of spending more time on your illustrative skills in order to improve your modelling skills. Hey, do what you want to do. You're just talking to a few of guys who have actually worked in the games industry and do the planning for real life 3d models. Don't come in here and throw these ridiculous arguments around. Your 3d modelling skills are amateurish at best. I don't know what sucker actually paid you to do something for them but they obviously had some money to burn.
Do me a favour. Model a human skeleton. All of the bones. Then come back and show us what you have.
Anyway... everyone who is talented in 3D is also proficient with the fundamentals of 2d and has basic drawing skills. The characters for Ratatouille we obviously sketched many times before they were ever modeled which is why they are able to come to life.
WOW! O_o
Apparently our art style (pathetic 2D!) is terribly inferior to the new wave of teh R0X0RZ 3-deh
I witnessed no change from your bland, unoriginal drawing and writing to your bland, untalented current state of affairs.
Get your shit together buddy. I hope printing this, trying to pawn it off onto your friends off obligation and losing money on it will teach a lesson
Grifter: Hey! Be cool, man! Be cool!
TimTheSloth: From what I've seen, 3D comics rank from piss poor to... quite well done.
ManonvonSuperock: For some good, candid feedback... but of course you knew that.
Epi: I'm sure I'll improve plenty down the road, especially if I continue participating in this forum... ;-)
Also:
Damn..! Check this out, guys. The writing is hit or miss but the art is just great!
Er, let me clarify: you don't have to be an amazing 2d artist to be a good 3d artist, but you *do* have to be able to draw. Its the fundamental you build your 3d work off of, the better your understanding of what actually goes where, the better your 3d model will turn out.
anyways look, you have 3d environments you've modeled, why don't you make some posts just showing off dynamic shot composition with those. Practice setting up your scenes and we'll give you crits on those. at least this way you'll be learning something that you can benefit from in the short term rather than writing off the vast majority of the critiques as stuff you'll look into further down the road.
lilchingch0ng: Heck, I'm ADDICTED to 3D!
As for dynamic shots of my backgrounds, I planned on eventually posting a demo reel I've been working on, which would contain that sort of thing...
And sorry I'm not feeding this thread material that implements the suggestions as fast as some world like (which, evidently leads to the accusations that I am blatantly refuting everything anyone has to say). Just sit tight while I make time for that sort of thing...
If you focus exclusively on 3D, you're gonna limit your growing potential. Taking time out to learn the basics of drawing will indubitably help you make better 3D.