I've done a number of AutoCAD traces of anime and manga characters over the last few years. Right now I have a few I'm trying to decide on, anyone wanna give an opinion on which one should be done?


http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/7272/screencapz.jpg
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/deadman_w ... .1/16.html
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/deadman_w ... 9.2/4.html
http://www.mangafox.com/manga/deadman_w ... 9.2/9.html

The final art piece will look similar to some of previous works for anyone curious:

http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/De ... ondax&qo=0
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Ch ... ondax&qo=3
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Ro ... 3494&qo=13
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Me ... 3494&qo=23
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Na ... 3494&qo=26
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Me ... 3494&qo=27
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Fu ... 3494&qo=38
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Cl ... 3494&qo=90
http://xanacondax.deviantart.com/art/Ha ... 494&qo=103
http://th07.deviantart.net/fs39/150/i/2 ... condax.png

I've done a number of works using autoCAD and photoshop in combination. This about 1/3 of them that I've done in about 3 years

Any opinions on the new one would be appreciated

Interesting. Is AutoCad useful? I don't have much experience with it. I have been using photoshop for a while to colour in manga pages but does autocad help this in any way?
If you are going to do any of those I recommend doing the one with the red man holding the girls head. The one showing the battle doesn't hold much that catches your attention and would be a good bit of work to colour. Trust me far angle shots are a pain to colour. One guy asked me to colour this

Took about a month.
And the one showing shiros face has been coloured a lot. Even I have coloured it here.

Would it be easy with autocad to make a render out of these?
http://aidanak47.deviantart.com/art/Last-line-of-Duty-163742451
http://aidanak47.deviantart.com/art/The-birth-of-true-chaos-193870858

If you're not experienced in AutoCAD I would personally recommend Illustrator to do a vector rendering. This is mainly because hatching solid shades in autoCAD can frequently cause the program to crash with increasing complexity of a shade region, illustrator tends to handle those better. There's an easy work around to avoid the crashing but it involves making shading areas smaller to reduce the complexity but it's more extra drawing that doesn't really wind up as part of the final render.

As for whether CAD is actually useful. It's not really designed for this kind of work but it works well enough and I've been comfortable using it. The idea in autoCAD is to attach the image as a reference and then redraw all of the line work using a combination of splines, circles, arcs, or whatever is handy to recreate the render.

These videos I did a few months ago show parts of the process I go through to do these sorts of renders:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7M7R8dzPQ
^^Music's a bit loud on this one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09kihFmQL90
^^Shows how some of the basic colors are laid out in layers and applied as hatches

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6WPXio73X4
^^when I have linework using a variable lineweight.

Basically the purpose of CAD is for the vector work. You can export the dwg as a PDF and then put it photoshop at any resolution and size that you want.

Something like what you posted as an example would take an obscenely long time to do it CAD, probably three times as long, but mainly because of the level of detail involved. If you're just rendering a single anime character as some of your other examples are, then the time to retrace them usually ranges from 6 hours to a couple of days worth of work.

For the two picesyou have at the end, the Highschool of the dead render would be the easiest taking probably 3 or 4 hours to retrace the line work and then get the hatching of base colors. Add another hour or so to put it in photoshop and render the gradients.

2nd one is also quite doable but it has a lot more detail. It'd take about a day or two to get the linework redrawn and the base colors hatched in. Add about an hour to two hours of photoshop work for non-solid shading (gradients).


EDIT: If you'd like I can provide some of the source dwg files. Just get AutoDesk Trueview if you need a dwg viewer

EDIT 2:
I decided to go with the one with Shiro holding the girl's head. Here's a png export I did from acrobat (the originals' much larger)


I haven't finished the drawing in CAD yet... This is about where I am after a day or so

EDIT 3: CAD work laying out all the basic colors is completed.

AutoCAD is mainly used 4 architectural purposes!! lol I used it in High school back in the day!! lol

I do this to keep in practice with the program ;)
These days they have us using revit for a lot of the architectural work

Ya that program came out after I graduated!! lol

Tell me you got paid for that. If someone asked me to color something that complicated for free I'd say hell no.

That's hard enough to do in photoshop w/out a tablet.

Anyway, I finished the first base render, and am using some of my extra time to work on one of the other ones since someone requested a wallpaper from it. THis is my current progress: