One thing that I've been thinking about for a while now is HOW I do my comic and art as compared to the result.
To give a some backstory, when I was a kid I used to draw a lot but I was always... Bad, as some children are when they first draw things. But I never took art seriously or considered it anything but fun to do, I eventually stopped drawing and moved into video games where I stayed for quite a few years, always trying to be the best at any given game I played. But during the course of gaming I found something even cooler, I loved how the 3D models looked and extracted a few from certain games to see how they were made, I found that using Blender, working with 3D models, and making 3D animations was really fun, but showing off what I made or found cool, wasn't easy or cared about all that much.
So after a while I just stopped doing 3D stuff, attempting to make games, etc. and got back into gaming, after a while fan-art piqued my interest in art again starting off with some really bad fan-art, moving into adventure fan-art (Which was pretty good in stylistic terms though still not amazing), then onto Naruto (Boooooooo!), and eventually into my current art work and style.
Where my story intersects with my current art style and question is when I started to combine my 3D artistic ability and my 2D art by using 3D models as a reference, but unlike some other artists (That I've heard of at least) who use 3D models, I make a render of that scene by messing with the depth, size, and resolution of the camera and positioning it either dramatically or plainly depending on what is needed for that panel, and then trace over it with my line of the the clothing, hair, eyes, etc. This makes it so that my character heights, proportions, and whatever else is anatomically correct to that specific character, though the models only really affect the proportions of the characters and sometimes (if they're wearing skin tight clothing or armor) what they wear, as well as certain background shots.
The question starts here:
Does the end result justify the means at which it is obtained? Yesterday when I was mulling it over I decided to draw the lineart for a scene in my comic Marked:
And I decided I'd try to draw one of the linearts by sketching the position, sketching the lineart of the character, adding clothes, hair, and trying to get the expression to look a bit like he's given up.
- This one took anywhere from 2 hours and 45 minutes to 4 hours (I can't remember if I started 1-2 hours earlier than I think I might have, it's possible)
The next one I drew was with my 3D ref style, all together (Model set up, moving into position, setting up camera, then drawing the lineart)
- It took 1 hour and 40 minutes
Both of them are set in the same area and environment but I had different inspirations for the position of both after I looked at how it could have turned out through the camera.
As the title says
If you didn't know it was made using 3D models would you notice? And does the method matter if you're making quality content at a much faster pace than without?
This question also carries over to if I were to get a series greenlit as a premium comic either by itself or through the incubator program. If I can do it quickly and make it look really good then does it matter how it's accomplished?
Not to say I don't want to draw regular non-3D model assisted drawings but I usually use it to draw references for things I need inspiration for, like the Gates of Hell for Chapter 8
I also use non-3D model assisted drawings when creating references for certain characters or weapons that would be difficult to model without a visual reference.
