About the story:
For teenager Nikki Sprite, life at the exclusive San Concord Girls Academy is already complicated enough. Between maintaining her 4.0 grade average, fending off her oversexed roommate, and trying to get that cute new student teacher to notice her, Nikki has her hands full. And now she finds out that she is the Chosen One who must save the forest world of Elphram. There’s got to be some mistake!
About the artist:
I’ve been a professional 3D animator for over 17 years, primarily focusing on product and medical/scientific animations. My career has taken me from Honolulu to Southern California to Arizona to Florida, where I now reside. Along the way I picked up a couple of Emmy awards and have done animation for clients such as NASA, Imax, The Discovery Channel, PBS, NBC, the Department of Defense and Disney.
A fan of comics and Japanese manga, I dabbled over the years with ideas for my own comics. Unfortunately, my regrettable lack of 2D drawing skills frustrated any serious pursuit of this notion. And 3D never seemed a viable approach to create a comic, both from the standpoint of the time required as well as achieving a nice comic look.
Then I rediscovered Poser, a 3D character design and animation program from Smith Micro.
Early in my animation career I experimented with Poser but was turned off by its quirky interface and poor rendering quality. So I dismissed the software as unprofessional and returned to my Lightwave 3D world. But in late 2007 I was lured back to test the Poser waters after seeing some promotional ads from Daz3D, a company that makes, among other things, 3D content for Poser. I was, and remain, amazed at how far the Poser world has progressed since I first used it. Though the software still leaves a lot to be desired as an animation package, it is superb for creating character artwork. Daz 3D sells some outstanding Poser-ready 3D characters, and both Daz and Renderosity offer a wealth of inexpensive Poser content. I began to delve into the Poser world, developing a technique to produce comic-style imagery. Soon I was hooked. Nikki Spice is a result of these efforts.
About the graphics:
NikkiSprite.com is produced on a dual core Pentium PC running Windows 7 (64-bit) with 8 gigs of ram and an 9800 Nvidea card. This is overkill, but Poser is one of the least memory efficient programs I have ever used. My software includes Poser Pro, Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, Victoria 4 and Michael 4 from Daz 3D, and many clothing/character/prop packages from Renderosity and Daz. Images are rendered using the Poser Firefly engine and then color enhanced with Shadowplay Photoshop actions, available from Renderosity, along with my own custom actions. (For a mini tutorial on my post production steps, click here.)
I hope you enjoy what you see here. Nikki Sprite is heavily influenced by japanese anime and manga. As such, the story is a blend of fantasy, humor, action, and the eccentric. It also has ample fan service. If this offends you, please surf elsewhere.
I apologize in advance for the slow development of this project. My full time job coupled with my freelance work leaves little time to work on Nikki. When I win the lotto, I’ll become more prolific. Until then, I do my best.
Glad to see your site up and running! Looks good.
Hi, i really like the comic look you have going on. Would it be too much to ask you to shoot me an e-mail detailing how to i can recreate this look? I play around with poser from time to time as and really really want to learn how to get this look. thanks
When I first saw this comic, I thought, “Poser? Naw, this couldn’t be Poser.” I used to work in computer games and am familiar with most of the tools available up to 2000, when I quit that business for the much less lucrative but more soul-rewarding field of comics. I guess Poser has come a long way. It’ll be interesting to see what you do with it as this strip progresses.
Poser has come a log way, as have the Daz Victoria models. But a lot of the work to create this comic style also comes via Photoshop. I’ve had some inquiries from readers who want to develop a similar look, so during the holidays I hope to post an overview of the steps involved along with sample pics -provided I can stay ahead of the game when it comes to creating comic pages. (So far I have a buffer built of about one month worth of pages, including a Christmas pinup-style page scheduled for next Thursday.)
Great to see another Poser/Daz artist in the comic circle, not many of us around who use 3D for comics so it’s always great to see another about! Your posing/morphs and expressions are great on here as well. And yes, Poser has come a very, very long way, I’ve only been working with 3D graphics for about 5 years and just in that short time the progress has been amazing, heck, just look at M3 and V3 compared to their 4th gen brother/sister, talk about a major improvement just there!
Man nice hardware setup, must render wonderfully, my gags with more complex scenes still, when working with 3D graphics though, I don’t think really any specs can be overkill, seeing as 3D rendering in and of itself if very, very taxing on a system, even what seems to be overkill may be just perfect for enhanced performance!
Garnet, I agree with you about hardware when doing 3D -rendering systems can never be fast enough. As far as memory goes, the more the better with Poser. For years I ran Lightwave on my 2 gig machines and never had a significant problem -not even when creating complex visuals for Imax films! But Poser brought my computer to its knees many times. I was forced to upgrade in order to produce this comic. Nikki, you owe me!
I like this comic… but why is Nikki’s neck so long? It looks weird, she’s very oddly proportioned