Okay, can I let you in on a little secret?  Neither Ayne nor I know how to do technical illustration.  What that means is either she or I are trying to draw a helicopter, it tends to look less like a fully armed Apache helicopter and more like a bulbous sausage with a plate above it and snow skis below.  That's not saying that I don't know how to draw, nor does that say anything about Ayne's skills (especially since she's the artist).  What it means is that our skills lie far more in figure drawing, curves vs. lines (or what we here at Megami tend to refer to as "organic" drawing vice the technical "inorganic" drawing).

Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest, are you ready for the rest?  Neither can anyone else.

Well, at least not anymore, anyway.  Technical illustration is a dying art, at least when it comes to anime and manga.  Why?  Because of CG rendering.  Now my technical illustration is off, but I've been working with graphic rendering for well over a decade now and I'm very comfortable with it.  For that matter, Ayne, used to attempt to do more technical illustration than she does now; now that I've introduced her to rendering, she lets the software handle most of it.

Cheating?  Maybe.  But telll that to everyone else.  Even as recent as twenty years ago, you'd have artists like Kaoru Shintani working on very technically detailed illustrations, as seen here in this page from Area 88:

Now, fast forward to the present day, where modern artists such as Nozomu Tamaki are perfectly content to let their computers do the heavy lifting, as seen in this splash sequence from Dance in the Vampire Bund:

Note that the lines are cleaner, as well as more even.  That's due to computer rendering, where the inexactitudes of hand-produced technical drawing have been removed by the precision of computer drawing the lines.  Modern computers allow artists like Tamaki to let CPUs deal with drawing computers and cities; artists such as Shintani probably didn't use their computers for anything other than typing the script, assuming they even had them.

So does that mean that artists like Shintani were lousy artists?  Absolutely not – they were drawing all sorts of things when they had little choice.  Does that mean that modern artists have no talent?  Again, absolutely not.  Some do it because they're not very good – that certainly doesn't mean they're not practicing; some of that technical art will have to be hand-drawn, regardless.  Some do it because they don't have the time; in Japan, even with assistants, you're cranking out 16 pages a week for those anthologies, while here in the US, you probably don't have the luxury of an assistant.  Still others do it because they prefer the lean and crisp computer lines to the harder lines of hand-drawn artwork.

It also goes without saying that even if you're not drawing it, chances are, you may still be making the model anyway: while there are tons of places to purchase models from (such as Turbosquid), not all of them have what you're looking for out there and sometimes you'll be required to make something yourself.  For that, you'll need to learn how to render and that does take some knowledge which ties into technical drawing skill.  Just a wireframe, such as the one created below by 3D artist Shaun Mechen, takes a lot of talent in that department, regardless of whether it actually ends up drawn on the page by hand.  Still convinced CG use is cheating?

Videogames, films, TV: a lot of what you see is CG rendered, because you can't summon a tornado on a dime, Atlantis never existed,  most people don't have a live tyrannosaurus rex to compare for drawing, and crashing aircraft into buildings left and right would probably be very problematic.  CG takes care of all of that.  People have no problem with this in film and television, so why in webcomics and manga?

For me and Ayne, using CG gives that much more time to make sure the tones are correct, or that we can devote to the storyboards, or maybe get some sleep (note: this is probably the least plausible ^_^;;;) or what have you.  For those who can work without it, more power to them.  But I have nothing against those who do use it since we obviously use it ourselves.

Besides, there's one more thing that can be done with CG that can't be done with traditional drawings: sell them as merchandise.  Look for guns on Turbosquid.  Now imagine how many guns are used in comics and manga, and how many people may render said guns in comics and manga.  Someone has to build the CG models, and if you're the one doing it, it's a nice way to make money.  I know of one would-be webcomics artist who ended up spending more time on the rendering side of the house and now does nothing but that to make sure those who tell the stories have the equipment they need to do so.

Bear in mind that there are not only generators for gun and such, but those for terrain as well.  Though mainly a commercial product, Vue also comes in a free starter edition.  Most of all, it's hella powerful: anyone who's seen the anime film The Sky Crawlers will be interested to know that with the exception of the drawn-in anime characters and a few isolated scenes, the whole movie was composed in Vue (although maxed out with all the plugins and on high-grade workstations, but still.)

 So, still think it's cheating?  Well, for those that don't, you can get Vue at the link above.  And for those that want to take their own shot at rendering, there's a powerful (and more important, free) rendering program called Blender that will stand with the big boys (in fact, Blender itself was a commercial product before the founders opted to release it as open source).  It has been used to make movies and games and it's something to be amazed by.

Plus, if you use it to its full extent, it'll make your life easier.  And that is probably the best reason of all to use CG rendering.

Tomorrow: Day 8 – Crunchtime Continues: Inking