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I'm quite sure you need a certain talent of some kind in order to sell "art" like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny-rZzX963E
http://cavemancircus.com/2015/07/30/15-ridiculous-pieces-of-art-that-sold-for-millions-of-dollars/
Your comment made me think of the time someone sold a piece of toast on eBay for a small fortune, claiming that the face of Jesus had miraculously appeared on the surface as it was being grilled. I remember it being followed by many 'miracles' of a similar nature around the world, although strangely they all stopped just after the results stopped fetching silly money!
I think the point about making money versus the time spent is that good 3D art tends to take considerably longer than expected to achieve a satisfactory, sellable result. Therefore, the business model does not inherently lend itself to making a significant wage.
You just don't see many NY Times bestseller children's books, or whatever, done with just a 3D tool. Not that it never happens, but it's rare. Being honest with yourself about what makes art sellable is the first step to making money at it. Every parent thinks their child is beautiful; every artist thinks their work is worthy of the Louvre. The reality is something less than this.
(In the next paragraph I use "you" as a generic second person reference:) If you just want to practice and enjoy the art-making processing, 3D is a terrific source for that kind of satisfaction. Just don't kid yourself that there's a lot of money in it. Lots of people have these same tools you do, and out of the box can press the same buttons and turn out the same basic renders. The way to make money at anything is to be better than others. The successful digital (not just 3D) artists are artists first. The digital medium is their choice of expression, but their talent doesn't require it.
Now, about a business model that can work: Forget "art." Create renders people can reuse in their line of work. Can you produce really, really, really good interiors that look photorealistic? There's a market for interiors mockups. Same with people wearing clothes, holding signs, set in poses useful for business-related Websets, etc.
Can you also model? Produce your own latest brand new iPhone and sell mockup art. Or can you take Solidworks models and convert them for use in D|S? Contact companies that have created 3D engineering drawings of their new products, and need marketing materials made from them.
And so on. Many people would not consider these jobs particularly "arty," but from my own experience, you can make money at it.
On the other hand, there are advantages to digital art.
I have a new career as a rpg book artist. One of the advantages of a cgi workflow is that I am capable of producing cool results -significantly- faster than artists working in more traditional forms. Heck, there's a good chance I can make something useful and good within a few hours.
Even better, I can tweak stuff very easily.
Try telling a painter 'that looks awesome but I want you to turn that figure a bit more facing the viewer.'
That said, there are obviously disadvantages; if I don't have content that resembles what you want, I could model it but that would vastly extend the work time.
I doubt there's much money in 3D comics. Probably someone is getting away with it, somewhere, but they're probably connering the market. Hell, webcomics, itself, is a low return operation. You need to really be incredibly awesome, and well connected, in some form or another to make it. If you look at the giants of the form who were neither of those things, and say, "Hey, they did it, why can't I?" Competition. For the most part, they didn't have it. These people's work is older than Facebook. They set up when people thogh AOL was the Internet. Back when a forum or message board was balck text on a gray background and formated as series of nested ordered lists.
These days, anyone can make a webcomic, and doing it in 3D doesn't provide a lot of "snazz." In fact, kind of the opposite. It's like making a comic with photos of real people. It feels wrong.
You gotta really up your stylization game if you want to do it. Make it look like an artist was at play. This doesn't mean NPR, but it's like the difference between a bunch of stick figures and Dresen Codak.
Look, I'm not saying bad art can't win. XKCD, however, is bad example, as Randall is from the first or second wave of Webcomic artists (Also, Randall is talented artist who just happens to draw stick figures. Not saying he's shown a full range of artistic ability, but if you look at some his more ambitious pages, you can see he knows what he doing when it comes to drawing. Also, his early work tends to show a less simple aproach to the art). A better example is One of One Punch Man. Frankly, if your idea and story and storytelling is as good as One's then you can do anything if you try hard enough. But One isn't that great an artist, or least wasn't when he started. The Current manga and OVA versions are designs by a mangka who was so impressed by the OPM story that he wanted to redraw it.
You don't necessarily have to rise that high to make a living, but you're starting the horse race carrying the horse if you try to do 3D without some kind of Non-Photo-Real angle (be it black and white, some crazy combo of instagram filters or full up cell or paint shading). (And quick and dirty stylizing won't do. The whole issue with 3D verses less sophisticated hand drawings is a hand drawing looks like it took effort. 3D looks like anyone could do it. Realistically, especially done well, that's not the case. It's actually kinda hard to do it well. But people don't see the effort, and ths don't value the result. It's like, I guess, a movie that's too heavy on computer effects. It tends to look cheaper than it is. Meanwhile, something Mad Max: Fury Road, which lousy with CG doesn't look as cheap because so much of the action was practial. You have to figre out the 3D still version of that. A composition so well designed that people don't look at and see a render. (Or, you know, that story so good people just don't care).
Then you've got to do the whole slogging it out thing. Success is often more about just not stopping than making money. Churning out content (of at least minimal quality) until you people start noticing you just because you've been at it so long. Until then, you'll be lucky to make enough money to pay for web hosting. I'm going to agree with Tobor. It would be easier to learn to draw.
It's not about being a naysayer. This world has an increasingly American problem of thinking that if you just believe hard enough, you can do anything. But that's just wrong. All the success stories have behind them either absurd blind luck or people who were eyes open to not just what the lay of that land was, bt what the limitations they were working under were. People who either spotted the unmet need before anyone else, or kept changing their approach until the stumbled into the unmet need. And the fact is (outside of porn) there doesn't seem to be a lot of desire for photoreal squential art, and even less for NPR that is obviously 3D.
So I raise all of these issues because if you've not found more than awesome solutions to them, you've got very low odds. Or high odds against for the glass is half empty set. John Cleese said that key to creativity (one of five, actually) is the ability to avoid committing to action until you have to. This is hard work when you have no deadline, but it still true. Doing squential art in an overrun market demand that you apply this idea to every single objection you find. Not dismissing them as naysayers because you don't want to see the down sides righ now, but actually sitting with discomfort of not knowing how to deal with the issue and giving your self permission to not know all the things. To consider the possibility that you can't solve all the the things. Because, fundamentally, you need to be doing this kind of thing because you love the thing. You need to be so passionate about doing it that you would do it if you had no chance of making money with it. That or you have to be uncommonly dogged about sticking to something and uncoomonly canny about changing it up until you win. Think Stalone and Rocky. Not Stalone in Rocky. Stalone wrote that movie. Won an oscar for the script. It was good by Hollywood standards, and everyone wanted to option it. {proably some hyperbole, there} But he didn't want to sell unless he played the lead. Which mean a lot of people saying "no," and Stalone going home and planning a new pitch. The story is he sent it out 900 times. Assume 5% call back rate, and that means he pitched 45 times before someone bit. You can safely bet all you own that he didn't use the same pitch 45 times. or 22 or however many meeting he really got in the end.
You really have to apply that same logic to trying to web comic. You really have to apply that same logic to all of the objections here. Anything can be done, if the laws of physicas allow. You just have to be honest about what you can reasonably hope to do with what you've got. You have to be clear not just what you want, but on whose already out there, and you're going to set yourself apart from them. How people tend to look at things and what kind of reactions you can expect to get from people.
(Good example, IMO: a lot people look at 3D and don't even see art. They see the specs of your computer. They aren't impressed if they can figure out you did something with a rander hack instead something that it would take 37 GPUs to render before the heat death of the universe. They are, instead, offended and feel like they need to hunt you down and put you down all over your social media presence. That's just how it is. You've got to figure out how you are going to either overcome their objections, or deal with them when they try to get inside your marketing loop. If you don't run into that kind of spoiler, you'll run into another. Because it's internet. Everyone has an opinion and the web allows them to try to paste it up all over other people's stuff. And, again, you're starting your art with method that has low reputational capital. So you need to have figured out what your value proposition is. What your offsets are. What allows you to back down the hecklers or allows you to ignore them. Stomping on them isn't really an option.)
Though curiously enough, National Lampoon and some others have had good success with this - MAD, Playboy, and others have done it. Years ago, there was a correspondence school that did full page ads of live-action comics, where the guy takes the course and is able to flip his boss off. In the 50s through 70s, there were series of comic books and perfectbound books derived from movie frames that were turned into illustrated comic-style stories. I had a few original Trek books that, had I kept them, would likely be worth more than the 75 cents I paid for them!
I've seen it used very sparingly, and when done right, it nails. I would agree, though, there's a lot lacking when using live action as a general method of making comics.
As you noted, hand-drawn comics don't have to win art awards, or to make money. Peanuts was never about the art. All the characters are super easy to draw, even Snoopy. Backgrounds are simple. Many of the latter-day comics, especially with female characters, use hyper-sexualized styling as a way to drive sales. That doesn't make them easier to do, just more likely to find an audience. Characters like Dejah Thoris or Cyblade take considerable talent to do.
Comics made to look like collages that look like cutouts from real photographs works quite well as comics I think. It has a sort of schoolchild authenticity to it.
Another possibility - set up both DA and Patreon accounts and use the DA account to post 'teaser' pages; you could set the Patreon account up to get payment by the page posted and offer a higher-resolution pdf of the full issue at a higher subscription level.
There's an exception for every rule and Star Trek fans are odd.
I'd say Mad is less of an except. They are a serious example of "what is said is more important than how. Same with National Lampoon." Playboy is along the lines of, you know, porn. People did read Playboy. But after they were done with pictorials and still bored. I don't think you can make a business model out of those things unless you have all the things. So, unless you are Star Trek (CBS will not approve. They are okay with you making Star Trek stuff, but not if you make money or make it too big, See Axanar), have the right mix of the absurdist wit and toilet humor (again, invoke Cleese here), or are mostly T&A with enough interesting content nearby that people will stick around when they get done with your T&A (much harder to do on the Internet).
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying if it worked well, there'd probably be more of it. And if you are making it work well, it's because you've got an angle to exploit. The photo collage thing, for example. That's an angle. It's going to depend on really laying up the way the images are breaking and overlaping each other. There's a fine line between a gimick and artistic design. Hard to ID, but instantly reconizable. Like the difference between a good movie and Micheal Bay movie. Unless you were very clever, I can't see that particular idea lasting beyond a short story. You'd need, I dunno. lots of easter egges and meaningful juxtapositions in your faux collage. Keep the read tightly plled into the media as well as narrative.
Which underlines my point. It's not enough to say "Well, Joe did it." You gotta asked "why did that work for Joe and why isn't market saturated with it?" Then, "How can't beat those limits, how can I escape the box?" I don't know if loading your fake clippings with easter eggs would do the trick, but it's thinking in that space "How do I value add this?" The biggest thing against any web comic is the glut of other webcomics. But the preference of the reader base for hand drawn art is still a factor. You can assume that exists because they don't know better, or you can ask yourself if, honestly, with all the people who have and use Daz, is this being used elsewhere (answer, yes. They aren't that popular). So what's you angle.
I Thought I could get away with good story and a different look. Didn't work. For lots of reasons. Not good enough story (I think it's great, but my execution was weak. Of course, I thought I'd have more time for updates. My look wasn't nearly what I'd hoped.
I have
done
better
since. But it's not enough. You really gotta put the head time in, and figure out how to visually set yourself appart. That's harder to do when iray is free to anyonw passing by Daz's front page and feeling inspired.
Back in the late 70s/early 80s we had teen magazines here in the UK (Jackie, Blue Jeans etc) which always featured a couple of photostories every week - 2-4 page comic spreads played out by models (it was how British actress Leslie Ash first got noticed, and there were probably others too). The stories all related to teen angst and relationships, and half the girls always seemed to be called Debbie and the boys called Steve or Andy, but even though the stories were pretty formulaic and you could usually see the ending coming a mile away they were always really popular. The mags just disappeared when all the pop stars that were also featured in them felt that their time was better spent drumming up an online presence instead and the photostories disappeared with them. The Young Adult fiction market is massive these days - maybe there's an untapped niche in there somewhere of readers who would enjoy a revival of the cheesy photostory :)
Again, special circumstance. In that case, real, semi famous people for young people to moon over. Call it the Hilton-Kardashian Effect. Makes it sound scientific. So how do you tap that? (Minds out of the gutter, where I just put them.)
Possibly attempt the Japanese Hatsune Miko virtual idol effect? I dunno. I suspect photocollages full of easter eggs would be easier than trying to invent an idol from whole cloth. That takes marketing dollars.
Tap into the collective unconcious of the modern teen? I believe there are whole magazines staffs who struggle with that. Seems a bit much for the single artist.
I forgot and was going to post about Patreon as well; I make payments to half-a-dozen webcomics. Dave Kellett makes roughly a thousand dollars a page for his webcomic "Drive". I'd probably hold off on pushing the Patreon until you've got a decent following and you've shown you can be depended on to deliver, but it's one more area where you can add another little bit of regular income once you're up and running and have proven yourself.
In the Photo Comics arena ("fumetti"?), John Byrne is doing a regular comic using classic Trek screen caps, and this is someone who can obviously draw. I've never bought one, but they come out regularly.
-- Walt Sterdan
Yes, fumetto or fumetti is the correct term, though photocomics is just as good. I've seen comics done with pipe cleaner characters, GI Joe's, Barbies, LEGO, and other objects, photographed and seldom Photoshopped. The idea, though, is that A) there are exceptions to everything, and B) each of the exceptions works on a different level than drawn comics. Actually, the same holds true for drawn comics, of which there are a zillion styles. Many of the most popular Web comics are very simplistic -- does it take Kate Beaton more than 30-45 minutes to draw an entire strip? I'd have to wonder. It takes me 30 minutes just to get the characters positioned where I want them in the set for a single frame, and I've been doing this for 10 years.
Comes back to developing a decent business model for 3D art, comics or otherwise. I could imagine a successful Web comic created out of old V3/M3 characters, if it had something else going for it -- wonderful writing, maybe an off-the-wall treatment, whatever. You'd still have, IMO, longer setup times, and even if you rendered in 3DL, the time it takes to render can eat into the bottom line. One really needs to consider these aspects when thinking about a pro career in 3D art, even if it's only part-time.
Personally, i see "Webcomics" as only an introductory platform. Its a modest start... that can have huge payoffs; the trick is getting and growing your audience. I can name numerous comics with very humble beginnings that became huge successes to this date. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was once a a B&W comic produced in the original authors living room and look where it is today? The Boondocks, started out as a B&W strip in a NY newspaper and later became an animated series that had 4 seasons (i think) of success.
The internet is a new media platform and i think its a great one for attaining success as it can reach readers across the globe in seconds. The hard part is obtaining and maintaining an audience. Basically having "Art" that the masses are interested in.
Think of all the household names for comic characters that started out as being comics in the newspaper: Garfield, Heathcliff, Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, etc.
I think the idea of seeing webcomics as modest start is overly ambitious. Unless you have a 10 year plan for spinning your comic into a world spanning empire.
Schlock Mercenary is pretty much all Howard Tayler wanted out life. He turned it into a six figure gig. He's one of the giants of webcomics. But he didn't go big. SM is not all over the media, and probably never will be. OTOH, One was just a guy who though he'd try being a mangaka. Now his creation is an international hit.
Bottom line, you won't be so lucky. You just won't. So if you want a chance at being One number 2, you need to plan even more carefully than I said before. You gotta work even harder to elevate your work beyond "look, another 3D comic." You gotta dig down deep. Or something.
Not like I'm ther world expert of what works. I've just observed all the things that people have done with comics, regardless of the media, and noticed how most of the big guys did not do those things (Penny Arcade being a notable exception. They've been phoning it for years). And realizing just how freaking hard it is to do that.
Wanna know the secret of Tayler's success? Six figures is the secret. And Being mormon, probably. Tayler was already making six figures. Then he realized he felt souless so he quit his job, hopped on the barely there internet and made Schlock Mercenary. His whole life became learning to art from first principles, learning to tell stories, and not missing a single update for 17 years. Apparently the only time it came close to missing an update it was because the Datacenter was on fire.
Do you have time to devote your life to this, right now, before you can guess if it will work? I'm betting not. Which means your task is that much harder.
Oh, and Tayler was already married with a fairly typical mormon sized family when he did it. Sandra Tayler must be some kind of saint to put up with that. Not every comic artist worked to that level. True. Many were dumb luck. Again, the pool of gamblers looking score is bigger now, and pool of bettors looking for a daily read is shrinking as social networks eat the internet. Talyer had determination and faith, both spirital and otherwise, and backing of his nuclear family. Many others had none of that, and they aren't remembered, today.
There are markets, but you gotta plan. You gotta figure out your angles. You gotta work out how you are going transition from "arely covers the hosting, if at all," to "People support my work on Patreon." or whatever new angle you might invent.
Of course, the best thing to do with a killer new angle is score while validating, reinvest in it and sell it as a SaaS platform to other webcomic hopefuls before the bottom falls out of the market. But I figure the market has at least five more years before someone invents a better time waster for the first 20 minutes of each day in the cube farm.
Interesting perspective, but i humbly disagree... not that im an expert either, but i see the internet and access to it only growing. Take gaming for example. At one time, gaming was reduced to expensive consoles played on TV sets... it has now transition to personal devices including phones, which is now the "Big Thing". Take the simple internet app such as Angry Birds that has taken the world by storm. Again, very humble beginnings that turned out to be doing VERY well.
I agree, that you cant present the world with "Just another 3D Webcomic", it has to be different and of great quality... but i think it can be done.
The internet is only going to grow and commerce is slowly but surely embracing it. Im committed to believing a quality Webcomic can be the launch pad to something great... we just havent seen it.... Yet.
-MJ
another consideration, rarely used media does not have as strong a draw as traditional medias
or in other words ...
if all other factors are equal, comics drawn in the traditional style (or at least appear that way)
will have a larger following than comics done in 3d models...with one exception
If your 3d model pages are as good as screen captures from block buster movies (every page)
then your comic would fall under 'graphic novel'.
why ? simply it is what everyone is used to.
It is why traditional manga can get by with all kinds of stuff, to include completely
changing the character style in mid story and giant tear drops to show emotion....manga fans are used to it.
most comic fans are not used to 3d model comics...yet
3d photo real thick graphic novels that look like stills from an action movie...a little more excepted.
Some older experimental medias were - photo realism backgrounds with standard drawn comic characters ...hard to pull off unless your story telling is spot on.
Wildly exagerated main characters who interact with more normal draw characters...works better with animated cartoons.
moral of the story - if you make your comic in a less 'commericial style' a bunch of folks will hate it without even reading it.
my personal feeling on it...Don't care...either you like it or you don't. But some artist are a little more thin skinned.
You will never please everyone, but the more you please = money. So I suggest you strike a balance based on your goals.
My Balance, I don't give a damn about financial success - makes me, for the most part, free to do whatever I want.
As long as I don't break laws...lol
Over the years from the commission work that I have done, I would say I have made about $2000 but I have a niche market to work towards and I have been offered a fairly nice amount of money recently for a 100 page comic.. The funny thing how I started out doing commission work was from a Yahoo Groups page I once had years ago was contacted by someone who wanted to start a site and needed art for it.. And now many years later I would say I have produced about 20 comics or so, some of them paid and some of them freebies..
But the main reason I use programs like Poser and daz Studio for my artwork is that I can't draw to save myself, and am often envious of those that can.. Oh also forgot that in my comics I don't use raw renders due to artifacting, and other small errors I use a third party program that will make the image look like it is from a comic book..
Below are some of what I do the first image was from a comic I never completed unfortunately since Toonycam Pro does not work well in Studio anymore the second one used a filter that came with Comiclife 3..
But in all these were done in Daz Studio I have done many more some are on my DA page and some on another site..
The Internet is over thirty years old. It's now 21 years since the "endless September" of 1996.
It's not a new thing anymore. In fact it's it's gettin got be taken for granted in the First world.
What might be making this seem all new and stff is the fact that internet is constantly throwing new applications at the masses. Some flashy some subtle. I grant that.
Web comics are not a new application. Far from it. Which again, reduces to, "How are you going make your product different," but has now reached the realm of the startup company.
It just seems a bit dreamy to think that "because Internet" is sufficient. The webcomics world is a market, and there's only so much space in it right now. Yes, there are more people on the internet every day, but many just don't English. And those who do are middling to well to do Indians (owing to the fact that India has so many languages, English has become a defacto method of information exchange across the sbcontinent, itself a lasting after effect of British Imperialism). And I figure that market of webcomics will be owned by Indians. They have their own entertainment culture with it's own rules.
So the real webcomics market is, for English speakers, at the end of the long tail off the growth phase, as the North American and EU markets hit saturation, We've gone beyond the growth phase and reaching the "people die and are replaced by new consumers phase" for those parts of the world. So let's consider the facts: Presently, the first world is looking a bit of economic bottleneck. I suspect it won't too bad, though. Automation will prevent the crash that worried people about 15 years ago, but it will still be some kind of crunch because the bottle neck is people. The Baby Boom was the last generation of big families as the majority of First World populations. Since then, everwhere has been trending toward negative population growth. Meaning the replacement customers of the future are going to be fewer that the present across most of Webcomics market. Wild growth of Internet adoption is just about done for these markets, and even your tech companies know it. There are two kinds of Startups these days. Those who are looking at ideas that haven't been tried yet in the mature markets, and those who are looking at how to apply the Internet to emerging markets (I think the latter are late off the bat, personally. Keen eyes young men were exploiting the Internet to solve problems in India in 2003, and are getting attention as world class innovators. For reals. There's hospital over there that is being looked as the model for IT integration in patient serivices).
So the days of success because the internet is new are over, IMO, outside some parts of Africa. For the rest, people are either still a bit culture shocked by the net or underestimating just how local markets outside the First World are already plugged in.
It's still down to what are you going to do use the levers the internet has left. This is no different than any long business cycle. First things are new and wild. Then the market gets crowded or the governemtn regulates. Once those things happen, it get hard to make a play, less room to move. What makes the internet seem so wild and free and young despite entering middle age, is the fact that it connects so many different markets. But that doesn't make the webcomic space any less crowded, or any less mature. So how are you going to innovate in that mess? Bottom line, 3D is not innovation. Not by itself. Perhaps motion, I dunno. I might know if I had more "me time" but as it is I don't. So I've not gotten past understanding what I did wrong two years ago. (Daily struggle to stay alive and sane, wot.) I could make a list, and most of it will be really thing I did wrong, not externalities. But I'm fairly certain that the externalities would have killed me anyway. If I hadn't made the mistakes that were just mine, I'd have merely died in style.
My big point in all this is that we're past the cowboys and mavericks stage of hotfooting it success in webcomics. Now, if you want to break in, you need either a real easy market (none exists that I can think, but others may have ideas of niches that sizable and unserved) or an honest to Dog business plan. And, like as not, just using Studio to do the art limits. As other have noted, what you get in rapidity to completed render against traditional art, you lose in setup time. A guy with a pen has the option of limiting things down to line art, or lines an flats, or lines and highlights, or any other combo of incomplete renders. So do we. When girl with pen (or wacom tablet) limits things down, they save time. We don't. It costs us MORE time because our tools are geared to more complete renders and we have to take steps change the output in addition to to whatever standard process we use.
I think what I've said about where 3D photo real sits in the sequential art world is fairly accurate. While I know and knew there were exception to the rule about comic by photo looking a bit weird, I suspect even that gets more respect than 3D art. People just don't respect it until you make them. And you make them by upping your game beyond stuff you could just buy (not say you shouldn't just buy stuff, but you still have master the stuff you buy and make it your own).
I've given though to how one goes about overcoming a lot of the limits. For a daily or semi-daily comic, it shouldn't take more than 4 to 8 hours to produce an update. Preferably half that. Most of this is done by exploiting the the thing the 2 artist can't do as well as you can. As for what that thing is: Consider Scott Kurtz. If you get it. let me know, because then you're starting to think about what your options really are.
Everyone seems to love art. But it also seems like everyone wants to pay as little as possible for that same art. I know painters who put a lot of effort into their work, only to have the potential client want to pay little more than they would for a 'starving artist' assembly line painting made in China.
Marketing is crucial, just as it is for any line of business. So is having an efficient workflow. Every single successfor independent contractor I know has a streamlined, effective workflow that allows them to complete their tasks far ahead of schedule so they can move onto the next project. Singular Blues mentioned Scott Kurtz, I think that's the right name to mention. PVP is a very simply drawn strip that clearly shows Scott Kurtz has a workflow so efficient that it rivals Jim Davis' on Garfield. I'd personally prefer a throwback to Walt Kelly but I'm in the ever-shrinking minority. And if you're doing this as a business, that's what counts.Scott Kurtz understands what his market is, and he knows how to target it.
There are a few who use Poser for comic creation - don't see why Studio couldn't be used. Here is a Webinar where the creators of 'published' comics talk about there work flow with 3D software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql9OOKgeCII
Edit: Couldn't figure out how to imbed the video in the post.
I pcked Kurtz because "real" artists gave him a lot of crap for what he did to streamline his work flow, and I rememeber it. And it applies to using 3D assets.
PvP is bassically a bunch of image macros lined up to tell a story. Kurtz has reduced his his characters to minimal shapes that he can just cut and paste into the frame. This doesn't mean he never draws, but it does mean he understood that 99.99% of the time a character is on screen, they are doing the same things. For a pure 2D toon/impressionist comic, the only question is are they facing right or left.
This applies to 3D. A good actor figures out how a charcter moves, stands and walks and runs, not just to build the character but so that you will have subliminal cues about "That's Captain Danger" the instant you see her on screen. The same goes for comics. 99% of the 99.99% of the time the actor is doing the same stuff, they aren't touching anyone. Perhaps a thing. sually the ground.
And Poser/Daz not only allow you to apply a pose from a library, but save one. The advantage the 3D artist has over the 2D is that like Kurtz, the 3D artist can reduce a character to series of recognizable poses, but the 3D artist is not limited to just Left or Right. And when the 3D artist tweaks a pose in their posing program, they can SAVE IT TO THE LIBRARY of poses for that character. When the 3D artist has to break down and build a special pose for an action scene or high drama shot, they can SAVE THE SPECIAL POSE TO THE LIBRARY FOR THAT CHARACTER. With mCausal's scripts for droping actors to the floor directly or by the bottom of their shoes, the 3D Daz artists should always see their scene set up time dropping on average for most of their works, because most of their character should have a cluster of poses and expressions that make up there identity, and the artist should always be adjusting the storage of said poses to make the best use of them. And always geting a stonger library of useful poses to keep the variety up. With the pose scripts to be had on ShareCG or one of the, I think, Zev0 products, they should be able to chop up and mix and match the main poses for any character and inject variety. 9 times of 10, the most work it should take to do base scene set up is rotating a figure and chosing an expression strength (Because you'll be designing custom expressions for your character along the lines of the 25 epxressions memes, and saving those to pose control dials or presets. Again, most of the time, your character's expressions are variation on a theme. That's why the 25 expressions memes exist).
It's always going to be a slightly longer time for the 3D artist to do the same work as the efficient 2D artist. But the 3D artists can use Kurtz-like cheats to stay competivies, and can more easily store and reuse one off designs. (A custom angle for the 2D artist may never be useful again, where as a custom pose for the Daz artist can be shot from many different angles in the future.) The #d artist will always need to dive in and tweak the fine details, but not for every frame. By reducing things to presets, the 3D artist fees themselves to choose what they need to focus on for maximum impact.
This is the kind of thing the 3D artist has to think on. Accept that you are starting from low reputation position. Don't waste time finding the counter examples who make it work. Focus on what you can do to turn this disadvange into something that works in your favor. Lie, I dunno, planning. Planning your business. Because you aren't saving time for beer and chips by streamling your workflow and saving or efforts for later reuse. You are saving time for all of the other hard work you need to to to make success of it.
@ Singular Blues - you put it much better and in more detail than I could. Thank you. The streamlined, simplified workflow reminds me not only of web comics but also of the limited animation stylings of the 1960s. Critics called it "illustrated radio" but it got the job done and made money.
I think it's pretty clear that no one here thinks they're going to hit instant success and quit their day job overnight.
That said, it's also a fact that everyone here -- bar none -- has a need to create artwork. 3D content costs money, and many of us would like to recoup some of that with the possibillity -- however slight -- of maybe making artwork full time however far in the future that might be.
There's a lot of good advice, and most of the best focuses on what's needed if you do want to do this for a living. All of it was fairly realistic, not negative, which is nice to see.
Some of the best advice concerned streamlining production; I've been doing computer production art/dtp in one form or another since 1986, including 15 years in the comic industry, and probably the biggest hurdle for a lot of artists is the concept of "good enough". It's the difference between creating a piece of Art (capital "A") and finishing some art to meet a deadline (self-imposed or not). If you're not serious about your deadlines, it becomes too easy to keep redoing the same render over and over to try to get it perfect.
As Singular Blues points out, it's very important to set up a productive workflow. If I were setting up a production-oriented workflow for a webcomic, here's what I'd do (note, this is for a story-based webcomic, not a joke-a-day comic -- the setup for a joke-a-day comic is much, much easier but the writing is much, much harder, unless you have a real talent for it):
1. Get the main story written. There'll be changes -- daily -- and you'll think of way-cool new things to add while you're working, but without a main plot and some solid ideas you'll wander off every chance you get.
2. Thumbnail. Pad and paper, iPad or other tablet, or the back of napkins, doesn't matter. For every hour you spend visualizing it on paper, you'll save multiple hours setting up your scenes onscreen. When you sit down to do your 3D, you should already know what you're doing.
3. Create your main characters and main scenes first. Think of it in terms of filming a movie or tv series: you don't start filming it and then start building sets and hiring actors, etc.
4. Try and find a style that works for you; the discussion above is pretty good regarding 3D comics and what's expected, but a lot of the opinions are based on history. Bad 3D art isn't any worse than bad 2D art, everybody can do it, but what's changing is the audience. As pointed out, we Baby Boomers are a diminishing group, and in some ways (not the death-way, obviously) that's a good thing. Hard core, old time collectors might not be very interested in 3D art, but the kids just entering into the reading zone are used to seeing half of their tv shows and movies in the style, and will probably be more accepting of it-- again, if done well.
5. Take advantage of the very advantages built into the 3D artwork system. I'd never spend 30 minutes framing a character (if that's actually framing the character, not loading the scene and characters, posing, etc.) -- for a panel in a story I doubt there's a lot of value-add to fine-tuning the frame past the first 10 minutes, certainly not enough to justify the extra time that could be used for multiple renders. I generally load a scene, drop in and pose characters, add one of my default light sets and render. On my old iMac, it takes between 10-20 minutes for 4096 x 3072 pixels; I almost never render anything smaller, but might do a spot-render to check some placement and such. While it's rendering, I work on other things (writing, thumbnailing, textures, etc.). Once it's done, I save it, rotate the camera, and do more renders of the same scene from different angles; if it's a really good scene, I might render through another cycle with slightly different poses and expressions. After an hour or two, I usually have over half-a-dozen renders. I might only need one right now, but I now have a library of shots that can be used again later, especiallly when some shots will be closed-ups and others far shots.
6. Try and find a postwork workflow that suits your style. For me, I started with using PWToon on everything, but after thousands of renders found I was losing some things (shadows and special effects shaders suffered badly); I found a style I like using some Topaz filters (clean and simplify) and a few Photoshop actions for altering the colours, shading and outlines. Is the final output awesome? I don't think so, not as good as if I spent hours fine-tuning each render, but is it "good enough"? For me, yes. The final output is a one-size-fits-all style that totally removes my postwork time on the images. Once I have a batch of renders finished, I run a single batch action in PhotoShop that does the postwork on as many images as there are in the folder, while I eat, sleep, or go for a walk. It's about compromise; I've tested quick renders and drawing over them, but it takes me longer to do a single panel well than it does to render four or five more panels. That said, if DAZ ever came up with a trimmed-down Studio that let me render smaller, simpler images on my iPad Pro, I would very likely switch over to doing paint-overs just for the freedom to stay away from my computer more (and change my format to match) .
After that, it's page assembly with whatever program you want to use for panels and word balloons.
Hopefully that's not all stating the painfully obvious, but I think that anyone thinking in terms of doing a webcomic should go for it, but that they should have a plan and a goal in mind first.
Will you make it? Statistics say that 80% of entrepreneurs fail within the first 18 months, but that doesn't stop 100% from trying, and trying anyway is how the 20% succeed. The bonus is that your'e probably not counting on supporting yourself on the earnings in the first 18 months, or probably in the first 48 or 60. It takes time to build your audience, and the longer you're prepared to build, the better.
I'd mentioned Dave Kellett earlier. He started with his brilliant "Sheldon" strip, but always wanted to do a sci fi strip, "Drive". After a few Drive comics here and there, he had to put it aside for other work, but lamented not being able to afford do to it. He turned to Patreon (remember, he already had a solid following via Sheldon) and now makes about $1000 per page -- not per month, per page -- and he's since added Sheldon to Patreon -- another $1000 per page of Sheldon.
It's difficult to guess where we'll be in 5 years, but it's worth it to follow through to the best of your abilities. I remember an interview with a comic artist who loved to hear people at cons tell them they were "thinking of doing a comic" -- he loved it because he knew that 95% or more of them who were only "thinking of it" would never actually do it, which meant less competition for him.
-- Walt Sterdan
What Walt said.
It was funny, I was sure Kellett was the example I wanted to use, and I have no idea why was confusing him for Kurtz. Fortunately, I stopped myself and checked that.
And of course, never forget that you are inescapably automating some of this. I do NPR in blender, personally. (Not they you have to.) That means I can export scenes (I've got materials translation automated), preview the render then save them. The cue a bat file, execute and let it render while I'm doing something else.
Like sleeping.
I said I made mistakes when I started. Not planning and reality testing a workflow was one of those mistakes. Not thinking ahead and realizing that a whole lot of things I was doing could be saved and recalled on demanad was another. If I ever go back to it, it will be with a mch, much more detailed plan of action, and the understanding that the plan needs to be sanity checked before, during and after execution. Plan Do Check Act. It's not just for quality management certification. It's a good idea.
I did a web comic for a year. Speed was an issue; this is one area that while I normally am leery about pose packs, they can GREATLY speed up panel workflow.
hmm there seems to be a great deal of difference between what one person thinks -good money or big bucks- is equal to.
just my opinion
good money = $100,000.00 a year
big bucks = $400,000.00 + a year
good joe job = $ 38,000.00 a year
making $1,000 is ok but not 'good money'
that may explain why I say only a few make big bucks...those guys who make about half a million a year
a few do...but not many
Peace all
LOL. That's the spirit.
Every time the Powerball lottery jackpot reaches a new record limit, the statisticians tell us we're more likely to be struck by lightning or hit by a falling piece of space debris than winning the lottery......
Then someone wins. Sometimes multiple people purchased the winning number in different places. Yet I have never heard of any Powerball winner getting struck by lightning or hit by space debris.
Yeah, except 90%+ of them are terrible. When they're not unbalanced they're unrealistic and make for a very "hey, everyone, I did this in a three-dee program!!" . Even the "everyday" sets need lots of editing to be useful in anything but overdone pinups. Too bad there's not a "Vermeer pose set." That's the way real people stand or sit.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer#/media/File:Johannes_Vermeer_-_A_Lady_and_Two_Gentlemen_-_WGA24639.jpg -- could actually have been a freakin' photograph!)
There are a few decent action pose sets useful for action comics, as long as you're doing an action comic.