Comic Page Breakdown (Patreon)

I know the content isn't to everyone's tastes, but I still figured you might be interested in seeing the process I've been using to make these comic pages lately! It starts by just getting a sense for what I want to show this page and how I'm going to lay everything out. Once I've got a solid sense of what's going to go where and what the panels will roughly be shaped like, I go about creating the poses in blender and rendering them out in three separate layers, one with just the background, one with just the characters, and a third ugly one in greyscale. Since I have the characters set up to be flat-shaded in blender, that means I get no sense of depth or detail at all- if for example Kat's hand were to overlap with her leg, since her stockings and gloves are the same colour, they visually just disappear completely in the render. To give me some sense of detail I render out a simple greyscale shaded version of each frame just to use as a reference for details. 

I render the characters out separately from the background just because it makes working on them easier. Digital artists will know this well, but for the rest of you, you can use the character-only layer as a mask for the shading layer and not have to worry about "staying inside the lines", the computer will just not colour in anything outside the area the characters take up.

Once I have all the images rendered, I compile them together and crop them into their respective frames, and I'm left with what you see in the second from the right example image, and from there the 2D work begins. Some hand inking and some basic shading later and viola, comic page!