ZBrushCentral

An Interactive Comic made almost entirely in ZBrush.

Hi Everyone!
For a long while now I’ve been wanting to try out an idea I had for a comic book. And after the studio I was at shut down I figured that would be the perfect time to give it a try. Also, with all the layoffs and the instability of our industry, I thought it would be pretty cool if we had another medium or outlet where we could still be creative and tell the stories that we want to tell…
So who knows? I figured I’d give this a shot.
Here’ what I’ve been working on. Done almost entirely in ZBrush, sculpted, rendered, and animated in ZBrush. The alley was modeled in Maya. Just to give you a head’s up, some of the links on some of my pages have links that will take you to my Kickstarter site, but you do not have to click those buttons to see the work that I wanted to share with you. http://comicpage.ofourowndevice.com/
If you click on this link you’ll be able to use the comic the way I imagined it in an app. Just give it a moment to load everything it needs to load, then swipe in the panels from left to right. When the gray sphere lights up that means you’ve played through that panel and you can move on to the next one. Thanks!

Attachments

ComicPage_Thumbnail_Forums.jpg

Here’s a bigger picture of it.
ComicPage_Thumbnail_Forums.jpg
Also, the word bubbles won’t make as much since unless you animate the panels in the demo.
http://comicpage.ofourowndevice.com/

Cool idea! The idea of adding a camera move to each panel is simple but effective. I think the interface is a little clunky though. I do like being able to scrub through though, but I had to click and drag across the panel twice to get through the entire sequence for some of them. Maybe it could be set up so one drag across plays through the entire panel. Perhaps you could also give readers the option to just play through the panel when they click, and in the settings there could 3 or 4 speeds to choose from to accommodate different people’s reading speed. It would be nice to have both options. Personally I would want to watch it just play through smoothly first, but then be able to go back and scrub through to check out all the details. Nice work though. Can’t wait to see more!

Hi Chief71!
Thanks for the input! I think next time I will plan on each panel taking just one swipe to finish for the sake of consistentcy. And also maybe having a progression bar would be good too, so that the reader knows when the end of the panel is coming. I think if there was a progression bar it would ok to have panels with varied amounts of frames. And it would make it ok for there to be some panels with longer running animations if there a longer or even second progression bar.
As for a play option, I’ve heard that mentioned before and I think that’s a great idea. I will definitely try to implement that as well.
It was great to hear your thoughts on it! Thanks!

Just WOW, amazing

That is awesome!! I have been working on a graphic novel the last few months myself Im mixing Zbrush,Vue, and some Daz as well…Heres a link to some of my work https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.654108381319231&type=1 ALl the space ships are done in zbrush and rendered in zbrush

You should checkout Madefire. They have released their motionbook tool to artists to use.
http://www.madefire.com

i really like the idea here, but i think the execution needs a little more finetuning.
i think 5-6 images a page like this is going to be too much. maybe mix it it “normal” pictures or bigger “action scenes”.
i guess it works better on a tablet, but i think people could get bored, having to scroll on each picture.
but very cool and fun idea. looking forward to see where you take it.

-r

Thanks BlackMath! I’ll check out their tools.

Promethias, looking cool!

rasmusW,thanks. I totally agree. I think the plan is going to be for the action shot or maybe the panels that would benefit the most will get the interactive version. Most of the time it’ll be the biggest panel. And the other panels will be the smaller supportive ones with no interactivity.

Thanks for the comments guys! :slight_smile: