#bran scuplts

[penwrythe]

Thinking about returning to my NPR (nonphotorealistic rendering) research for my WOR style guide thingy.

Fell off of it last year, but since I'm working on these three characters here, it's important to remind myself of the goals for WOR's style.

Also, need to make a moodboard and media example list for WOR's fantasy 3D/2D aesthetic.

With this said, guess what I found recently!

So, I was revisiting an old webcomic I had read in my teens called The Dreamland Chronicles by Scott Christian Sava. This site is currently an archive of the 3D comic series that started in 2006. If you visit, just know that some of the pages, both the old 3D comic and the 2016 drawn comic, are either missing or misplaced throughout the site. I'm not sure if this site is still updated or maintained.

I found a series of pages that explained how The Dreamland Chronicles was made. Pages start here! This gives me a good starting point for developing and designing 3D characters, environments, and assets for a comic. The only thing that's missing is the render time (the style is similar to most 3D animation during the early 2000s on a 3D Studio Max version during that time) and how they organize all the files.

I did check the comments under one of these pages on the site and the creator did mention that (mind you, this was back in 2008 with 2000s 3D software) it took either a few hours or days to render a single frame. Nowadays, Blender, Maya, 3D Studio Max, and other 3D software are more advanced, so something like this would take half the time on a good computer rig.

Got some more information about the comic from the FAQ section here. It's no longer on the main site, but still accessible on the Wayback Machine.

What I found interesting is that once all the characters, sets, environments, and other assets are completed, it takes about a day or so to create a page. Depending on what the scene calls for, maybe more pages created within a day. Back when Dreamland Chronicles was running, the comic updates five times per week.

~ I mean, still, there's render time. So maybe, pages were created one week, then rendered out while the next pages were created, and so on?

Considering this comic's semi-realism style, yeah, that render time is going to take a while.

For WOR's style, I'm going for a cel-shaded 3D style similar to my own drawn style.

Example, my Spoon Ballerina character from last year, from concept to 3D model. Note: the 3D render on the right was less than a minute for a single character and plane using EVEE (Blender 4.0).

Another example is the anime 3D models by Bran Sculpts like the one below:

Both examples use Blender, and while Bran uses Blender's emission shader nodes to create the flat colors and shadows (with painted shadows), the Lightning Boy Shader I use also works off of emission nodes. Lightning Boy has the advantage of layer shader nodes, thus simplifying the setup for more complex models. The painted shadows I might had to do for certain areas of the character depending on how they are lit in an environment.

Rendering time might not take long for these- hang on

Downloaded and rendered the Akko rig - in less than half a minute. That's just with one character, tho, how long would it take with a full scene with a fully modeled environment? Idk, but maybe time might not be an issue for this style lol. And the character models might not need a high poly count for rendering, either. Interesting!

The most time-consuming thing I could see for WOR's style is modeling and texturing (gods, humans, all mimic/war and civilian object types, assets, environments, etc) per issue for Rise of Relics (maybe for months depending). Setting up for a scene (for panels and so on) might not take long at all...

#mystuff #npr #nonphotorealistic rendering #blender #blender 3d #3ds max #dreamland chronicles #webcomics #3d modeling #wor research and inspo #worldofrelics research notes #worldofrelics #art #bran scuplts #Youtube