Wildsided

PW:EF continues to roll and it's time to introduce a new character. But before that a little history In the picture above of the main PW cast from way back in 2002, it's hard not to notice especially for those of you that have followed my stuff. That one of the characters bares more than a passing resemblance to another of my characters. This is because Tech started life as a life size stuffed toy replica of this character who's name is Shadow. When it became time to make the puppet Tech for Epic Gamin' I didn't have the money to buy new materials to make him. So I sacrificed Shadows' body and used it's material to add a mouth flap and eye rig turning him into Tech. So the character needed re-imagining for the motion comic and after rummaging through my old sketch books I found a pencil drawing I'd done of the original Shadow covered in tribal markings and incorporated that into new Shadow's design. So without further ado. This is Tyler's guardian and most loyal friend Shadow. fixmaybe.bmp

Hi Rich, I think the biggest issue with the background vs foreground is the textures (Decals). Planar application has this tendency of looking great from the angle you applied it and then awful from another angle because the decal has gotten stretched and blurred. The best way I've found to combat this is go into say front view and hide any patches that aren't facing right at you. Apply the decal. Then switch to another view and repeat the process until the whole thing is covered. On a complex shape this usually works best if your decal isn't a uniform pattern. The proper way to do this though is to "unfold" the object and texture it as a 2D shape. If you search 'flatten tutorial' in the search box you should find a good tutorial by Jim Talbot Alternatively, you could tweak a dark tree rock texture to the colors you need and do it that way.

Happy Birthday dude, hope you have a blast

Nice one Mark. Those are the kinds of things kids remember forever. "Hey remember that year uncle Mark made the J'onn J'onz cake for me" Good times

Introducing Card Mistress Teah.

Concept drawing, took about 20 minutes to do. Posed the 3d models and then added battle damage.

As promised guys, here's the series' main protagonist, Tyler. Seeing this guy in 3D after only seeing him in my drawing books for so long is kind of a big deal for me. He was the first thing I tried to model in A:M way back in March 2007 (That was a disaster)

Okay as far as I can tell Amy is ready to roll. Next up Tyler.

Neither does my wife, everytime she walks into my office she says "What's going on with her pants" and now you've got me wondering the same thing. I've tried making half-tones in photoshop before with very mixed results. I hear there's a program called Manga studio that does tones really easily so I might look into that.

Happy Birthday Karen!

And so having finished the base model I can adjust it to her body type and dress it and we have Amy with a body. Once she's rigged I can pose her any way I need.

Ladies and gents allow me to introduce. Base girl A base around which female characters will be built. limbs and proportions can easily be shifted to create different looks but essentially they'll be built around this model. It's a heck of a lot faster than creating a whole new body for every character and once they have different hair, facial features, clothes and proportions you'll probably not be able to tell that they were created around the same model. I'll make a base guy next.

I betcha that would look really nice as those Christmas garland decorations that you string across the ceiling

Happy Birthday Jody, have a great one

Happy birthday dude have a good one

2 splines! old hair where have you been all my life......hang on that just sounds wrong somehow......classic hair that's what we'll call it.

The Elite Force is a team assembled by the U.E.G (United Earth Government) to combat threats that would otherwise be outside of the scope of the U.E.D.F (United Earth Defense Forces) or to carry out clandestine missions that the U.E.G council want to keep quiet. Each team member was recruited due to them each possessing abilities beyond those of a normal human being. Be they of a natural origin or abilities that the individual has gained through some kind of physical augmentation. But no it`s got nothing to do with Star Trek, the 'Elite Force' sub title really came out of necessity. Parallel Worlds was the story`s original title but as the concept developed I realized that i had a lot of ideas that explored different themes and while they all took place within the same universe they couldn't all be one story. So I split them into different stories 'Elite Force', 'K-8' and 'M.I.A'.

Hello! Being as though I've put Epic Gamin' on hiatus, not cancelled, it's just a copyright mine field that I don't have the time, money or inclination to wade through. I've decided to make a whole new topic for my shiny new project and when I say shiny and new I mean for you guys, for me this project has been on going since 1999. I won't bore you with the details (unless someone asks), but needless to say the plot and characters of the story I intend to tell have been around for a long time. I mentioned over on Dan's Epic Gamin' stuff that I'm moving into motion comics and as I've been flirting with the Anime art style for years I decided to go with that style for Parallel Worlds: Elite Force. Below is the first step toward making this new show a reality. Her name is Amy and while she may be cute...Well lets just say looks can be deceiving. To make production quicker, the only parts of the comic that will be hand drawn are the eyes and mouth. Everything else will be modeled in 3D and posed in A:M, exported to Photoshop and finished off.

That's fixed it, cheers Rodney. I'd already tried deleting the ground, but putting a chunk of geometry behind seems to have done the trick. Now I can get back to styling that mop I dumped on her head.

Morning all, Been working on a new project and have run into an an odd problem. So quick (hopefully) question. Does anyone know what might be causing this? It's like toon render just gets bored when it gets to the top of her head and stops. (Note: that's not final hair or anything I'm just testing)

Hello!! It's 2013, the kids are back at school which means it's time for Dan to get back to work. A while back (about a year) I was discussing motion comics on the forums here and have been playing with the idea ever since. Anyway I've decided to take the plunge and try making one. The primary reason is that the 5 minute Christmas episode took a heck of a long time to render and the general video watching populous of the internet have short attention spans so you need to have consistent releases to keep their attention. I cant afford to spend a couple of months animating and rendering an episode and then have nothing new for another 2 months. Anyway I just got through making a little test frame and I think it looks kinda nice so I figured why not post it. Also it kinda looks like a screen shot of a video game and oh how I wish it was!

Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages! It's finally here, the Ace.Co Entertainment Christmas special has landed and there's a link to it below. http://blip.tv/aceco/ace-co-entertainment-...al-2012-6488297 It's been a journey getting this one done, so I really hope you all enjoy it. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all and here's to more stuff in 2013!

That is possibly the funniest thing I've seen all year and with only 3 days left to go before the end of the year I doubt it will be dethroned. Also how awesome would it be if this were an actual version of chess? Minus the pissing maybe

Is the global tab there when you go into options?

Certainly does Robert. To fix the background/foreground syncing problems I rendered the whole thing all at once and his head went all jiggly again. But I saved over those frames with the finished ones. It's not a huge deal I just thought you guys would get a giggle out of it.