Importing characters

When you first create a comic document, your window looks something like this:

Writers often talk about being hindered by the “tyranny of the empty page,” and Comic Strip Factory doesn’t want to put you through that, with all those empty panels at the top of the window. That’s why, at the bottom of the window, we’ve put two catalogs of artwork called Central Casting and Scenery. Central Casting is visible first, but the Scenery tab is only a click away.

Your next decision is simply what character you want to start with. Pick any character from Central Casting and click it. It will open up into a third tab, titled with the name of the character.

After clicking on Fred Nerd, a new tab is added to the bottom part of the window. This is the beginning of a library for your comic. This comic document will remember that Fred Nerd is part of its library, so the next time you open the document, there will still be a Fred Nerd tab there. You can close this tab, which removes Fred Nerd from this comic’s library. If you have already copied in some of Fred’s art, this doesn’t remove him from the comic.

If you want to open more characters, you can return to the Central Casting tab and click on another character.

Parts and Groups

The Fred Nerd library you have opened is a parts file. Comic Strip Factory comes with many built-in parts files and you can create your own. Parts files are composed of two types of objects: parts and groups. As you scroll through the Fred Nerd file, you will see several complete poses at the top and a large supply of additional parts down below. The poses are all groups, while the separate heads, hands, torsos, etc., are parts. A group is a collection of parts that has been grouped together, which can also be ungrouped.

In addition to full poses, there are other parts that have been grouped together for convenience, like Root Wiz’s head-hair pairs and Sam Ho’s leg-foot pairs. In the case of head-hair groups, when you use them, you might want to ungroup them so you can send the hair behind the torso while leaving the heat in front.

You can select one of these parts or groups by clicking on it. You can select multiple objects by clicking in a background area and dragging out a rectangular box. Any objects the rectangle touches will be selected. Or you can add individual objects to the selection by holding down the shift key and clicking on them.

When selected, objects have a blue dashed-line box around them. You can tell what is a group and what is a part by the length of the dashes in the lines. Long dashes signify a group; short dashes indicate a part.

A group and a part selected in the library.

Dragging items into the comic

You cannot edit parts files in the library, but you can drag their contents up to the comic. If you start by clicking on one of the complete poses, and then drag upward toward the comic, you will see an copy of the pose move along with the mouse, while the original remains behind. While you’re dragging this copy, as your mouse enters and passes through various panels in the comic, the most recently entered panel is selected. When you release the mouse button, the copy of the library item you have made is dropped into the selected panel.

You can create an entire comic using the preassembled poses of the characters that come with Comic Strip Factory. It’s a good way to get started, but doing so limits your repertoire and might start to make all your comics look alike. So the next step is to use the preassembled poses, but modify them. Let’s say that in your first panel, you want Fred working at his desk and talking to the reader. The first pose in the Fred Nerd library shows him working at his desk. (Well, there’s no actual desk there; you can see where that comes from in Adding Backgrounds .) But he is staring intently at his work, not looking at the reader, so it’s almost exactly what you want, but not quite. This is where all those extra parts come in.

Editing a pose

Drag that first pose up to your panel. Then you can start looking for a better head to use. To make this easier, all the parts in a parts file know what kind of object they are. The library view can be sorted or filtered based on those part types. There are two popup menus on the right side of the bar at the top of the library view: One is labeled View and is initially set to All with Poses , and the other allows you to change the view scale. Click the one labeled View and you will see this menu:

All with Poses is the default view you have been looking at, which is how we have arranged the library for you, emphasizing poses at the top. All by Type shows all of the parts (and only parts) sorted by type. Even parts that are members of a group in the main view are shown separately in this and the other views. All of the other views shown in the rest of the menu only show one part type. One nice thing about the sorted and filtered views is that—no matter how wide or narrow you make the window, and no matter what you set the view scale to—the parts will be arranged to fill the available width. You only have to scroll vertically to see all the parts.

Choose Heads from this menu. The library area now looks like this:

The first head in the second row is just what we want (this may be in a different position for you because your window might be a different width). That’s the one we want to use to replace the head in the pose we dragged up to the comic before. Look at that pose in the comic now:

You want to replace the head, so you need to select the head and delete it, but right now his pose is grouped so you can’t. You have two ways to deal with this. The traditional way would be to use the Ungroup command in the Objects menu. This would work, but Comic Strip Factory offers a better way. You can edit the group without ungrouping it. To do this, either double-click the group, or select it and click the Edit icon in the toolbar. (There are also a menu item, a contextual menu item, and a keyboard shortcut for this command. Edit is used frequently in Comic Strip Factory, and we didn’t want you to miss it.)

Fred pose in the group editor.

This is the Group Editor, and it is designed for you to be able to concentrate on the group you are editing. You’ll notice some things have changed. You can no longer see all the panels, only an indication of the one the group is in. If there had been other objects in the panel with the Fred group, those would be hidden now too.

Another new thing to notice is this control, just above the editing view:

This is the editing level control, for returning to previous editing levels. The part that doesn’t have a leftward pointing button around it tells you where you are. The button parts (there is only one here, but there may be more) return to places you came from. To return to the main view of the Comic, you would click the part labeled Comic.

To give Fred his new head, click the existing head and delete it (by pressing the delete key). Then drag the head we selected from the library up to the group view and position it on his body so that it looks natural.

This head fits on this body just fine, but some of the heads might only be useable with a little modification. A common modification is flipping, or producing a mirror image of a part, which can be done with the Flip command on the toolbar. (This command flips horizontally. There is a command to flip vertically as well in the Objects menu.) That command alone can double the number of useable heads, hands, and other parts in a given situation. It is also common to rotate a part so it fits better with a pose. For information on how to do this, see Rotating, scaling, and skewing objects .

Finally, changing the front-to-back order is often needed when bringing in new parts into poses. When you drag the new part into the group (or any new container), it always goes in front of everything else. This is fine for the head in this case, but if you wanted to replace his left hand, you wouldn’t want the new hand in front of the right hand or arm. For that, there are commands in the Objects menu: Bring to Front brings the selection objects all the way to the front (in whatever container is currently being edited; in this case, the group of Fred parts). Send to Back sends them all the way to the back. Bring Forward and Send Backward move the selected objects one step forward or backward.

Building a pose

Sometimes a character doesn’t include any pose that fits your need. For these situations you can build the pose entirely yourself. The best first step is to set the library view to All by Type in the View popup. This way you can get a good overview of everything available, in roughly top to bottom order. Assembling poses will take a little more time and some feel for anatomy. Use the techniques described above to make things fit, like flipping, rotating, and adjusting the front-to-back order. Pay particular attention to getting left and right hands in the correct place. Are the thumbs pointing in the right direction? You may have to try out the pose yourself and see which way your thumbs are pointing!

A final bit of customization you might do is editing the facial expression or maybe the fingers of a hand. This has its own help topic, Editing parts in a comic .