Rendering can take quite a bit of time so I found a simple workflow using matcaps. Matcaps are material captures, they capture a material and give a nice display in the viewport. These are great for sculpting and modeling in 3D. Im using matcaps in this current render. I have seperate render passes, one is a matcap, an ambient occlusion, a thickness, and another matcap for the reflection. I bring that into Clip Studio Paint Ex and add some filters to get a good final result. The Aim The purpose here is to be able to render out an animation quickly then bring that into a compositor of my choice (Clip Studio Paint Ex) and export that into final still images. Rendering can take alot of power and time, with this technique I aim to use matcaps which render instantly and don’t require alot of power. Clip studio is perfectly capable of exporting the animation into .mp4 or .avi movie files. However that i’snt necessary in my case. Adding voices and sounds to the animation can be done in another application so exporting still images is fine. Compositing This is a quick animation rendered in Modo with one of my test rigged 3D models. To bring all my […]
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3D Art has been used in comics and manga before, but 3D art in comics is’nt well presented when someone who doesn’t use 3D as their main content creation tool attemps to use this medium. For one thing, comic artists may not be familiar with rendering, lighting or setting up a scene. To be able to extract good 3D line art is’nt enough. There’s texture work or screentone as used in manga (Japanese Comics). The traditional look of human touch can’t be seen either. It’s a great tool for architechture but for an everyday artist like myself we need these tools to blend in to our work. Often times I see comic artwork that uses 3D in their work and the 3D aspect speaks more than the hand drawn stuff. To be able to use this medium in comics we need to find a good balance between 2D and 3D. 3D in Manga 3d work has been used before in manga work such as Gantz a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Hiroya Oku. The story lends itself well in 3D computer graphics, but how was it being made before making the film screen? Image taken from Gantz volume 1. […]
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At this moment of writing I am a computer science student. I enjoy computers and art. Animation is a perfect combination of those things. I am a self taught 3D animator, when I found Modo (a 3D application by Foundry) I was instantly amazed. The power of animation for a single user is something I thought was impposible. Like many applications it takes practice and patience to study and learn every aspect of 3D. What made me want to use Modo over other 3D applications was it’s design and approach to 3D. The Community The greatest part of working in 3D is the tutorials and documentation available out there. I find that every artist, programmer, and user that uses a 3D application contributes to the world something that does’nt exist. That is what a community is all about, that is where content grows. If it were not for those users there would be not much information on what we do. For 3D applicaitons the community is a big part of working in a 3D application. Everyone needs a little help at some point or another. Pixel Fondue is one place that provides an incredible amount of information in a compact […]
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If you’re looking for a code editor Brackets is a free and open source text editor that works on Windows ,Mac, and Linux. Brackets can be found at brackets.io. The top three Extensions needed in an editor Out of the box Brackets is simple and minimal. It doesn’t come with stuff you don’t need or want. Themes To install extensions open ‘File’ and select ‘Extension Manager’. This is where you can download themes and extensions for the application. To start off if you want some cool themes head over to https://brackets-themes.github.io/. There are in tructions there on how to install the themes to Brackets. s Indented Guides Next you want to have indented guides. These lines help to view your indents when coding. To install this extension simply type ‘Indent Guides’ in the search bar at the top right. Then proceed to install. The download page can be viewed here. Tab and shift+Tab are your friend when you want to indent many lines of code, try them. Working Tabs And finally working tabs, search for ‘Brackets Working File Tabs’. This extension allows for tabs and split window. The download page can be viewed at Brackets working file tabs. That’s really all […]
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A look at Coding in Modo from an artist perspective When you look at modo the first thing you’re going to use is the command window (on the left) and the event log (on the right). The command window is where you will be typing commands and python files to execute a script. The event log is where the party is happening. This is where we can test if our script is working and see the events happening in our scene. It constantly updates when something new happens. Our first command To give you an example lets execute our first command. Type this into the command window. item.create locator A locator is created in the 3D view. Imagine if we had to create 100 of these. We could have done this manually, but that’s what scripting is all about, automating. Writing a script To write a script simply create a text file and name it file.py make sure the extension ends with .py and not .txt For this tutorial you will need a text editor to type code. I use Brackets, a free and open source editor with extensions which can be found here. It works on Windows, […]
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