largento

I thought I'd share this here. A friend contracted me to do an illustration for her daughter's 5th birthday party. The daughter really loves the new Nick Jr. show Paw Patrol. She originally wanted me to draw it, but I asked her if she was game for me going the 3D route so that it would look like the TV show. I created models of the daughter and the number 5 and used images as layers for the rest. It came out surprisingly well. I watched an episode of the show while prepping to do this and I gotta say it's really pretty to look at. Very appealing characters and a simple, cartoon style that makes everything look like a toy.

The software only runs while your subscription is active. Afterwards, it can't be used until you reactivate it.

Great work, David. At first blush, I thought this might be a good tool for beginners, but it's obvious that you still need to be knowledgeable about spline continuity and patch modeling to get good results. Although, I'm guessing looking at the underlying geometry might suggest new solutions when you're modeling.

PURE AWESOMESAUCE!

I found that, too, when I was building that Forty Acres backlot. Mostly just squares and cubes. Still, it's an impressive sight when it all comes together.

Nicely done, Steve. That looks great!

They have a Facebook group and this looks very much like Holmes' profile picture:

Nice work, Jirard!

Ah, good ol Arthur Q. I came across a YouTube clip of him a few years ago. I don't know if he appeared in the Great Gildersleeve movies. He used his normal voice in the radio show as the barber.

The Wayback Machine last archived his site in August. At that point, he hadn't updated his blog since January of 2013.

Some more stuff, as I switch into crazy-to-get-it-done mode. :-) Here's a couple of sets in town. And here's how I rigged the bicycle. For junior riggers like me, what I did was create bones to rotate the wheels and in an on/off pose, set them to rotate like the bone that rotates the pedals. The pedals, themselves have rotation bones and they are set to aim their rotation at nulls centered above them. That way, when you turn the pedal bone, the wheels turn and the pedals mimic the rotation they would with a foot on them. The central bone controls the orientation of the bike and there's another bone that rotates the steering. bicycle_rig_s.mov

Thanks, Jake! I probably should one day take the time to figure out how cars are really put together rather than trying to make the whole body one mesh. I'm doing a puppet show, though. they could just be drawings on cardboard being held up with sticks and I could get away with it. :-)

Thanks, Rodney! Let's just hope I can keep up this pace. :-)

Thanks, David! Here's a quick and cartoony General Lee model I've been working on today. I still have to create an interior for it. I'm still finding it difficult to model cars, but given how little screen time these are going to see, at least I'm able to get something in the "okay" area.

My simple tank for The Wobbling Dead. Real tank, I found, was far too complicated for what I needed, so I simplified it. It doesn't move or fire in the story. It's only story purpose involves the hatch, so I made just one large hatch. The tracks are probably too detailed for my needs, but I think it somehow makes you not notice how simple the rest of it is. EDIT Here's a wireframe...

Would love to take part in this one, but am rapidly running out of time to finish The Wobbling Dead. Good luck, everyone!

Jack, it's bad form to use other people's characters for your projects ...and really, wouldn't you rather have your own characters? There are lots of resources here on the forums and other places where you can learn to model your own characters in A:M. At the time I learned, Barry Zundel's training videos were what helped me, but there are many more of them out there and most are free. It will take time to get good at it, yes, but why waste that time trying to reshape other people's models? Use that time to learn how to model anything you want and then you'll never be stuck wanting. It's embarrassing now, but check out this post. It shows my first attempt at a character head and then my next attempt after having watched Barry's tutorials. You'll see graphically just how much of a difference it made.

We do, but there's no payout until it reaches $100.

Thanks, Dan. Sadly, we'll probably not see a dime from this, but it doesn't cost anything but time to try. :-) After we broke even on the original Greyhawk graphic novel in 1997, our enthusiasm for working on comics dried up and we went 10 years before we started doing them again. Unfortunately, I think the same doubts McCrary had back then he's having now. It's just too much work for getting no return. I was talking to a friend the other day and only half joked that after all this effort working on this Wobbling Dead movie, I'll go the con, sell 20 copies and then have to go look for a real job. It's a bummer, but that's how it goes.

Exactly. Plus I already have another puppet movie with no rods for precedence. :-)

I'm sure there's a way to make them easier to use. The inherit problem is that the rods aren't supposed to be able to achieve all of the normal movements of the hand. They are attached to the outside of the hand, which means the hands mostly stay thumbs-up. The rods can be angled outwards to allow some rotation, but not the amount a normal hand would have. Full palms up or palms down would be virtually impossible for a puppeteer to achieve with the rods. Especially since they are holding both rods with one hand. I think the biggest drawback I'm finding is that they look out of place in long shots. Typically, in a long shot, a puppet type character is replaced with a marionette which wouldn't have the rods. So it just seems odd for there to be these rods sticking out of the puppet's hands. Put simply, they don't help with the illusion, they just draw attention to themselves, which is not good. I don't know why I was so doggedly determined to move forward with them, even after seeing how odd they looked, but I've gotten over that now. :-)

Both Greyhawk graphic novels are now available via ComiXology! They are priced significantly cheaper ($2.99 and $4.99) than the print versions and are set up as individual pages, making them easier to read on your tablet or phone. They are 93 and 104 pages respectively, so that's a whole lot of starbuckling fun for very little cash. The second volume does include a new six page epilogue that isn't available online. And the first has the original last page that was left out of the online version. Greyhawk and the Starbucklers, Vol 1: Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean Greyhawk and the Starbucklers, Vol 2: Universe on Fire The Wannabe Pirates #2 was approved several months ago, so it should be available soon. I've got #3 & 4 waiting in the que to submit.

This has been a productive week for The Wobbling Dead! After several drafts and many outlines, I finally have a finished script and the storyboard/comic book is nearly 2/3rds finished. Hoping to have that done in the next week or so. Then onto animating! It's going to be tough work, but I gotta' finish it in time to have DVDs made for the Dallas ComicCon in May. I've decided to drop the arm rods from the models. It seemed like a fun idea at the time, but I don't think they really add as much as I'd hoped they would and are just big pains to have to keep track of. They are constantly intersecting things. It means I'll have to re-render the shots they were in, but it'll be worth it. Keeping my fingers crossed that things continue to go well.

Didn't you try to go down that path once before, Robert? The data for the camera in A:M didn't seem to be cooperative. Icarus was the free one, but it doesn't exist anymore and I couldn't find it anywhere when I looked.

That's pretty good! It does seem like the camera stops abruptly before the end of the shot, though. I was playing yesterday with an old shot from a home movie my friends and I made back in 1987. There was one shot with a mirror on the wall and as the camera moves, you can see my friend who is operating the camera in the mirror plain as day. I'd always wanted to replace it with a painting or something and after stumbling on something about tracking decided to give it a try. I was using Mocha AE with the idea of just replacing the rectangular mirror with a 2D image. The problem I ran into was that the camera work was very erratic, there wasn't really anything I could use as a tracking marker that would survive the shot. The mirror's image was constantly changing, so that confused the tracker, too. To be honest, though, I think even if everything else would have worked, I was still dealing with video taken from a 25+ year old VHS tape that was probably 3rd generation to begin with. It would be fun to have something like Syntheyes just to make fun videos for my nephews, but at $300, that just isn't gonna' happen in my current financial state. :-)