August 22, 2007 Justin Chin

Fuel & Fire Page Roughs

Okay, so this week is all about building a scene for Fuel & Fire. This will be the first scene I’ve created for the book. For starters I roughed out the pages needed for the scene using stand-in objects.

s04_hunter-attack-_1sm.jpg

s04_hunter-attack-_2sm.jpg

Notes:

  • These represent 4 pages in the scene. The scene will encompass about 5 pages.
  • Comic will be in landscape form. 
  • The red shapes are the clipping mask showing through (being that the images are not cropped and sized to fill the frame). This will obviously be fixed in the final.
  • The images will be shaded like the single frame in panel 2 on the first page.
  • The purple is rough placement of sound FX.
  • The white is rough placement of narration and dialogue.
  • The red diagonal lines are some changes to the panel shapes and gutters to break them out of their plain box form.

The Tools:

  • SketchUp – rough, and eventually final renders (though I might do this in Google Layout).
  • Maya – character posing and deformation.
  • Photoshop – for the roughs and final layout (though I might use Illustrator for the final).

The Assets:

Roughing the Page Process:
[PS] Photoshop
[SU] SketchUp

  1. [PS] Load up my custom template (10 1/4″ x 6 5/8″ landscape)(facing pages).
  2. [SU] Open up scene file in SketchUp.
  3. [SU] Import basic assets, arrange, and set camera angle (save as scene).
  4. [SU] Screen shot (alt+PrtScrn) the panel shot in SU.
  5. [PS] Paste (ctrl+v) as separate layer in template file.
  6. [PS] Crop out any extra items in screen shot.
  7. [PS] Create panel in a separate layer (for use as a clipping mask). Arrange on page.
  8. [PS] Arrange layers so that image is on top of clipping mask – right click on layer ans select, “create clipping mask”.
  9. [PS] Fine tune image in mask.
  10. Repeat steps 3-9 for each panel.