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Spectacular, as always, Stian! Looks better than real.

That's really neat, Ken!

Thanks, Ken! There has certainly been a long tradition of this sort of thing in cartoons: Black Pete, Bluto, The Crusher, etc. so I'm not exactly breaking new ground here. :-) You're right about the stiffness and lifelessness of T-poses. It's been pointed out that at Warner Bros, there was a difference of opinion on Bugs Bunny villains. Chuck Jones preferred the big dumb galoots, while Friz Freling liked them to be short little mean cusses. I like both, but with there being a level of adventure (and therefore some danger) in this, I've always liked having the hero be the little guy winning out over the big bully. Thanks, Rodney! I think he's my favorite so far, too. I would expect McCrary to do so, yes and I'll pass on the complement. We're not going to start really promoting the site until we've got 20 strips up, so right now we're not really getting any feedback.

Thanks, Rodney. The scale is definitely intentional. Cutthroat is a menacing villain and I want Flemm to appear "small" next to him. An image that has stuck with me since I was a kid was Roger Moore's James Bond fighting "Jaws" in the 70s and at one point Jaws puts his hand over Bond's face and practically palms his whole head. That amazed me and it's exactly what I was thinking about when I enlarged the hands. The contrast really makes the villain seem more of a threat. Did make a slight update to Cutthroat, though... McCrary suggested adding a gold trim to the hat:

Oh, and here's how Sneeze ended up yesterday...

A productive weekend! Here's the body for the villain, Cutthroat Jacques! His design changed from the original, too. The most obvious change is the addition of the big pirate hat. Here's a side-by-side with Flemm to show scale. And *still* I have a ton more to do. :-)

Thanks, Rodney! Nothing planned behind the showing a little bit of work at a time. I'm just showing it as I get things done. :-) This is definitely a journey! A loooong journey. :-) And yes, Sneeze was always supposed to have a hook (see the original designs in the first post). The only real changes in his character design from the original are that he lost the bandana around his neck (I thought that would cause too many problems with his chin passing through it), gained the belt on his torso and his shirt changed slightly. Haha, I guess it was good timing with the strip, although it's in the next strip that Sneeze actually gets the hook. I do have to consider what I show on the site, though, since McCrary is working the story up to the point that the cartoon takes place and many of the characters and situations won't be introduced for awhile. At this early point in the strip, Sneeze doesn't have his hook and Flemm doesn't have his eyepatch. McCrary has finished about 25 strips and there are still several characters yet to be introduced. It's going to make doing the movie blog on the page difficult. But, by the time the movie is ready to be shown, the webcomic will have caught up, so it works out in the end.

Started working on the body for Mr. Sneeze!

Nice job, Eric!

Yes, but a 3-button USB mouse is much cheaper than a Wacom tablet. :-) I have a cintiq (which I'm still getting used to), but I've not even tried to use it in modeling. Much easier to use the mouse.

It definitely depends on how big the model is and how complex the materials are. I've been using it lately and simple materials with surface properties happen almost instantly, but more complicated ones take much longer. There's no progress bar or anything, just have to wait for it to finish. You might consider breaking the model up into the parts that use each material (if that's possible) and then bake those individually. That's what I'm doing. Just make sure you give the resulting image files unique names.

Count me definitely in for a tutorial, John!

Thanks, guys! They are just decorative wings. I would presume they are made of wood, although I've gone ahead and given them the brass treatment. It's still a work in progress, but I've been giving her the decal treatment and surface baking the various materials. It's working as a set as well as a ship, so I've got some more set-dressing to do. I'm saving the individual parts as separate models so that I can build it as an action object using just the parts I'll need for a shot. Still, I couldn't resist rendering out an image for my desktop picture this morning...

I've not ever used The Setup Machine, but I've used Barry's DVDs and they're real helpful. Barry doesn't really cover assigning CPs and weighting, so seek out as much info as you can on that subject when you get around to doing it. I'm still kind of intimidated by rigging myself, but thankfully I'm passed being completely terrified of it, so that's a step. :-) Looking forward to seeing your neighborhood come alive, Jirard!

Yeah, dude. The feedback is nice, but you gotta' do it because you want to do it. I know I've updated my WIPs lots of times without a single peep of a comment. I just keep chuggin' along. :-)

Thanks, Bob! I stayed up late to post that first strip. :-) It will be fun seeing them add up. I'd love it if we could do a daily strip, but McCrary is only able to work in 2 a week. Maybe down the road, he'll get to the point where we can up the number. The RSS feed is actually a freebee. I'm using WordPress for the site and a webcomics-specific theme called ComicPress. My CSS skills are pretty limited, so right now I'm just customizing it as I go. It's really an incredible resource. Especially since it's free! Thanks, Yves! I claim temporary insanity for the specularity. :-)

I was unaware of this until recently, but if you read up on the format wars at Wikipedia, you'll find Microsoft is a big player in them. This from the HD-DVD entry about trying to avoid a format war:

I own both and buy Blu when there's a choice. In the end, content is everything and Blu-Ray has the lion's share of it, most notably Disney. How is any family going to make a choice for Hi-Def that *doesn't* include Disney?

Thanks, guys! Al, Stian did those renders, so he'd be the one to answer that question. Paul, it's looking like it's going to be longer than I first intended. I won't know for sure until I get the storyboards done and time it, but the script ran 21 (or so) pages long, which leads me to think I may be looking at up to 20 minutes. I'm definitely going to try to slim it down as much as possible, but I'm okay with it being that long if it does end up that way.

There is another ship in the script, but it's a mystery ship (much different than the Sea Anemone) and how much detail of it is shown is really going to depend on what the needs are when I do the storyboarding. In the script, it only appears in two scenes and I wrote it with the wiggle room to get away with not seeing very much of it.

Thanks, everybody! I think Stian did a fantastic job modeling the ship. Seeing it take shape has been a real booster shot for my inspiration and challenged me to up the quality of my work, too. Gotta' make something worthy of it. :-)

Well, here's that big thing I was talking about! Flemm's ship, The Sea Anemone (Flemm can't pronounce it, but he loves it!) Stian Wahlvaag has done a miraculous job of taking my cartoon designs and building this pirate ship for the movie. It came out really, really cool and my movie is instantly many more times better because of it!

Thanks, Bob! This is for sort of a fun business (meaning one that will probably never make any money.) :-) The idea originally was just to make a short film, but it's grown more open-ended. When my friend and I discussed story ideas, we started thinking we could do a series of cartoons, but the reality is that there would have to be huge gaps of time in between them and that's where the idea for doing the webcomic came from. We can tell more stories that way and keep the characters "alive" in between short films. This will all be on the website, and we will be selling advertising, but it's doubtful we'll see any real money from that. Mostly, we're doing it because we want to and are having fun. I would think having artistic ability would help, but I think it largely depends on what you're wanting to do with A:M. There's some amazing mechanical modeling on these forums that I couldn't even imagine approaching and when I realized I was going to be needing something modeled that would be better handled by someone with that ability, I commissioned one of those people really talented in that regard to do the model. (I'm gonna' be all mysterious and not say anything about it yet, but it should be finished very soon and it's really cool!) I definitely have a personal philosophy that I don't know I can't do something until I try. Thanks and I appreciate the encouragement!

Thanks, guys! Wish I had a good excuse for the prolonged period of questionable taste, but for some reason I just kept chasing the shiny. :-)

I got a bug this morning and suddenly decided I was tired of all the shiny stuff. :-) I guess I must've been going through a phase, but I went back and started dropping the specular intensity out of the models and seeing how they looked. Gave me a chance to put together a sort of where I'm at so far graphic that I printed out at work and put up for inspiration. Here's a smaller version of it... I don't know how they'll end up in the end, but I kinda' like them this way (at least I do now.)