The Way I Do... (Patreon)

Hey guys! I want to share behind the scenes what I usually do when creating content, in this case, a comic. It's not a tutorial so I try to make it as brief as I can so you have the big picture of what I'm doing.

Brainstorming and the Preps

Usually when I have an idea I write it down on my Miro board. Brainstorming the ideas and dividing into scene groups. These help me with scene plotting and preparing the 3d assets. Below are examples of Summer Heat storyboards.

Preparing the 3d assets sometimes could take time. From the storyboard example above, I need to prepare the assets [the environments] for the pub, pier, and beach scene. I'm using both Daz Studio and Blender to make the scene.

Dialogues & Scene Plotting

Moved on to the next step which was the story dialogue and scene plotting. I'm using NovelAI to help me make a story dialogue. It's more like a novel making. You make a narrative about the story and the AI will do the rest. I also use Grammarly to make some corrections and suggestions on the spelling of the dialogues.

Since I'm doing it by myself, those two AI tools help me a lot when making a story.

Usually, I'm doing the dialogues and scene plotting side by side. From the example above, the scene is at the VIP Lounge focusing on Noriko and Mandy. So, I have a clear picture of the scene who's talking, what are they talking about, when they did it, and so on.

At Daz Studio, I make the character pose, some arrangements, and other technical stuff including preparing the clothes. I rarely use normal assets from the Daz3d shop. Mostly I buy the clothing assets from the Artstation's Market Place. It's a lot cheaper plus I can edit it in Marvelous Designer.

Rendering & Layouting

Also, I sketched the page layouts. In the comic industry, it was called comic paneling. Basically, arranging together drawings into a story, in this case, arranging 3d images. Below are examples of the Summer Heat on page 165. A quick sketch based on the dialogues.

And here is the final page result. Got some arrangements to make when I made the sketching.

For the render itself, on average it took 45 mins to 1 hours. Depends on the complexity of the scene. The number of the figures on the scene, the details of the environments, etc. Because Daz Studio uses an engine from Nvidia [called iRay] it's basically the longer you render the more clearly and sharp the rendered image you'll have. I took a shortcut which was using a script to make it faster to render-lowering the textures without reducing the quality. Usually, I aim below an hour for the render to finish.

For making the layout, I'm using Adobe Illustrator.

Post Editing

Lately, I've done some experiments with the bits of help from AI. Detailing the skin and clothes. Here are the examples:

Before you ask, I'm using Stable Diffusion, img2img-inpaint method. I've been looking for a way to add more details without more rendering loads. The more morphs, the higher textures you add, the longer it takes to render. I think this method is more efficient for me now.

Well, there you go. Behind the scenes of my content creation. Hope this answers your questions in case you guys wondering why it took so long for me to make a comic series. It's quality over quantity afterall.Cheers!