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Behind the Scenes: The Raven 3D Comic
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 09:53:24 +0000 UTC
I just love the "spooky" pop-culture, so every year when October comes, my pencils are sharpened and Blender open and ready to go. And aside from a classic illustration work, I always like to experiment a bit and try something out of my comfort zone.
This year, a new Blender version came with a new shader node called "ray portal", which basically works as a camera inside your scene and allows you to project part of your scene to a material. But not just a flat snapshot, that could be obviously done before by pre-rendering a part of the scene and then adding the video as texture. This is different, because it allows you to project in 3D, so when you move around the object that has a ray portal shader, you're able to see in 3D what happens in the other part of the scene.
When I thought about possibilities with this, beyond the obvious "doorway to another world" stuff, an animated comic book strip came to my mind. Wouldn't it be awesome, if the you could animate your scene and then just project different angles and views of the same scene in comic strip frames next to each other?
So again, this time a technology dictated the way I was going about to create something. And now that I had the vessel, I had to fill it with something.
Visit the full Pinboard here
Naturally, I wanted to stick to a haunting October theme and I wanted to find something suitable for a comic strip. So something simple, but quite powerful. And I always admired older "horror" works. Like the original Dracula novel. By today's standards, it could be read to a first grader, but there is something chilling in the simplicity of the older horror narratives like this.
And similarly, you don't necessary think of The Raven by E.A. Poe as a horror poem, though it definitely carries some weight, displaying a person going through a loss, alone with himself and his thoughts, slowly decaying into madness. It doesn't really matter, if the raven in the story is supernatural, or not. But it definitely serves as bad omen and adds a shroud of mystery.
And this simple narrative allowed me to simplify the poem into just four scenes, starting with the arrival of the feathery guest. I just had to pick a few distinct lines from the poem, to follow the story. Of course, I wouldn't be able to fit the "real" story into the strip, I had to basically dumb it down to "a bird flies into his room and says 'nevermore' while refusing to leave", but it all felt much more fresh and so much more interesting, than another zombie/murder/ghost story.
Now more than ever, it was important for me to start with a sketch. It always helps me to ideate my scenes before I start 3D work, but for a conceptual work like comic strip, it felt absolutely necessary. First I created the frame layout and sketched in places for the speech/text bubbles. Then I methodically tried to extract the lines from the poem to fit the scenes I had in mind. I basically went backwards, picking the lines for the last frame, sketching in a very stylized raven.
The rest was mostly about thinking about the camera angles of the room, and deciding on the key moments that come before the raven speaks. So tapping on the door, then on the window and then the fluttery entrance. Simple.
To create this in 3D, I modeled the room layout and created a duplicate, since there were a two states of the room. With the window closed and empty and then with window open, drapes swinging and bird inside the room.
I then used these two separate stages to create animations and set up the portal shaders to project on a simple comic frame layout with the speech bubbles prepared beforehand.
You can watch the full process video on Youtube.
