Over the weekend, I came across a video of the manga artist Inio Asano (Goodnight Punpun, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction) discussing his workflow for illustrating pages, which involved a particularly novel asset: the Unreal Engine.
While the video serves as mostly a glorified advertisement for Unreal, a popular game engine, Asano’s testimony provoked intriguing thoughts about the creative process. Essentially, Asano uses Unreal to mess around with developing scenes, being able to adjust position, lighting, and other aspects of a scene on the fly, which helps him to develop a reference for the immensely detailed pages he draws in his work.
As someone who often has trouble with the visualization aspects of drawing, this approach to developing references seems really cool as a potential tool for an artist to use! I’d be curious to see how other artists might potentially approach such technology in their own work.
Featured image taken from the linked video.
