Lord Bronco's Guide To CGI/Poser Superheroes!
I apologize for the length, I've abbreviated as much as I can, but realize this tutorial represents over 2 years of research I've undertaken under my own direction.
But first, an explanantion of the value *real* artists, like Gill Bates, and the creators of all the classic comics that made our American phenomenon of super heroes in printed art so special.
Um first off, I'll list a few of the classic artists that I love so much-Artists that worked with traditional pencil and ink and who produce works that no computer will ever be able to match...
Michaelngelo Bounarti-the only "Fine artist" you'll see me list on this all to short list. Not because of his sculpture or his famous color paintings, but because of his black and white sketching abilities! This guy could DRAW, and all of his more refinined pices begin with black and white sketches, where his organic ability to capture the human form is just plain spooky.
Also, he was the fisrt to do Chiarucusco (more on that later)
Burne Hogarth-Author of the seminal classics "Dynamic Anatomy", as well as many other crucial books about rendering the human form-he also did pulp covers of things like Tarzan. He's almost arguably *better* than MichaelAngelo-Really!
Wally Wood-And many of the other E.C. artists of the 1950s Horror and Sci-Fi. Wally and others began to employ incredibly subtle inking techniques to their pencilied work-things like stipling and gradated brush strokes, crosshatching.
Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko-It's disservice to both to lump them in with each other, but these guys kind of pulled back and worked within their own limitations as well as the medium they were creating for. Jack, beyond being a great writer/creator, was sooo good at breathing life into his drawn characters with beautifully *posed* and staged scenes of motion.
Steranko on the other hand, brought not only an amazingly robust style of penciling, but he seemlessly incorporated both Fine, Pop and Hollywood Art conventions and influences into every narrative he contributed to.
Skipping over so many fine artists...
Berni Wrightson and John Totleben (And Daniel Clowes). Berni Wrightson, umm the swamp thjing stuff, but just go buy "Frankenstein"-a steadier hand was never seen.
John Totleben did amazing work for Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, but his work on Miracleman is the ultimate beautiful/horrible juxtaposition. What these relatively *modern* guys employ is an inking style called Chiarucusco, which can really only be appreciated in black and white.
Short answer, is long, organic inked lines reveal a nearly photorealistic organic image. I love that stuff!!
Obviously, I love these guy's work, but let me try and pay them some respect by relating a story of a real guy I actually met-Daniel Clowes.
In the alternative comics boom of the 1990s-right around that grunge thingy happened, comics like Peter Bagge's Hate and Daniel Clowes Eightball actually got a showing at a Seattle museum-I think it was M.U.R.A. or somethin.
Not only did these comic books deal with mature themes and *emotional* situations, kinda like Japanese manga sometimes do, they just weren't in the superhero universe-which was soo cool!
Short story is, i'm bumbling around this musuem, and I'm thinkin all this art is crap-I meet this guy he's got long hair -whatever. Basically, someone tells me *That's was Dan Clowes*-and I'm like whatever...computers draw all his pages and his plotlines are weird.
Then I see one tiny piece on the wall, it's framed, and maybe 11 inches on a side. I squint, and I can see that it's actually hand drawn. I can see the pencil lines, I can see the inks over said pencils.
It's a page of Eightball!
And the floor just drops out from underneath me.
He...Actually...Hand... drew all those panels! All those pages! All those letters! And they all look machine perfect! No computers-No nothing!
Anyway, he *won* the showing, in my opinion :-)
My point being, he's another dude who can actually draw!
And if *you* think that computers will replace dudes that can draw, you are are wrong.
These days though, we have dudes that skip the pencil and ink stage-completely. They're using wacom Tablets, which by the way, were maybe only perfected a couple of years ago with the Intuos 3 with it's much higher brush pressure sensitivity.
They are really neat- they let ya draw with a pen instead of a mouse-and they're as well designed as an I-Pod.
oh yeah, and they have unlimited Undoes. That is important ;-)
Here's the thing though, you can't skip the pencil and pen stage unless you can first draw in the real world.
Whileas MMOART.com for example draws using a new interface-a pen tablet, they don't use Poser. No Maya. No Cinema 4-D.
Part 2
Where it's Headin (and why it isn't there yet)
Have you ever logged onto a new game and spent two days tweakin your character until it's just right?
Have you continued to play with your costume selections and hero planners more than you play the game?
I know, me too! :-)
It's amazing the 3-D art we take for granted these days, and what's even more amazing is that pretty soon all toons in all game applications will look photorealistic! Poeple will start arguing about moles more than they argue about nerfs, or whatever...
The reason-in another computer generation or two, if not already, is that microprocessors are gonna be so powerful, and ram Caches so big that peeps like you and me will be rendering our stories, and they'll look as good as a Final Fantasy Movie :-)
But...
We aren't there yet.
We're sooo close, but here's where we stand today.
Our desktop computers, be they either PC or Mac, are ridiculously overpowered relative to levels they were they were a couple of years back, but we are still held back by the limited applications that are available on them.
And this brings me to Poser 6, excuse me Poser 7 (just released).
Unbelievable, mind-shattering results have already been created using much older versions of Poser. I mean photorealistic and yet subtle artistic compositions that look as good or better than anything you've ever seen.
These typicaly are portraits or pinups, if you will, but the most advanced utilize virtual background sets rendered by programs from other vendors. Bryce and Vue spring to mind.
But these scenes are not easy to create, or necessarily fun to work on.
I'm gonna skip the particulars of the background rendering techniques, but will instead share with you all the best tips I've gleaned for at least making the foreground characters look as good as they can, and there are lot of subtle techniques that you'd never figure out in a million years on your own.
A few words about Poser first.
Poser is the first 3-D modelling program that's been made available to desktop users at a pricepoint that makes it easily affordable.
It allows a user to dress and model a figure in virtual space, and then output the model to other graphics applications which create the back grounds, or sets if you will. 3-D graphics by their very nature are very mathematically intensive, and require massive computational power to look *real*.
There's no way to escape the mathematics, they *are* what create the images.
There's only so many ways to make them easy to deal with, which Poser does a fairly decent job of, but it's still not what I'd call *user friendly*. It's interface- can be just...counter intuitive, though a lot of thought and revisions have been made over it's various iterations.
A quick side note-Poser 7, though i haven't booted it yet, initially seems to have not too many new features other than a walking "animation" tool, as well as a vocalization tool for the models lips while "speaking". Other than these things, the tutorials below apply to Poser 7 just as well as they did to poser 4, 5 or 6.
When you're looking at doing Computer Graphic Illustration, you're not drawing so much as creating virtual photographs.
You're not using Illustrator, or Painter, or Freehand and brushes-you're using most often Photoshop to subtly modify the stock images to give them enhanced clarity and depth and lighting effects-things like that. This is what is called postwork, and it's these subtle modifications that distinguish the professionals from the newbs.
The first book, and it's the only book that that I've found that is what it says it is:
Denise tyler's and Audre Vysniaushus' "Practical Poser 6"-which is a step by step walkthru of the Poser application. Clocking in at over 500 pages, it is the seminal work which is packed with useful techniques and workflows, and at least addresses all the possibilities of the Poser application.
As good as it is about the basics, where it really shines is in later chapters where it talks about postwork.
Of particular interest is the chapter on lighting-which its a huge part of what makes professional output professional.
But also, it even has chapters however brief, on creating custom props and clothes! Which is also where you hit one of the biggest limitations of Poser. If you can't find a particular prop for your character-you have to make it yourself, or create it using postwork :-(
Thankfully capes cowls, cloaks and many armors are already available-probably the single best ones made to date are Predatron's Superhero costumes props for Victoria 3. Umm-much more can and should be said about this, but this tutorial is already long enough as is...
After reading it, one may be able to tackle their first model/scene, but I'd then point them to this next tutorial which may be found on Renderosity.com.
Renderosity.com is both a community and a marketplace as well as a centralized location for amateur and professional CGI artists. It's usefulness and impoartance cannot be understated, especially because this is where the rest of the tutorials have been posted by artists who have already struggled with these issues, and in some cases have posted their best moves.
Kirisute is one of the better artists on renderosity-just an all around great creator with an excellent eye for composition as well as themes, but also the technical chops which create extraordinary scenes.
But maybe the greatest thing this artist created this tutorial, which is a step-bu-step that illustrates alot of the things that Practical poser tries to illustrate:
Firelight Tutorial
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=129Do you see how flat and weird the figure looks, when suddenly after a couple of steps, suddenly it's like a photograph. Of all the tutorials on renderosity, this is still the best one I've found.
So assuming with these two tutorials, you get some figures/results that you like. Would you like to make them look like a comic book?
Sure ya Do!
And this is where I point out again these two brand new tutorials, which are just amazing, and which I haven't even gotten to try yet! These actually specialize in using and doing postwork inside of Poser, before you even get near Photoshop.
Part 1
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=1183Part 2
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=1552And here's another one I ran across-though brief, it also really shows how to simulate hand drawn line work, and shows it step by step.
Animation style renders
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/tutorial/index.php?tutorial_id=463But say you're like me, you're lazy and/or slow or thick about postwork even after trying all of these tutorials-well somebody made something so cool-and they're called "actions".
These are very inexpensive presets that you load into Photoshop, and which automate the many steps that create postwork that looks like comic books, or fantasy illustration, or a whole buncha other cool things!
Everything this guy Adam makes is 5 star, and he's even come out with some brand new ones since I last looked!
Adam's Crazy Actions!
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=Adam-
And well, I guess that's it! All of these techniques are gonna be ones I'm using/gonna use in the creation of my graphic novel, but it took so long to find even these I felt like I should share them with you guys.
But using poser, if you aren't gonna dedicate the time to the postwork, creates images that drive people crazy because they can spot it in a second.
I was reading through a funny forum recently-and the two things these veterans were complaining about were comics that look *too* photorealistic, and those that are obviously traced-ha ha.
Yup, good ole Poser!
So, making comics with Poser is definitely putting the Cart before the Horse.
It's like Hiring a whole production company to film a movie, so you can publish the stills offa the set in a newspaper!
It's quite silly really, but it's been my obsession for these last two years.
I don't know if this is to encourage people to actively try and use these apps, techniques or to actively warn them away before they start :-)
I will close by doing a quick cost anaylsis for people though:
Poser 7 $149Poser Book $50Photoshop CS $400Character Models $50Vue Program $400
For just the software, no mention of the time you'll spend just reading the one book, easily $1049 bucks.
Art is still worth money-believe it!
I'm not gonna just give up on Poser, but I have booted the program maybe 3 or 4 times since I finished reading the book, and everytime I see it's interface I just go bleah and turn it off.
The character creator in my online game works about 50 million times better...
Peace all, I hope this helps, for whatever the reasons.
I feel better just getting it offa my chest.
Brian Z 2007
