Woah. Now that's cool. It's really interesting to see that they are full 3D models but the shaders are done so that the ideal viewing angle is from the front and yet they don't look weird or broken from other angles. That's really nicely done.
Maybe this just doesn't work on mobile, but this appears to be a static two panel comic with a perspective effect applied. If it is that, I suggest the site implements a notice that it needs to be viewed on desktop.
Oh! It was not really an WebGL issue but was a combination of the mixed content error "triggered" by HTTPS everywhere extension. This is somewhat annoying from time to time, the author should have used `//yiwenl.github.io/...` instead of `http://yiwenl.github.io/...`.
My favourite version of this is all of the cutscenes in the PS Vita game "Gravity Daze" (Gravity Rush). They're all drawn comics, but with the layers set at appropriate depths. The game uses the Vita's gyroscope to lock the 3d camera to the handheld's orientation. You really get the feel that you're looking /into/ a comic!
While this is very cool, it raises the cost to produce and deliver comics by an order(s) of magnitude.
Comics have always been a easy low cost way for artists or even people with just idea's to communicate their ideas.
For an extreme example of this
http://www.qwantz.com/
Where the ideas are amazing, but he uses the same few cells for ALL of the comics.
This comes from someone who has worked with 3D content for years, and I see mesh based 3D as the Ultimate machine in handing power to people with money.
The current level of art assets requires displacement maps, specular maps, texture maps, a zbrush high poly model, lods models, and physics models. While all of these things are very doable, in order to DO them, you takes highly skilled artisans. Highly trained artisans are expensive. Therefore if you want to create some new art assets it takes lots of money. Lots of money means getting investors. Investors mean giving up significant amounts of equity. Which means you have a very narrow window in which to succeed and if you do, they benefit disproportionately.
'Comics' is a wide enough form to accommodate many different methods and timelines of production. If you look to the world of Print comics the intentions are often quite different from web and the production is as well. Everything from Chris Ware's super intricate spreads to XKCD's deceptive simplicity to Qwantz' focus on text (which I imagine is harder than one might think) has a place under the umbrella.
Neat! I've had a long-term interest in "toon shading". The problem with a lot of the traditional real-time methods of creating the outlines is that they're too literal, and cause unpleasant artifacts at some joints and seams. Also, you typically only have one parameter to tune, for the whole scene: line thickness. The problem is finding a value or range of this one parameter that works for a whole scene. E.g. if you use the same thickness for close and far objects, then the farther objects will appear more black since a greater proportion of their area is devoted to outline.
Another problem (for VR) is that current VR systems don't deal well with thin lines. You really want to avoid aliasing (crawlies) for high-quality VR.
Would love to see something like Paperman implemented in real-time:
Certainly is "possible" (and if you search you'll likely find some "3D renderers" for 2d canvas) but that'd need a rasterizer implemented in JavaScript and if you want anything more than 1-colored triangles, some notion (even if haphazard, custom and callback-or-so based) of "shading" --- should screech to a crawl quickly.
I think I'd have to move away from the concept of using polygons for such an approach - I had thought about just using a simple 2d projection of a 3d path, but I'd obviously run into quite a few problems regarding occlusion and a bunch of other things with that.
But I'll be having a lot of fun trying out some different approaches to 3d rendering ;)
Maybe you'd be interested in this experiment I did with straight lines a while ago. I project 3d points onto 2d and make lines out of rotated divs. But I don't use css 3d rotation because I want to keep the fixed width of the lines themselves.
There isn't proper occlusion but I fake it by applying a different style to edges that are facing away from the camera. You could also do like the OP and draw white polygons in the space between lines.
Interesting, the music theme from the third comic in the first row[1] is the exact copy of the famous game Star Trail[2] (The Dark Eye) from the nineties. I hear such similarities occasionally and always wonder if this is either a strong influence or a deliberate copy (No offense, just curious).
Well, setting aside the fact that they sound nothing alike, that music theme is a sample from "Fanfare for the common man". So if anyone copied anyone I suppose it was the game copying Aaron Copland.
That XKCD one is one of the best I've seen, even better than the Calvin & Hobbes one which I loved - full 360 rotation on all axes possible. Very well done.
