The Making of "The Bath Crone," Pt. 3: Stillness

(This is part 3 of my series on the making of my 3D comic "The Bath Crone" and includes theorizing on 3D comics in general. You can read the comic yourself HERE, it only takes a few minutes. You can find part 1 of the series HERE, and part 2 HERE.)

After I had finished transferring what I thought were the fundamentals of comics into the third dimension, I started working on a proposal document, a visual explanation of the more nitty-gritty aspects of how a 3D comic would work. A lot of these details I was figuring out as I was creating it, so it came out in a pretty stream of consciousness way, but it helped me a lot in solving some hard problems. This original document is too raw and embarrassing for me to post here in full, but in this post I’ll be going through it, explaining the conclusions I came to, and posting little excerpts here and there.

One of the first things I decided, even before a lot of what I talked about in my last post, is that my 3D comics would be STILL. This made sense, because comics are still, and it’s only the reading that animates them. I thought this despite a few of my favorite webcomics (Kid Radd, Spider Cliff Mysteries) as well as my OWN webcomic tisTree including animation in some form. This didn’t matter, because I was trying to be a formalist about this. Looking back, similarly to my excitement about Scott McCloud’s “TIME = SPACE” formula, I just found the idea of stillness exciting. That excitement, more than any theoretical rigor, drove my decision-making. I thought that walking through a still sculpture garden and bringing it to life through reading was bound to be an incredible experience. I still think so. 

Besides that, it seemed like this was a chance for comics to import something homegrown to the realm of video games that I was co-opting for my own purposes. Though there have definitely been still games, most games are full of movement, animation, particles, and almost all the games that aren’t have few to no people in them. I thought that a vibrant, populated, but utterly still world would be something fresh to video games, though I didn’t like to call my theoretical comics video games back then. My mind filled with images of not only still characters, but rain, fire, waves, all the things that loop incessantly in every game ever made.

I had concerns about this stillness, too. I was worried that the movement of the camera through the space juxtaposed with the stillness of everything in it would create a disconnect for the reader. After all, 2D comics on the page are totally still, but the camera movement of a 3D comic is itself animation. I tried a few tests, but none really set my mind at ease until Bath Crone. I think now that it’s… not a very big deal. But if I was to overthink it, and I’d like to, I’d say it’s a matter of compartmentalization. The reader has to see the camera/eye as a meta element, separate from the world of the story, a bit of UI. If a 3D comic successfully convinces the reader of this then seeing the movement of the camera as animating the 3D models becomes as silly as thinking you’re animating a statue by walking around it (though in a way you are!) So much of creating art is in getting people to ignore little and big absurdities and contradictions like that, because those things are the hidden gears that make it function.

The stillness of 3D comics, though a beautiful idea, also lead me to make a decision that would eventually cause me to put way more work into Bath Crone than I probably should have. I was walking around outside one evening, observing the shadows, and I noticed something that I had never really thought about much: the shadows on the trees didn’t change as I moved around them. Because I was thinking about 3D comics so much then this seemed very relevant. I realized that in a world of absolute stillness, the shadows never move. Reflections do, they move for an observer who is moving, and many surfaces are to different extents shiny or reflective, but this was for the most part a minor detail. I was making a comic (or thinking about making a comic) and simplification is a big part of comics. The few objects that absolutely had to be shiny or reflective could be handled specially, but everything else I could hand paint. This was incredibly exciting, and had the bonus of giving a potential 3D comic a less video-gamey, more hand drawn look.  

I got obsessed with the aesthetic possibilities of this hand painted stillness. I painted test models, including a few that I modeled AND painted from life, by setting up chairs on four sides of the still life object and moving between them with my Surface Pro running 3DCoat. And when I wrote my proposal document I filled about one tenth of it (doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a long document) with ideas for how to achieve this look and various effects. As I knew very little about the technical aspects of 3D at the time this section of the document consists of ideas that range from naive but basically correct, to completely flat out wrong. There is one section where I compare the way certain older games faked reflections to the way they created the fake mirrors on Quantum Leap, and that part is dead on.

The first 3D model I ever painted.

As I said in my first post, Bath Crone originally had no narrative element, it was intended to be just a still scene you could walk around in, a means of getting something onto the screen, and mainly as a way to test my technical and aesthetic ideas. The narrative aspects would come as I was working on it and saw the opportunity. This is part of the reason for its short length and its lack of some of the theoretical storytelling techniques I had come up with (which I will talk about in my next post.) 

The other reason was how labor-intensive the process of painting everything manually, with no repetition, turned out to be. I hadn't expected it, but painting the comic took much, much longer than any other part of the process. The upside was the comic turned out looking almost exactly how I wanted it to, as you can tell by comparing this original color concept art to the final product:

Even the hand painting alone does not totally account for how much work this was. Actually, I placed even more restrictions on myself. I didn’t allow myself to use textured brushes, stamps, or stencils, and relied instead entirely on a square brush at around 85-95% opacity. My thought process was that digital painting did not inherently have much of the interaction between brush and canvas (or pencil and paper, or whatever) that creates the texture that gives traditionally painted images so much richness and warmth, properties I wanted my hand painted comic to have. I didn’t want to just emulate the properties of physical media, though, I wanted my digital comic’s identity to be fully digital. So I relied on the slight opacity of my square brush (which itself gave slightly more texture than a round brush) to create accidental texture through the intersection of my brushstrokes. I would then take these accidental little shapes created through this process and extrapolate on them, taking their contours as a border and creating further texture inside this border, until I was satisfied. This process turned an already daunting task into a huge undertaking.

Rough demonstration of the process.

Besides my painting process, I also relied on the 3D engine to create warm, fully digital texture. If you’ve ever played an older game you’re familiar with the pixel shimmering effect that happens when the game is attempting to render a scene at low resolution. What happens is that there’s more detail in the 3D scene than pixels the engine has available to render it. This leads to the renderer sometimes being unable to create a smooth, coherent image, causing a certain amount of visual noise, especially in areas of high detail, high contrast, or with objects or textures that are far away from the camera. This happens both with geometry, at the edges of objects, and with texture, on the surface of objects. This shimmering noise happens even at higher resolutions, though it is less noticeable, and newer games mitigate it with texture filtering, anti-aliasing, mip mapping, and shaders. Though a low resolution was out of the question for Bath Crone, as I needed in-game text to be legible, I could take advantage of this textural property of 3D simply by doing away with all these techniques, particularly texture filtering, giving my textures what I like to think of a natively digital equivalent to film grain.

You can see it clearly here. I'm using the effect to simulate light sparkling on spilled liquid.

The last visual touch that I added to Bath Crone was the golden border around the screen. Adding it was a decision that I made pretty late in the process, and I had several reasons, most of them minor. I wanted to draw a visual parallel to comic panels, one more reminder to the reader that they were reading a comic. I wanted to hide some of the distortion that cameras create at the edges and especially corners of the picture. I wanted to tie things together more visually, give everything a little added bit of coherence. The main reason, however, was my desire to prevent immersion. 

While I was making Bath Crone, discussions about VR and immersive, border-less games were everywhere, and I started thinking about the place of 3D comics in all this. I was thinking about it one night while I was watching a play, and realized how important the separation between the stage and the audience was to the success of a play. Of course the actors may go into the aisles, or interact with the audience, or even sit in the seats, but all of these things are just gimmicks that only draw attention to this inherent separation. The stage is another world, and the separation from the audience is what allows it to exist. If this separation were to disappear, this other world would dissipate, mixing into our world and being diluted down to nothing. This started me thinking on how important borders are to all sorts of art, and how they are the thing, counter intuitively, that allow us to experience stories.

This is not to say that VR erases all borders and is therefore incapable of storytelling, I think that would be giving it too much credit. Every medium has its own sort of borders, even if the screen never ends. Still, I wanted to celebrate borders rather than minimizing them, and I wanted to give my readers the sense that they were reading the world of Bath Crone rather than stepping into it. I wanted the readers to treat the camera as an eye, a bit of UI, as I said before, and not as a representation of themselves walking around the comic. 

For my next 3D comic project I am going to carry a lot of these aesthetic ideas forward, but primarily use less labor-intensive techniques, such as tiling textures, textured brushes, stamps, stencils, and computer-calculated lighting. I would not want to jettison hand painting entirely, but it seems unnecessary to use it for an entire comic. Using different types of texturing techniques also opens up a lot of new, interesting aesthetic possibilities, so it doesn’t feel like an unhappy compromise. Still, I’m glad I did this hand painted craziness at least once, and I’m very pleased with the results.

(Next time: storytelling in 3D comics)