Making stories of Comic proportions. Part 2

Hi everyone,

Now that you know how I got into it, maybe you would like to know a little more about HOW I do it...

When I decided to try my hand at making 3D stories, I realized that maintaining continuity would be a challenge. 2D comics, drawn or otherwise can get away with errors in perspective and relative proportions but in 3D such incongruities are more apparent, mainly because perspective is always perfect and anything that looks like a perspective error is actually due to bad posing or bad scaling. To keep things up to date, I have my “base character” models. Which I update whenever needed, usually at the beginning of a new issue. I also use a pretty complex excel spreadsheet to keep track of many of my characters vital stats.

Since Funky Spice is a long story with many characters that transform very slowly, each in its own special way, I feel it was necessary. It would not be fair to the reader if when looking at back issues the changes would not be properly represented. Especially since the transformations are so slow that back issues are probably the only way of seeing the changes! So in this blog post, I’ll show part of the process of keeping my characters within “comic proportions” and I’ll also share a few of the tools I use to do it.

At the beginning of FS#13, Alice amongst others needs to be updated. She’s slowly developing and like Nadia did before, week after week there is a little more of her. So I update her “morphs” first and then I adjust her “scale” to fine tune her final height to what was planned in the story, in this case, Alice is now 5’4”. I use a 10 foot ruler found on Share CG http://www.sharecg.com/v/40765/Poser/Poser-height-measuring-rulers

So far I have found no native way of taking body measurements in DAZ, apparently it is possible in Maya and 3DSM. So I have to make the best use of estimates using rectangles and cylinders. When measuring circumferences on humans, we rarely stop to consider that the area being measured is closer to a rectangle than a circle. By sizing and placing the rectangle to have an approximately similar amount of poke through from the skin as we have from the shape, we should be pretty close to the real measurement. Just add up twice the Z to twice the X. I used a script called “SizeOf” Shared by DeltaX15. http://www.4shared.com/zip/G9dbesdH/sizeof.html



Repeat for the under bust if you want to know the “bra size” (underbust+5=bra size)… (Bust size – bra size =cup size) In Alice’s case 40-(28+5)=7 The 7th cup size. (AA=0, A, B, C, D, DD, E, F=7) Alice is a size 33F! Her other measurements are 23” waist and 38” hips (40-23-38) Pretty extreme but one must consider those facts: She’s a comic book character, she’s in top shape, she’s more than halfway through her second puberty, (which is not something likely to happen in the real world)




Finally for a real world comparison, Nicole "Coco" Austin's measurements: http://www.cocosworld.com/new/stat/  are (or at least they might have been at one time) 39"-23"-40", 39DD bra size, is 5 foot 2 inches and weighs 135lbs. Of course, she’s exceptionally curvy and you can never really believe “real world” measurements since pretty much every woman will lie about it. (Or at the very least in the case of models and such, forget to update their facts sheet when it’s convenient)

The final measurement is provided because I have a reputation of liking/rendering women with unrealistically large thighs. Alice’s thighs are 23” a quite realistic measurement for height and fitness level.