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Well, even the terrible ones at least got the body in some semblance. I don't mind tweaking it after that, I just don't want to spend a lot of time doing things like 'put your arms down' or whatever.
But, yeah, there's a delicate balance between adjusting and correcting for godawful sets.
Agreed, especially in shots where only part of the body is showing. I would much rather use a "go-to" and a "sit" set of poses for places like Moonshines, GIS and some of the others than spend too much time starting from scratch; nine out of ten times I'm framing the upper part of the body and it doesn't really matter if the buttocks are floating above or plunging through the seat -- time saved equals money, and even a pose set with even a few useful poses soon pays for itself. And as mentioned above, once you tweak your pose, you save it and you won't have to tweak it as much -- or at all -- next time.
-- Walt Sterdan
Walt and timmins.william hit that nail sqarely, IMO.
The important part of any particular frame is only what's in the frame. Everything else is unnecessary. It just doesn't matter. With unbiased renderers, you do have some concern about reflected light and shadows, but even then, just being in the ball park is usually enough. If it's not in the frame, it just doesn't matter. And trying to always fram a whole subject is usually going to result in poor images. Frames service story, so you try to pare them down to only the stuff they need to service the story. This is something I still struggle with. I saw a youtube series on the sort of visual language of comics. Not fully educational, but eyeopening if you don't think of this stuff often. Unlike many comic related vids, it doesn't goe forhour long digression into the lore of a particular hero or series, but instead looks at this artist, or that book and talks about what was going on interms of visual information insuport of the story, on different levels. IIRC they were 10 minute, 15 minute bits. Which makes them 3 to 5 times as long as the perfect youtube vid (there's a reason the Green brothers have this thing about not going over four minutes in their vlogbrothers bits), but generally, 15 minutes is a good range for an instructional or informative series.
I will try to find that guy and link it up, because it's good stuff.
It also comes back to one of things I was saying about this whole thing being really really hard, and doing 3D making it harder. The whole point is it's visual story telling. It was pointed out that John Byrne was doing Star Trek photo comics, and I was dismissive of that. Still am. It's STAR TREK. Instant audience. But also, Byrne. Pretty sure he knows how to reframe the still to create the maximum effect. You need to know, too. You don't need to be Byrne, but you do need to make hobby of studying the things Byrne knows. The vids, if I can find them, are a good source of inspriation and pointers to ideas you should probably be studying.
Which reminds me, and swings me back to "if it not in frame, it doesn't matter." Montgomery "Scotty" Scott. Lieutenant Commander. Engingeer. Has all his fingers and toes.
James Doohan. Actor, Canadian, War hero. Played Scotty. Had one or more fingers shot off in war. Most people didn't know that. He did not wear prostectics or keep fake fingers on hand for tight shots. He just cleverly kept his hand out of the frame. The few times he couldn't do that, he contrived to be holding things in ways that hid the damage. It wasn't in the frame, therefore Scotty had all his fingers. End of story. If it's not in the frame, it's not a problem. Thumbnail your layouts, even if it's just lines of text describing the image in you head. Set your actors in very basic poses that aproximate that relationship. Set your camera to frame them per you thumbnail. If it's not in the frame, it's not important. If there are going to mirrors or reflective surfaces, you need to spot/preview render at this point to see what might being reflected into the frame, but beyond that, you only worry about what's going to be in the finale image.
If you have a page of talking heads, on the schedule for today, your actors don't need pants. George Clooney tells the story that Robert Rodriguez called him one Wednessday or Thursday and asked him to play the President in Spy Kids something or other. Clooney said, sure, when. Rodriguez said, How about Saturday, at your house. Saturday rolled up, Rodriguez came over with camera and minimal light and sound crew, picked a room. Clooney donned shirt, tie jacket and a pair of boxers, sat down, and they shot it. Clooney never stood. Never left the desk. Pants were irrelevant.
This doesn't mean you always omit pants. Maybe your talking heads scene is so generic, you could get away with rendering different angles for "stock footage." In which case you need to be more detailed, just to cover the angles. But that's a secondary concern. Low hanging fruit, as it were. You first goal is getting the shot, and if it's not in the shot, it's irrelevant to that goal.
Here's an annoyance mostly caused by Daz. STOP MAKING THE WOMEN AMAZONS!
It's annoying because it's mostly irrelevant with female only renders, but messes up renders with both sexes.
It's kinda funny. I did pinups for years before doing comics. Then with Genesis 3 I started buying male content, and at first wondered why the hell the guys are all so short. They are close to the same height as the women, but when they wore heels they towered over them. Then I realized there was nothing wrong with the 6'-ish guys, all the 5'10"-5'11" women were the problem.
Best way seems to be to scale the figure, too much height morph makes them look like oompa-loompas. But scaling the women to appropriate heights jacks up all the male-female poses.
Great point. That was a hard habit to break, coming from doing pinups where I would try to get every little detail perfect (on collisions).
If it's not visible, it doesn't matter. Get it close enough so the pose is plausible & then move on.
Yeah, agreed on the height thing. Though, in my case, I just took for granted that the females were supermodel tall, I didn't appreciate what that meant. Until I settled on a character who was 5 foot, and another who was five four, then five six and finally five nine. Four different people there. It was a bit eye opening how they all compared to base female. Since I do a lot more technical stuff, now, than I do actual art, I don't see the figures in any context most of the time. It's still a bit jarring.
I'm sufficiently fast at adjusting poses, though, and I don't get much use out couples poses, so I'm over much bothered by that.
OTOH, the average height for American males is 5'9-5'10. So the 6'0-6'1" Genesis male is also too tall. I'm a "tall" guy, myself. People remark on it. I'm 6'0. Admittedly, people assume I'm taller until I prove it, but still. You can scale both the males and females down to average and still have poses match up, within reason. But you do have to use the scale, not height. otherwise the limb.body proportion goes out of whack.
I've gotten pretty good at adjusting poses too, but the height discrepancy from reality just means extra work. You go from simply tweaking to heavy tweaking/full blown adjustment.
My approach is 'it's saving me the annoying 20-50% of just getting everything in roughly the right place.'
And every once in a while it does stuff just right and I'm astonished.
Also, I find poses often inspire ideas, even if I don't use them at all.
The real pita is trying to pose archers and riflemen. Ugh.
The poses are so sensitive to body proportions and prop design that it's almost always going to take a lot of fiddly adjustment and test renders for clipping
Well, Sturgeon's Law states that "90% of everything is crap", so we shouldn't expect any better with pose sets.
That said, I think if we had a "Vermeer pose set" it would also be 90% crap. Take any one of his poses, for example and apply it -- without modification -- to one of his other "characters" and you're going to need to tweak it, because this person's arms are longer, that person's legs are shorter, that person's thinner and that one's fatter so hands are suddenly posing inside their belly, etc. At work, for example, I spend most of my day in an office chair sitting in what's basically a half-lotus -- for me, it's just the most comfortable positon for my legs and back, but most of co-workers either couldn't sit like that at all, let alone for all day. It's nothing special, it's just how my body bends. I can't sit the way that most of them do and be comfortable all day long.
What's interesting is looking at Vermeer's work -- true Art with a capital "A" -- and remembering how he most likely did it. His subjects came in with their own, personal "daily pose set", he had them try different poses, found one that would make a good painting structure-wise, then tweaked their poses ("raise your hand a little, turn your head a bit, etc."), made a quick render and then did hours and hours of rerendering and postwork, often changing the poses slightly in post.
His final render and poses are awesome, but are echoed by the better artists here (I'm not one of them) who often do the exact same thing digitally.
-- Walt Sterdan
I know what ya mean with poses, they can be a pita to get right I am in the very slow process of doing a 100 page commission comic for a website and they are after a medieval theme for the comic.. And the hard bit is going to get the bow draw poses looking right, I have a lot of ideas for it but yeah going to be interesting as going to have a lot of action moments.. lol
One other thing I do, do though is if I am after a certain type of pose but there are none already premade I will get another pose that is close to what I want and adjust from there..
I have done fairly well with commish its supported this hobby and contributed to building my latest 5K PC monster. I have almost 1 million 500,00 views on D/A. I have a specific target audience. There was more in the early days. I have many many renders, full stories ranging from 250 to 500 plus renders. I could not sustain making a living but it gets all re invested in this.
I really don't know what I'm talking about on this subject, I'm just a hobbyist with this stuff.
But I have noticed something over the years that I think is a big factor....
With the "internet economy", people have come to expect everything is free. Free cartoons. Free software. Free FB. Free tweets. Free images. Free discussions. Free Youtube. Free Google Earth. Free Gimp. Free training. Free videos. Free browsers. Free operating system. And on and on.
Many people feel entitled to all this free stuff. Heck, even the Blender Guru guy gets in trouble for daring to offer stuff for sale, even after he's spent so much time and effort to give tons of great FREE stuff over the years.
So now people who want to make money via internet have to rely on people who will pay less and less for anything. And now you need an audience of thousands or millions around the world, each of which are only willing to pay pennies for anything. And you hope those thousands of pennies add up to something that's worth your effort. And you end up begging for likes and subscriptions so more and more people are exposed to your stuff.
I dunno, I can't imagine how 3D cartoons via the internet is a money making proposition, unless of course you get tied in with a huge name studio that everybody is clamoring for. Heck, I think most people can just go to one of the many art sites and look at portfolios from some real experts for their cartoon fix.
So yeah, I guess I'm another naysayer....
There are basically two models that can probably earn some money:
Advertising - a minuscule amount of money per impression. A larger audience will entitle you to better paying ads.
Patronage - free with some donating. You need a large audience so people start following, and then need to hope you can encourage even 1/1000 to pay.
There's also outright 'buy my stuff' but that just won't work without already growing a very dedicated following.
So step one is finding something that stands out and growing an audience while polishing your skills.
What he said. You need to hit that high point of either stumbling into a cult following, or stumbling into the special thing.
Blender Guru, for all he does, isn't do the special thing (though that HDRI addon is probably an exception). He's just being ANdrew Price telling us about stuff other people put in blender.
I'm not trying to put him down, but I am trying frame why some people don't see the value he's adding. They're sure they could figure it out themselves.
That why comic scribes have slim chance. Razor thin.
I'm a writer. I think the Matrix is keen. Not so much the rest of the trilogy. Why? Simple. I could have written a better movie in both cases. At least, that how I felt after leaving the third. The thing is, not so much about me being awesome, just that my inner story editor was anticipating something much more clever. Not only didn't that happen, but the CGI climax figt was a let down, and there just wasn't enough snap.
The point being, whether I really could write a better film is irrelevant. There were enough hooks to make me feel I could. Same thing with Blender guru and the key thing about why you can, if you try hard and are luck, make money in anything online. You just gotta hit the key point where you are providing something people don't feel any particular contempt for.
Sure, many people will always feel you owe them. But those people won't pay anone for anything. It's the ones who will that you're trying to impress enough that they give you a tip. People make decent livings off of it. It can be done.
The odds are against you, but if you treat it like a business plan, then you're no different than any other one person start up. The odds are against all of them too.
I'm interested in this, in case you forgot to dig it up.
I'm not gonna get into a discussion of Blender Guru, but the guy has over 300k subscribers, and clearly he provides tons of value to a lot of people. But the point is the guy spends so much of his own time, much like zillions of other people on the internet, producing stuff for others, and asking nothing in return. but in return people give them a hard time because it didn't meet their requirements, or because he dares to offer other stuff for sale. The same people who do nothing on their own to contribute, they just sit back and criticize.
Honestly, I think the pendulum will swing on free internet content. I think people will get so tired of producing stuff and getting nothing but criticism in return that it will start to dry up. I had the same experience, but with far fewer subscribers (only a few hundred) and I produced a bunch of training videos, and asked nothing in return. And I actually had a bunch of people asking for copies of my code, asking me to spend hours tutoring them for nothing, and expecting me to hold their hands. It's strange. And 95% of those people produced nothing on youtube and had 0 subscribers. So I gave up. Lots of work, and no benefit, just people getting upset that you didn't give them more.
And that's why I became another naysayer when it comes to making money on the internet.
That's what sites like Patreon are for, although to be fair the idea with Youtube is to make money off advertisements.
I was putting up lots of stuff on DA, 4K high res images. I was thinking there wasn't a lot out there for 4K desktops. But not too long ago, I asked myself "why do I keep doing this for free?" I imagine as more places like Patreon pop up, or Patreon becomes more popular, you'll see this. Of course, your content needs to be good enough for people to want to pay.
I'm still relatively unknown, but I do pull some money in that helps offset my Daz addiction.
I scanned thru the Wiki on Patreon, and noticed they had listings of the top 50 creators, and it looks like the monthly earnings averages between $10,000 and $30,000 per month. Sounds like a lot, but I'm guessing (almost certain) these are not one-man-shows, each is probably a team of individuals who produce the content.
So at $10,000 per month, that's an annual earnings of $60,000 each for a team of two. Or $40,000 each for a team of three. And so on. And those are the top 50. Imagine the other 50,000 creators (as of May this year).
Sounds like a nice idea, I'd just be surprised if many people are really making much of a living from it.
I've been toying with the idea of making a graphic novel with DAZ and Photoshop, but just for fun. I wasn't planning on making any money, although that would be nice. Funny thing is, I just discovered web comics were a thing over a year ago. I met some guys who appear to be pretty sucessful at it. I bought their 1st volume and an art peice at a convention. I follow the comic now, but haven't paid them anymore money yet. They get money from a variety of different methods, all talked about here.
Meeting them inspired my interest in doing art again and led me to finding DAZ. I use to draw all the time, but I don't have depth perception due to faulty eyes. I use to get my proportions wrong anytime I tried to draw something from my imagination. I could draw a model or an object in front of me, but not from my head. My mom tried to get me to persue art as a career, but I just didn't see any money in it. Of course, back then, the Internet and digital art were still babies. I didn't see the potential. Oh well. The important thing now is that I get to be artistic again, but not to make money. I have my day job for that and it pays pretty good.
For reference, consider starting fiction rates. Nowadays, for genre fiction and rpgs, you might get anywhere between 2-5 cents a word.
That's just about the same going rate for similar fiction in the 1920s. And no, not adjusted for anything, the literal dollar amount of pay has not increased in 90 years.
And that's one reason I gave up rpg writing a few years in.
Just looking at some of the people I'm supporting - a web comic creator - 826 patrons, $4,600/month (he writes, pays artists to do the artwork and layout); an artist with over 2,000 patrons, $2,800+ per month; and another artist, 6 patrons, $35 per month.
So - one making a living, or a good part of one; one making spending money and supporting 4 or 5 South American artists with same; and one who might be paying his or her internet access bill. My guess is that the vast majority are somewhere between covering their on-line costs up to the monthly rent or food bill but not much more.
And the flip side of this is the market; in the 1970s the major SF magazines sold around 90,000 issues a month. Now its around 8,000 issues print and 10,000 electronic. Comic books, today, sell at a level that would have caused the titles to be dropped as underperforming in the 90s.
I've been a comic book artist for a few years (though in my case it's not 3D comics, but more traditional comic art). Comics are a very hard way to make money, particularly now that we're in a world economy and you compete with people in other countries who have a much lower cost of living and can charge FAR less than what you can. It's one of those jobs that you just have to love doing and realise that you might never make much money at (unless you're blessed enough to become extremely popular and well known, which few have been able to accomplish).
You have to love doing it, otherwise, it's not worth it. If you're looking to do it "for the money" - you'll likely be really disappointed.
THIS. The best money I've made in art has come from personal/private commissions. If you want to make money in art, make sure you're posting your work EVERYWHERE (DeviantArt, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc) and make sure you're putting out the information that you take commissions. Don't take it personally if you don't get commissions for a long time though, it takes a while before people start finding you, and sometimes one needs time to grow and learn and become better artists before the work starts to get noticed. If you're passionate about art though, stick with it and keep learning and growing and putting your work out there. :)
Genre fiction has always been a publisher's market. There's always someone willing to write it for pennies. Not that it'll be any good, but as long as it's passable, it suits the publisher's needs. They're not really looking for Heinlein's here. When they get one, they still pay pennies.
Writing at this pay level is acceptable to get some credits, though the value of the credit tends to be much less than it used to. Editors just don't value the odd blog unless it has superstar status, but sadly, most writers aren't aware of this. They'll agree to low pay and get a credit of little value. They'll wonder why the next assignment is still hard in coming.
All the genre writers I know are self-publishing. They may not be making any more money, but at least they're in charge of their destiny. (Actually, a few are making a decent wage, and using their indy-published titles to catch the interest of mainstream editors.)
My point about the poses isn't so much that they're coarse and inexact (which they are), they're simply poor examples of how a real person sits, stands, or walks. I doesn't matter how close the virtual camera is to the character. I agree they can be handy as a starter, as long as you remember to use something more realistic as a posing model, and make the appropriate changes. From examples here and elsewhere, most 3D users don't do much to "correct" the poses, and then they wonder why things don't look natural.
I've said it a bunch of times, but here it is again...
The trap people get into with CGI is that with very little effort it LOOKS so realistic!
But without skill and a trained eye, you miss countless things that leave it unsatisfying. But unlike drawing and going 'whoa, wrong number of fingers,' the path to getting better is somewhat opaque to most people.
When I started it was just to reproduce my Land Of The Giants stories after I found another artist who was making similar scenarios mentored and got me started. It went waaayyyy beyond what I expected. It got noticed earlier on by real ex LOTG cast members then commish requests came in I ran with it. I have no limits (save for child porn and other extreme stuff) as the saying goes cash is king.. If we are going to get picky and anal in regards to poses making characters realisitc. I am sure that most woman would not fight in skimpy tight outfits and heels LOL.
Yeah. Along with most women and men aren't that tall, or symmetric, and so on. Impossibly perfect models who look exactly the way you want (to the limits of your library and skill) and work for nothing more than a steady diet of electrons? Hard to beat that price. Also hard to expect realism, especially since most people's idea of realism is thoroughly unrealistic. And when trying to sell art (even when selling means giving away for free) you gotta play to expectations to some degree. No use matching reality perfectly if people complain it looks unrealistic, and dump you in the bin.
It's like explosions. They're full of fire, right? Aside from nuclear explosions, not so much. Gasoline explosions are. You do see that a lot with fuel detonations, but grenades, high explosives, and other things intended to go boom, not so much. Making all that light and flame is waste of energy that the explosive chemist wants to be put into the shockwave. The vast majority of artisitc depictions of explosions are full of fire because that's what people expect to see. It's not realistic, though. So to with Daz poses. Remember, they aren't designed to to look real as their primary aim. They're designed to get you to buy them.