One important thing, since you intent to go commercial - make sure that your free items have an EULA that supports commercial use. For Iray, it's best to start with Genesis 3 or Genesis 8. If you're going for 3Delight or other non-Iray solutions, you're probably off better with the older generations like Genesis 1& 2. What the others suggest is correct - try working with the free stuff first, and limit yourself to one generation. I've joined the academy and it was very helpful so far in overcoming some problems, as well as giving me a new perspective.Īs for making a comic in Studio, here's what I learned from my own experience - this can get rather expensive very fast. They have a free monthly webinar about visual narrative where you can get direct feedback on your artwork from other artist, and help with some issues. They offer a lot of useful advice in regards to all sorts of topics one usually struggles with as a beginner in the software.Īlso, is a great place to go. I'd recommend spending some time reading and joining the threads here: it's worth trying to learn the program first. We have a thread over in the art section: Īs for rendering, there's no quick and easy solution. if you want to have a character looking into a mirror, you'll have to render an image from the POV of the mirror, place it on the glass as a texture, and then render the image you want.ģDL can also be interesting because you can get something that looks realistic without being "too realistic." One downside is you won't get reflections (at least I haven't found a way to get reflections with openGL). It gives you a slightly cartoonish look without too cartoony.
#Custom comics for comic life 3 software
This software is for both the mac and windows and you can try it out for 30 days. If you are willing to pay I would recommend comic life from plaq, this will help you with layout if you are just starting out and it does a great job. I have a used Wacom cintique 21ux that I got cheap on craigslist and it works great with my software, I would recommend a tablet for graphic work if you are getting into doing comics it will improve your workflow alot. I generally only render the main characters in Iray but most of the time it does not have the flat 2d comic book look I want, so I use flat shaders and opengl.
You can do speed line in Krita but if you want clean lines Inkscape might be the way to go. I recommend the opengl render engine in daz studio, because just about everything can use it (my old cheap laptop can render in it) and most of my background stuff is rendered in it. Krita is a great free program that has diolouge box built right into it's software and it is free. I would use Opengl render engine in daz studio for your renders and then composit inside of, GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape if you want to use free software. Most people render in Daz Studio's Iray engine and import an image file into Photoshop for editing. And you can certaintly spend a lot of money if you want to (or if you don't want to, but have low willpower).īy render in Photoshop, do you mean the traditional use of the term in a drawing/painting context, or the 3d term? If you mean the second, it's better to render in Daz studio instead of changing formats and remaking all of your materials for photoshop's fairly limited rendering abilities. Find out if you even like doing this stuff before you spend money. I believe there's some tutorials included to direct you into setting up a scene/lights/camera/etc. However, I would suggest starting by playing around with the free stuff that comes with the software. There won't be much in the way of character morphs or backgrounds that come with the free software I'm afraid. There are other corners of the internet where it can be found as well. All of that stuff is in the shop tab at the top left.