Here are some tips to help you save time when creating illustrations using a 3D drawing doll.

 

This is a shortcut that lets you create illustrations without having to do the tedious line drawing and shading of mecha and small items.

First, add a drawing doll

The theme this time is a waitress firing an M249 light machine gun.

Drag and drop a 3D machine gun object onto the layer of the drawing figure placed on the canvas.

If you drop it when a red square appears, it will be placed on the same layer.

I used Masse's M249.

Set a parent-child relationship between the drawing doll and the machine gun

Select Tool Operation → Object and open the Sub Tool Details.

Select the object list and drag and drop M249 onto the drawing figure.

Once the parent-child relationship has been set, pose the right hand as the attachment point by fine-tuning the scale, position, rotation, etc. of the machine gun so that it holds it nicely.

The finished product looks like this.

Once the pose is set, release the parent-child relationship.

 

You can release the parent-child relationship by dropping it outside the parent-child relationship in the object list of Sub Tool Details as shown in the image.

 

Once released, duplicate the layer and delete the drawing doll and gun from the object list respectively to make the drawing doll and machine gun into separate layers.

(Just to be safe, keep the original parent-child layer as a spare.)

Draw a color rough sketch

I draw a color rough using the drawing doll as a guide.

The drawing doll is just a guide

However, I draw the grip and handle parts carefully so that they don't come off too far.

When making color rough sketches, I use a pen with simple settings that have no anti-aliasing, brush size, or ink density.

 

You can easily fill the same layer with a bucket, and it's also easy to separate layers for only the parts you need with the magic wand, which has zero color error.

In the color rough, the layers are separated so that the gun is sandwiched between the arm and the torso like this (the arm is shown in layer color to make it easier to understand). If you paint it in a solid color without anti-aliasing, you can do this kind of work easily.

Here is what I inked and painted.

Drawing lines and adding shadows to 3D objects (this is the only tip you need to read)

Have you ever thought that LT conversion of 3D objects is "honestly a bit difficult to use" because of broken lines and other debris like the red circles?

 

This phenomenon can be avoided relatively easily.

 

Select the 3D object layer and copy it with ctrl+C

 

From the menu, go to File → New from Clipboard.

 

This will create a .Clip file containing only the 3D object,

so all you have to do is increase the canvas size from the menu, Edit → "Change screen resolution".

 

 

This is the same size as the previous image, after changing the screen resolution by 5 times, LT conversion with detection accuracy 90 and line width 10.

The background layer has a 30px border with anti-aliasing OFF.

However, the processing is slow. With raster layers it's still better, but with vectors you get spinning circles and sometimes get the message "Clipstudio is not responding."

It depends on the machine specs, but I think it's best to keep it to around 10000px~20000px

and process it with a raster layer.

A shortcut to shading

Next is the shadow. First, open Tool Operation → Object Subtool Details

 

Uncheck Use Texture in Environment → Rendering Settings.

 

Then rasterize what is left with only gray polygons displayed.

Here is the before and after image after moving the mountain as shown in the image using Edit → Color Correction → Level Correction.

Then, if you add color using a gradient map or layer blending mode, it will actually look more realistic.

After shrinking it, I pasted it in the same place as the original file and gave it a slightly anime-like look with a gradient map. It looks like this.

Finish

Finally, I combined the cartridge brush from Imo-su with the cafe of the celestial sphere and gave it a little blur to finish it off.

 

As for the gun, I think you can see that it's a simple process with almost no paint on the magazine part, leaving it almost as it is.

 

As you can see, by using Clip Studio's excellent functions, it's easy to draw guns that would be difficult to draw by hand, and it saves time.

 

Thank you for staying with me until the end 🥰