What is your opinion on the 3d comics?

[Darth_Biomech]

Judging by the topwebcomics.com, they seem to be ragingly popular, considering that they make a half of the top-10 best webcomics in the rating.

What's your opinion of that, uhm... Art style? Technique? Medium?

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My very subjective and very negative opinion rant. TLDR: I REALLY don't like it.

To put in plainly, I HATE it. I HATE it so god damn much!
Their popularity leaves me completely slack-jawed and with faith in humanity draining very rapidly. It's obvious that they all are created in a program called "poser 3d", or was it "daz 3d"? No difference really, these programs are letting you create human characters from a basic human template model a-la videogame RPG character editor screens. They all are characterized by the abysmally bad render quality (It would already be considered bad as far as late 90s, think about that), ultra creepy "realistic" human models with limited control for facial expressions, and lots of reusage of stock assets that were either free for downloading, bought in the app's store, or maybe even just straight out torrented. So basically you have ready premade characters, ready premade assets and environments, all that's left to do os to cobble them up to a scene, pose the models into something approximately resembling a natural pose a human could take, and hit render. All that was left to do is add speech bubbles and your comic frame is ready! With that it is probably possible to chug out pages on a hourly basis.
Oh, and all of these 3d comics have rating "R". Why? Because the people that the program lets you to create are naked by default, and fully detailed. Maybe then you'd need to spend some effort to create clothes and outfit your characters with them? Oh, but do not bother, the asset resources are also chock full of pre-made clothes. Many thousands of poser "3d artists" on DeviantArt do not even bother with outfitting their characters with any of the clothes, 90% of their art and stories are about fanatical nudists.

So you see how appaling it all looks to me? It requires zero creative effort. It's far worse than those sprite webcomics that were popular at one point, because at least those sprite comics were pleasing to look at and had some aesthetic and internal artistic consistency, and many at least featured custom-drawn original sprites, or edited the sprites they had.
These things on the other hand are frankensteined out of assets made by a bunch of different people, all with a different quality level, all for entirely different purposes and styles. So they will and do clash with each other stylistically when brought in together. Add in a bare bones outdated render engine that somehow manages to look worse than even direct screen grabs from the editor window...
I would guess that what's explain the popularity is the "R" rating - since models are naked and anatomically detailed by default - it's trivial to create sex scenes with them. But who for the love of god would find scary and badly rendered, badly posed 3d model porn arousing?! I've had higher standards even when I was fricking 14 and ready to hump anything remotely female-shaped!
The only and last real explanation I have is the rating fraud and botfarms that constantly vote these to the top. But it's awful lot of effort and surely the website would have some measures against vote cheating?

Like, I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that all of those projects were made by the same people.

Do not take me wrong, I am not against the idea of a comic that's 3d instead of drawn. I would want to check that out.

But I also am a 3d artist myself, and I understand that for the 3d comic to have any shed of quality in it (Or to come out on a schedule that differs from a glacial crawl), it will have to be an order or two magnitude more of an effort sink than a 2d comic, and have a budget and\or a team on par with feature-length CGI animations. New character? New location? In 2d a skilled artist can produce a ready drawing in a day. Concepting out a new character or new location would probably take less than a week, if not the same day (if we count out subsequential refining). In 3d however, on average those take about a month worth of full-time work to create. That's 2d concept+model+textures+materials that define how these textures look+bone and rig manipulator setup that will allow you to pose it, and only then you can finally start using that character in the comic. Environments do not need rigs, but they have about three times as many details and objects in them. Also, note how in film productions all these steps are usually done by completely different people, and it still is several weeks of work, since many steps require the previous steps to be finished first.

[malwdark]

I did try that and came to the same conclusion xD making a comic with 3D requires a lot more of work and money than 2D.
It may seem easier for someone who doesn't know how to draw but even having all the money on the world to hire 3D modelers, posing each frame is hard.
Still I've seen people making the covers of their books with super bad 3D renders and show it proudly

[scribesunlimited]

I'll be honest with you guys, I think they're toying with the voting system somehow. I've visited each of these comics before, and they aren't that popular, don't get a lot of readers, or visits. So...I'm stumped as to how they net so many votes, and it seems that they do it every month.

I think TopWebcomics is fried, and I think we'll gradually wean ourselves off it ourselves, until further security measures are implemented.

[CommanderMarty]

I prefer 2D comics with 3D assets over 3D comics.

Also the 3D in those banners look awful, I've seen GMOD posters that looked better than that.

[ninjashira]

I personally don't care for 3D comics, I just don't really enjoy the aesthetic. But I love the fact that the 3D medium is available for people who want to create comics but lack the drawing skills necessary to do illustrate one the traditional way. I think anyone who wants to make comics should make comics by whatever way they can! And if that means using 3D models or taking photographs of action figures or doing sprite art or collage or whatever, then that is awesome and they should do it!

[Phantomlight]

I have always loved and enjoyed 2D anything much more than 3D. I like 3D movies, but I just find myself going back to 2D ^^ And in terms of 3D comics, I've never read one and, at least for the ones you've shown us, I don't see myself checking them out ^^' The art style reminds me of video games for the PlayStation 2 which aren't my preference but it's not bad. It just looks a bit uncanny? It makes me feel uncomfortable. 3D takes a lot of hard work so I commend these creators for them taking on this challenge, but it's not something I personally like. I think creators who use 3D backgrounds and elements can merge 2D and 3D pretty well. And even if they do not, they have their reasons to make the backgrounds and objects 3D and I don't blame them ^^ 3D spaces and objects look really cool to me, but the 3D people just make me feel uneasy xD So an entirely 3D comic is not something I'd be interested in personally.

[Macarenaoftime]

On a more positive note. I want to share with you guys a pretty cool comic made in 3D.
The author has a background as a film director and in animation, so the quality it's pretty good overall.

Even if you dislike the art style, I would still recommend it immensely as it's a very well-put-together horror story and thriller.

Elena

My personal opinion is that if the core story is good, then the art it's just the icing on the cake.

[rajillustration]

Depends on the 3d. There's 3d illustrators who do incredible stylistic renderings that are really cool. But, you need to have a good understanding of lighting and camera and rendering to really get your work to that illustrative quality. To do it for every scene in a comic would take ages to set up, actually.

So I see a lot of potential in 3d comics--do I think they're all doing it? No...

I feel like it's very, very difficult to do 3d uniquely and to do it well. We tend to treat it like it's simple, and it is if you're just opening up a free poser app and moving around objects--but making models from scratch, planning your styles, your colors, setting up renders, rendering in layers, often messing with those layers in photoshop
--yo that takes a long time. I'll just draw.

[artemficta]

I agree with the statement that they're probably cheating the votes. Top Webcomics is pretty easy to cheat if you have multiple accounts and multiple connections to the internet. Most everyone I've talked to about that common style of 3d comics hasn't liked it.

I don't particularly agree that making 3d comics is harder than 2d, or more expensive. You just have to know how to take advantage of the many many many free addons and assets out there (especially for Blender). I did seriously consider doing a 3d comic for awhile, and it would have been faster than what I'm doing now, and 100% free. I chose not to do it in the end though because I still do prefer my drawn style. But it is completely doable to get a fully 2d attractive look with 3d based on how knowledgeable you are about the software and your skills.

[ar-ninetysix]

I can't see it working well in any other way than trying to pass off the 3D art as 2D tbh even if it was expertly crafted, the way that comics are presented with panels and speech bubbles would make it hard to immerse myself in the story. It's hard to elaborate on what it is that causes a disconnect but.. Yeah.

I do remember though, there was this one artist here a while ago, and they seemed to make it work as a few black and white comic pages using only 3D elements. I couldn't even tell it was 3D until it was mentioned. I forget the name of the topic, but I really wanna link it here as an example of something I would read just based on the art

[Darth_Biomech]

3D spaces and objects look really cool to me, but the 3D people just make me feel uneasy xD

That's because a realistic digital human is THE hardest thing to do and it's something we can't achieve even with millions of dollars in Hollywood films.

3d environments for stylized comics are actually quite simple. I do them all the time:

It is very embarassing when I get comments that praise my "perspective skills".

Though they pay off only for locations that are going to show up for more than one page. I've been thinking on trying to do some tests with 3d characters, but round shapes act so unpredictably in my render of choosing (Regarding on where the lineart is generated and how thick it becomes) that I've scrapped that idea, since it was looking too blatantly three-dimensional, post-effected to look kinda like 2d, and that wasn't satisfactory to me. Gotta stick with the photoshop for now, it seems. =D

[Phantomlight]

Okay, so this is amazing xD Yeah, I should specify that the realistic human look is uncanny to me but the cartoony or more stylized characters in 3D are better, but with anything, there can be instances where even cartoony 3D characters can look a bit wonky and not really executed well? I'm thinking of that show "Butt Ugly Martians" I mean their designs weren't exactly my favorite regardless if they were 2D or 3D but I think they would have been more tolerable in 2D? Maybe that's just me xD But there are 3D comics I'd probably get into if the art was executed pretty well (doesn't have to be perfect).

[somekh]

My opinion? Overwhelmingly they're bad.

Not because I find them lazy or low-effort, but because they take away the need for any stylization.

Part of the joy and the appeal of webcomics is the style they're drawn in. Are the lines sharp? Are they gritty? Are there no lines? How is the lighting done? What are the colors like? Are they muted? Bright? Are they in black and white? Halftoned? How are the characters proportioned? How do they move? Are they bendy and cartoonish without clear joints, or are they super staunchly realistic, or are they somewhere in between? Are the expressions realistic, or are they exaggerated with a lot of squash and stretch?

Part of visual storytelling is inherently style. You CAN NOT tell a story in a graphic novel format WITHOUT style. You lose over half of the story elements, between the loss of anatomical style, ability to exaggerate expressions, and the freedom of color and shading.

These 3D webcomics use realistic prefab models that have been slightly edited, and have extremely restrictive rigs that can't be edited without breaking the whole damn thing. The shaders are usually extremely restrictive as well, unless the artist has a lot of experience with making and applying unique shaders to create a style (like with the above comic, Elena). They CAN'T exaggerate lighting, lines, styles, textures, and expressions. Since they are locked into hyperrealism (often with limited rigging, too, so even then characters look dead-faced and fish-eyed), these comics can only tell you half of a visual story.

[indagold]

I'm a 3D artist whose kinda tired of 3D comics trying to either trick you into thinking its 2D or tries realistic rendering but ends up looking like a PS1 cutscene. David OReilly's work seems to be one of the few artists that can balance both a 2D/3D visual style without it looking like trash.

[Darth_Biomech]

unless the artist has a lot of experience with making and applying unique shaders to create a style (like with the above comic, Elena)

I've read it, and unless there's some article that talks about BTS (and somebody really should share the link then!), the comic made the impression that it was a 3d model but outlined by hand. The lines are too organic to be generated from geometry, and some facial expressions were possibly hand-drawn as well.

[CursedBeasts]

I kinda like stylized 3D (think World of Warcraft) over hyperrealistic because the latter tends to look uncanny to me. But I respect the effort that goes into both styles and setting up the character models and environments.

The art in the banners reminds me of Sims 3 for some reason.

[spadesart]

I think 3d comics can be done well, but I definitely think they look better with a different approach. I have trouble reading them laid out like a traditional comic page, but I don't mind them done in board/single panel style. Sims 4 creators have gotten pretty good at staging their comics, [example] [example]
I even wanted to try making a Sims 4 story a while back, and they're definitely an interesting challenge getting the shots to come out right. Specifically having to mod-in poses and having the game lighting and weather changing regularly, or messing with the nightmare that ReShade is.

At the same time though, I agree with you that the comics that use programs like poser/daz are a little hard to read. On one hand, you can obviously put together a lot of content fast and the authors have that advantage, but the program they use seems incredibly limited with how aesthetically pleasing you can make them and it really hinders the experience imo.

[Yulek]

Going by the type of 3D that you are talking about in the OP.

YES. why do they exist.
Like. Why make a comic? There's other forms of story telling, if you have no visual creative skills, then maybe a visually creative medium is not for you.

Sounds Gate keepy, but I'm talking solely about those 3d ready made asset horrors.

There's more to a comic than to have images.. The story telling itself is through visuals. How are you going to do visual story telling if you're bound by those assets. Ahhhh.

Even a. Good story, won't be a good comic like that.

[FafasMcMelt]

looks bad, is bad, and should feel bad

[ble]

My only experience with 3d comics was looking at some listed on the bad webcomic wiki. So they were all awful.

I think most common in sites like webtoons or duch, is 2D characters, with 3D backgrounds.