mcDuffies wrote:I'm of belief that no tools are completely inadequate for creating art in hands of someone capable. I mean, if people managed to make perfectly good comics in MS Paint, I don't see why they wouldn't in Poser.
I've seen beautiful photos made with cameras that are equivalent to earlier described plastic rubber-band hold found-in-dumpster things. Simply, quality of camera doesn't restrict composition of the shot, and composition is really essential for good photo. Also, skillful people learn to handle shortcomings of their tools, so if a camera hasn't got much along the lightning control, skillful photographer still knows how to set the scene so that just the right amount of light falls into it.
Anyways, even good tools that make making comics easy can fool the unskillful eye, but anyone who's read a few comics of that kind can see when someone's using tools to their minimum capacity.
I'm guessing that it takes one well-done popular comic of the kind to push other creators to use that tool more seriously...
But generally, I think that the mistake artists who work in such, more alternative tools make is assuming that their work is essentially different from work of average, hand-drawn comic. When you strip it to the core, what makes good hand-drawn comic, or photo-comic, or poser comic, is the same thing. Like they said before: if you think that, because poser doesn't handle facial expressions well, they're not essential for poser comics, then you're wrong. Artist who draws spends probably more than 50% of his time drawing faces and mastering how to draw them. Author of poser comic should spend just about the same time and effort on getting faces of his characters to look lively and convincing. If poser author thinks that backgrounds aren't important for poser comics, he's wrong. They're important for any kind of comics, because what backgrounds bring to comics is unrelated to tools.
Similarly, DarknessFalls, you say that you can't draw, but you can still draw stickfigures. Artists who hand-draw use stick figures quite a lot, we all most likely sketch the scene in stick-figures before we get to draw it. This is because stick-figures strip the composition of the scene to bare minimums and let us work on making the scene expressive without bothering with details (they come later). Here's an idea: many people said that figures in poser comics look stiff and as if posing for camera. Why not try to first draw the scene with stick-figures, and when you get the composition you like, only then try to model it in poser using the stick-figure drawing as a sort of template.
the thing being, i generally see poser as a single tool, it's purpose built to create scenes, and to some degree, animations, other programs, like 3d studio max, Truespace, lightwave, and even the venerable photoshop and its ilk are proverbial toolboxes in their own right, which can be used for one thing, or even a multitude of tasks, some people even go from 3d max, to zbrush, to photoshop to create the end image.
in reality, what poser tends to honestly lack, is honest-to-god diversity, i've had a look at a lot of poser comics in the past, and most of them, regardless of overall quality and slight differences, mostly look the same.
this is prolly because in reality, most poser comics use the same bunch of base models with a few tweaks here and there to make them seem different.
that said, poser has its place, for some, one can even try and replicate a scene from their head, to poser to try and get the poses, and lighting correct for the sake of reference, for example.
all that's said and done, i don't personally see much difference between poser, and one of these, barring complexity.
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