Back in 2007 I ran across a very interesting webcomic called “Deep” which as its name implied was supposed to be pretty deep. The intention of its creator was to make a surrealism comic that was made by multiple people. For each person involved he’d write a script which you could put your own twist on. Anyway the project sounded like alot of fun so I decided to take a shot at doing some pages for it. What the story of deep? Well even now I’m not entirely sure, it’s about a girl named Ellie whose wandering the backroads of a very strange dreamlike America, and alot of weird stuff happens to her. Even for a conuseur of confusing storylines like myself it was a little hard to follow.
This is the first page I did for deep
I decided to do my pages using 3d models instead of drawing them, just because I’m alot better at that sort of thing then drawing. Anyway I pretty much went nuts with this. I got a pretty vague basic layout of what to do in the script and just went crazy with it. It was much like when Toho gave a layout of what to do with the American godzilla, specifying that it needed to have three toes when everything else besides the toes ended up being changed. The above image had a couple influences, one is the boat, I got the idea for its design after watching invader zim. I always liked those weird smiley faces all over everything in that show so I stuck one on the boat. The boat actually used to be a 3d model of a turkey dinner which I made into a boat for some reason. Also we can see the sperm swimming beneath the ocean, this was a sequence inspired by one in Urusei Yatsura movie 2: Beautiful dreamer, where we see fish swimming beneath a puddle that the kids walk by looking up at them.
Ellie meets barcode in the sewers
The second page I did for deep had Ellie meet baracode int he sewers. Barcode is a character that wasn’t originally in the script , like I said I took some liberties with alot of stuff in the script. Barcode was originally supposed to simbolise human society, no matter how hard Ellie tried to isolate herself, he’d always be there following her. The author really liked barcode and he ended up being included in later pages. The strange creature tot he left is a giant rat made out of poop. Why is it there? Well why not? Do I need a reason for everything I do?
There can only be one lord of the rings!
Here’s another room which would be right at home in my “Dark Place”, I mean hell it even has sleeping potato’s you know you want a room when it has stuff like that in it. In the script for this, Ellie was supposed to see a tower with a surrealism clock out of her window, I thought a regular tower was too boring so I made it into saurons tower. The grafiti on the wall is “Pururin” to get that watch “Welcome to the NHK” there’s also some other grafiti on the wall, but to be honest I don’t even remember what the other graffiti was from now.
This is the final page I did for deep, apparently Ellie see’s herself being crucified and alot of interesting stuff shows up including a man with a sock puppet hand with no head.
Anyway, I tried to take my deep pages beyond what people tend to see in 3d online comics. Usually when people make 3d comics online they look like crap to be honest, I mean they just take some poser characters with crappy rendering and what comes out is an awful mess. A good example is this book, which in my opinion tells what not to do when making 3d comics
How not to make 3d comics
Lets just look at the cover of this book for a moment, what is wrong with this? First of all, what is with the characters faces? All of them look like a bunch of crazy stoners! If it wasn’t for the fact that we can see the blue guys hands I would be thinking he was uhhh…doing something questionable. But this isn’t the biggest problem here, look closely at the creepy baby wearing a top hat. Part of his head is poking through the side of his top hat! This is an instructional book someone went out of their way to make and we have such a glaring mistake? There’s no excuse for that, even if your totally inept at manipulating character models beyond basic poses, you still can go in and erase mistakes like that using photoshop.
Now don’t get me wrong, if your making a 3d comicbook poser can be a useful tool, just don’t think it’ll automatically solve all your problems or your end work will end up looking like generic crap that only this fellow in the below picture will want to read.
Golly Gee! I sure do love me some POSAAR!
My advice is at least for important characters you should make your own character designs and make them youself. My deep pages were made using maya, 3d max and softimage, but if you cant afford that, Blenders a pretty nice free tool. If you leanr to master any decent well rounded 3d package it’ll do you more good then relying on something that uses pre made models like poser. Right now I’m probably not going to make more 3d comics for awhile since i’m trying to sharpen my 2d skills. But I am making a short movie based on the cautionary tales script which you can read here http://defectron.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/cautionary-tales-the-movie-script/ so you’ll be able to see alot more 3d art from me in the future as I post things from that.
If you want to read the rest of deep you can find it here
http://deep.comicgenesis.com/
Also lastly if you like my deep pages I recommend you check out Urusei Yatsura movie 2, Talking head, Neo Tokyo and invader zim since I put alot of homages to those in my pages. These are 3d packages I would recommend if you want to make stuff on your own, you can still use poser for some stuff too, just dont rely on it if you want to make something that isn’t crap
High priced: Maya, 3d max, softimage, houdini
mid priced: Lightwave, Cinema 4d
Free: Blender (The reason why I don’t list any low priced 3d animation software is because blender has the capabilities of a mid priced package but is free, so why bother with a low priced package that isn’t as good?)
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