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To filter or not to filter? Are CGI and photography really art?

Started by Fuzzy Modem-migration,

11 posts in this topic

Fuzzy Modem-migration

Fuzzy Modem-migration

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To filter or not to filter? Are CGI and photography really art?

 

The splinter under my finger nail. The bloated testicle in my cereal bowl. Photoshop filters. People hate them on site. Almost as much as lens flares. It seems instinctual.

 

So a bit of background. I’ve been working on a Photo/CGI comic book.

 

http://crossovercomic.com/

 

Essentially it’s a movie storyboard with speech bubbles. People seems to like the writing for the most part, and I’ve gotten a lot of praise for the imagery and the use of CGI, but nearly everyone[i/] complains about the filters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “I really like it- but those filters look terrible.”

 

A quick breakdown of what I’m doing here:

 

I start with digital photographs. Over the past four years I've amased more than ten thousand.

I use the photographs for three things.

First: My Characters are all shot in costume against blue screen. Thus far I only have one CG character (one of my other character's pets.) I have nine costumes now, the elf costume being the latest and far and above the most ambitions. It was made with tree bark, porcupine quills, modeling clay, sharks teeth, taxidermy eyes, and half a gallon (literally) of liquid latex.

Second: Textures. I try to use photos for all my textures. It helps blend the GC with the photo elements.

Third: Backdrops and sometimes foreground elements, depending on how many camera angles I'll need of the same area. When I shoot a location I try to get a few hundred angles so I'll have anything I might need.

I use photos wherever possible and only resort to computer graphics when I cannot logistically photograph the subject- such as a spaceship or a dragon. I've considered making scale models, but the ability to adjust lighting on the fly with CG proved more important the the greater realism offered by physical models.

I model in Rhino CAD and export to Maya for texturing and rendering. I also make both a high quality and low quality digital double for each of my actors in case I need a pose I didn't get during the shoot, or for shot involving dismemberment or death, or for things like creating an army.

Weapons and buildings are also created with CG, but always textured and referenced with real objects and buildings. Swords and guns are hard to match with the live action characters, but look much better than the props I originally tried to use. Now I have my actors pose with green wooden dowels that I just paint out in post.

The last step is Photoshop. Here everything is composited and matched for color and clarity. Grain is removed, blurred areas are sharpened, and sharp areas are smart blurred. I add blood, precipitation, shadows, frosty breath, glows and reflections.

For any close up shot of a character I paint in shadows based on a CG head I use for reference rendered in a separate pass with the CG lighting.

After everything is properly composited I use a complex combination of layering and filters to give the image a painted look. I've worked longer and harder on perfecting that effect than possibly any other aspect of the comic. No one filter does the trick so it took a lot of experimenting to get it right. The secret recipe is:

Three identical layers.

Top layer- Find edges filter. De saturate. Set to color burn. Adjust Brightness +75, Contrast +25 Manually paint out certain areas (stars for instance always end up black)

Middle layer- Remove from original document. Increase size to 3200 x Height. Smart Blur at radius of 10 and a threshold of 25. Run water color filter. Add back to original document.

Bottom layer- Unchanged from original. Adjust the opacity of the other two layers to the desired level.

The last step is to add the text bubbles. Which I always compress at a separate, higher level to maintain quality. The -script for the first book is 144 pages and is translating to about two pages of comic for every one page of text. The -script took me seven months to write, twenty two drafts, and more than eight hundred pages of notes. I'm still stuck on the last fifteen pages, but I'll finish them eventually.

 

Those this is obviously A LOT of work. And if I want to finish within my lifetime, I need to find ways to speed up the process.

 

The filters cut my production time in half. HALF! They hide all my seams. Without them the compositing would be painfully obvious. Like a pop-up book. Worse than the cover of the National Enquirer. I don’t use them because I prefer them but because I need them. The only alternative is to spend hours and hours in photoshop painstakingly masking each seam by hand.

 

I even get people accusing me of “cheating” -trying to pass my work off as hand drawn when it isn’t. WTF?

 

Unless someone has a better idea. And so far I’ve gotten a lot of criticism but no suggestions. It’s killing me. I need a third option. Anyone?

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Mighty Hal

Mighty Hal

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Hi Fuzzy Modem (or is it Shawn?),

 

I like your comic...it's fun and its free...and I think it's pretty obvious that you're using photos and computer skills to create it. Anybody that thinks you're trying to pass the work as OA just isn't paying attention.

 

You know that, too.

 

The thing of it is, this really isn't a subject for a board about original comic art. Your work is original but it ain't comic art -- as we both agree. A comics board would be more appropriate, a photo board would be more appropriate, a Photoshop board would be more appropriate; I just don't think this question belongs here.

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Aman619

Aman619

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hey, I got no problem with the filters or anything else. All thats important is the final images. Comics can be any manner of sequential panels telling a story. So dont sweat it.

 

of course, this is a forum for "original comic artwork" and unless you start with a pencile or inked page that you scan? Then you dont HAVE any "original comic artwork" at all. So the "future" use of comics technology trends toward the absence of original art. Again, not something I have a problem with, but this might not be the forum you are looking for.

 

back to the filters though, if you do it just to save time and not for their effect on the art? Better to take the time to silhouette or whatever you want and lay off the filters..

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