I’ve just been nosing around quite an interesting site based around technology to extrapolate a 3D model from a flat photo. They work out which elements of an image are vertical, which relate to floor or ceiling, construct a simple 3D model, then texture map from the original image. It’s worth watching the intro video to get a feel for how it works.
Archive for the graphics tag
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3D modelling from flat photos
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Transforming Hands
I promise to stop talking about this soon, but bear with me… I’m still excited. One of the quite obvious benefits of using a tablet that hadn’t quite sunk in is how you can pull bits of a sketch around.
I was working on a character sketch last night, and finished drawing one of the hands. It was quite respectable, obviously hand-like and not particularly mutated or alien. However, only once I’d finished did I notice that it was a little bit too big and in the wrong place. So… I dragged a marquee around it to select, scaled it down, then pulled it into a better position.
I guess you could look at this as cheating, and that I should practice until I can sketch it right straight off. It just seems like a great idea if you’ve drawn something you’re happy with, but slightly wrong or out of position.
Another quite cool thing is to use different layers to try out alternate versions for particular parts of a sketch. So I could create a couple of alternate hand sketches for the same character, then use layer comps to look at the different versions and decide how to proceed.
I’m still playing around with some of this, but from my experience so far it seems like sketching directly to a PC opens up quite a lot of flexibility. I’m also wondering about scanning images, fading them right down to use in the background as a template. At this stage I’m just trying to emulate some of the styles I like, so this seems like a great way to learn.
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Fat Tablet
I finally got around to ordering an A3 graphics tablet, which arrived last night. I’m so happy I’d be purring right now if it wouldn’t get me strange looks and alienation.
I ended up ordering the Wacom Intuos3 A3 Wide tablet, and I’m very happy. It’s actually much larger than I’d visualised, but it’s delicious to work with. I was talking recently about how sketching directly with a tablet is tricky, but more flexible. It was tricky because I was using a tiny tablet with a large widescreen monitor. I think I actually prefer sketching with the new tablet to using paper.
I went through the whole process with a picture last night, going from rough sketches, using Illustrator to produce an ink outline, then exporting to Photoshop for colouring and shading. The Illustrator inking technique I mentioned yesterday definately seems to be the best way to produce the ink outline, and the whole thing was so much less painful than trying to achieve the same with a small tablet.
I want to practice some more and produce a few pictures I’m proud of before posting any work, but it’s coming along…
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Digital Inking
I’ve spent some time recently looking into different techniques for producing digital comic artwork. Generally it looks like there are a few different approaches, and different people end up using different techniques. The best reading material I could find (in paper) was Digital Manga Techniques. This was great for a high level introduction, but didn’t go into quite enough detail to really come away with a clear idea of the entire process.
Producing sketches seems fairly straight-forward (in terms of process, not skill!). People either seem to sketch on paper and scan in, or sketch directly with a tablet. Using a tablet is more tricky, but you get lots more flexibility by working directly with a pc. The process described in the book is to make a very general sketch, fade it down to about 30% opacity, create a new layer, then produce a more refined sketch using the original as a template. By repeating the process for a few iterations you can arrive at sufficient definition to proceed with inking.
The area that really wasn’t too clear was the best technique for inking (an ink outline is produced from the sketch, then the sketch is discarded). Inking on paper seems to require a great deal of skill, and doesn’t allow you to easily correct mistakes. Digital inking looks like the best way to go, but there are a few different approaches that you can take to produce smooth ink outlines.
Drawing directly with a brush in photoshop is possible, but it’s very tricky to produce smooth lines. The better techniques make use of vector tools to produce smooth, consistent lines and curves.
All of the photoshop techniques I’ve seen use the pen tool to draw paths, then either stroke the path, or convert it to a selection and fill with colour. The downside about these techniques is that the end result is a raster graphic that can’t easily be edited or changed – i.e. it’s a little awkward to adjust the original vector that it was based on. You can convert the path to a selection, save the selection and use that to restore the original path at a later stage, but the process is quite cumbersome.
Knowing that Illustrator is a better tool for working with vector graphics, I then went searching for digital inking techniques for Illustrator. The best tutorial I found is available here. This technique means that the original vector paths are maintained and can be adjusted at any stage. The resulting brush stroke for the outline will automatically adjust in line with the path changes.
I won’t know for sure until I try out all of the different techniques, but at the moment this is looking like the best bet – so scan in a sketch, bring it into Illustrator to produce the ink outline, then export to Photoshop for colouring and shading.
I’ll post about how I get on…
