Make a Webcomic Without The Need For Drawing Skills!

If you wish to create a webcomic but don’t have drawing skills, Pikkipi does the work for you – it allows you to make up different character models, put them in poses, and compose scenes that can be inserted into a webcomic.

You can add the speech bubbles and frame the shots using any design software – or better yet a comic layout program.  For example, a lot of Apple Macs come with Comic Life which is a very easy tool for laying out panels and text captions (you can get it for Windows too).

If you’re interested in learning more about webcomics, here’s a couple of links to check out:

BuzzComix
DrunkDuck

Free storyboard software

It occurred to me that Pikkipi could be used as a storyboarding tool – I mean storyboarding as in planning out shots for a movie.  It might be a good option for students and the like who would ideally would want industry software such as FrameForge but don’t have the money to put down and would like a free storyboarding software. 

Here’s a storyboard frame that I knocked up really quickly using Pikkipi.  I added the notes using Keynote, a presentation program on the Mac.  You could probably use all kinds of software to add arrows and annotations, or even the presentation maker in Google Docs.

make a storyboard with Pikkipi here

Getting the character into position

There’s two ways to position the characters in the scene now.  This should make it easy to set up the scene faster without a lot of mouse-dragging, or just to zoom in on the head when you are working on an expression or new face setup.  Here’s the two ways you can move characters around:

 

1. Use the Quick Move buttons.  Clicking one of these will pull the character into a predefined position.  You can also use these buttons if you lose the character off the side of the scene!
    
2. Move with the mouse.  When you click on the scene and drag (hold the mouse button down and move the mouse) you will move the character in the scene.  By default this is a back-forth-left-right movement but if you click a different Mouse Mode icon at the top, you can change the movement to rotating the character or raising/lowering the character. 

You’ll probably find the Quick Move positions good for setting up the character positions quickly, then use the mouse move options to fine tune their place and rotation.

>> Go to Pikkipi now

Make more faces with new head shapes

To add further variety to the types of faces you can create I have added a wide and narrow version of the male and female heads.  In combination with the options for eyebrows, mouth etc. it should now be possible to make some quite unique and characterful faces.  Next I’ll work on some more texture additions for faces – crease lines, that sort of thing.

Here’s a couple of shots using the new face shapes.

What’s Pikkipi?

I have made Pikkipi as a creator and poser for characters.  Whenever I get to play with an avatar creator in games I always want more options and to be able to take shots of them.   Better still, I want to make poses and interesting looking scenes with them.  So that’s what Pikkipi does.

If you’re wondering why it’s called ‘Pikkipi’… it’s made up.  I just wanted something unique. 

 

Create a scene

I’ve been working on this 3d character poser / scene creator for a while and it’s pretty much ready for public consumption.  I’ll keep adding features and options.  You can go play with it any time at www.pikkipi.com