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Minutes to go and I'm only $661 to go! The stress is killing me!

Last chance (for me!) Please help! I only have 2 1/2 hours left and I'm only 30% away! Please do what you can! If I don't reach my goal, I get nothing and the project gets cancelled. Thanks, everyone!

Heading into the last day of the Kickstarter! It could still make it, but that's going to take a lot of folks helping out. Hope you'll consider saving this project and bringing it to wobbling life! Don't forget about these added incentives! Thanks to all of you who have supported this! I greatly appreciate it! This is going to be a very long day for me.

Even if you don't add any footage to your video, I'd embed some of your YouTube videos into the story section.

A lot of people do $10. It depends on what you are shipping. For DVDs, it cost me less than $6 for first class to anywhere. But then you have the mailer, address labels, making several trips to the post office. Most of that cost goes into domestic, too.

Hey-yo, I've updated my Storenvy store with digital versions of The Wannabe Pirates comics! Issues #1-3 are available in PDF format and you can even get the Curse of Greyhawk Island graphic novel for waaay cheaper than the print version! The print version of issue #3 will be available soon (just sent the files to the printer tonight.) Also, both of the Greyhawk graphic novels will be available soon! They are almost ready to go to the printers. Just some last minute decisions about the back covers and they'll be out of there! We're hoping to bring the digital versions to the Comixology app through their Submit initiative, but that takes time and we're not sure if they'll accept the books yet. If we do get the go ahead, I plan on bringing as many issues of The Wannabe Pirates as I have material to do, that will include the Amulet of the Apes stuff. And of course, you can still order the Stalled Trek DVD at the store!

I want to put up one last plea for help for my Kickstarter project. I still have four days left, but a family emergency is taking me out of town tomorrow morning and I won't be back before the end of it. I also likely will only have internet access via my phone. Every little bit helps get closer to that goal, and remember I'm offering those bonus incentives for Hash users. Hoping for a last-minute miracle, Thanks to all of you who have helped, believe me, it is very appreciated!

Thanks! You know, it's funny that I don't think I really ever thought about the fact that most of the Mad Magazine parodies I read growing up were of movies or TV shows I'd never seen. Didn't stop me from enjoying them.

Thanks. By far, my goal on this new model was to make him as simple as possible. The simpler he is, the easier he is to model, rig, etc. As to the original project, I think it was another one of those times people were scratching around for some kind of group project and I was throwing out ideas. I thought it would be beneficial to have a kind of Project Pack with all kinds of props and stuff for an easy to create character so that new users could start making their own movies right out of the box. The Extras DVD is a great resource, but it's like looking around a garage sale for matching salt and pepper shakers. This way, everything would be the same scale and be designed & rigged to work with the customizable character. Didn't seem to interest folks, though. :-) Thank goodness I finally latched onto doing Stalled Trek. I was bouncing off of the walls before that.

Nope. There was obviously not an outpouring of enthusiasm for the idea. :-) This idea did manifest itself in the puppet idea, though. This idea of being able to take a basic character and make all of your other characters from him. To be honest, I'd completely forgotten this existed, so no, this model is not the simple model I'm working with now. Speaking of which, you want to talk economy of splines, do a compare with the new one. :-)

sQcHDlEzA68 Sticking this on the page now that I've figured out how to embed YouTube videos.

rdUtjbf3U9g Just experimenting to see how embedding a YouTube video works ...and success!

Looks very convincing to me!

Don't forget that you can also create an environment map for your sphere. Create a new material and change the attribute to: Plugin->HashInc->Environment Map Choose a bitmap to represent the environment that it's in and apply the material to your sphere. Now you don't even have to use reflection, it will reflect the bitmap. See image below:

Thanks, Mark! It was a bit rushed, but I'm so happy to have one now.

Happy birthday, Robert!

Better late than never, I finally made a trailer for Stalled Trek: Amutt Time! You can see it . I must've tried a dozen times to do it and just had the dickens of a time trying to figure out how to do it. What do I show, what do I not show? It's a 16 minute movie, how do you make a trailer for that? For some reason today I thought of an opening title card and just started writing down the whole thing. It changed very little from what I put together. The beauty part is now I have the trailer embedded on my Storenvy product page, which is something I've long wanted to have. How do you sell a DVD without showing a video?

Presumably with much larger budgets. :-) And remember, most of the uniques saw it twice. There might be a better follow-through if I were selling a DVD rather than having it link to a Kickstarter. That adds another layer of complexity to the thing. Also, a lot of advertising is just aimed at awareness. Potentially 45K people are now aware that there's something called "The Wobbling Dead" who weren't aware of it before. If my product was on shelves in store, this might translate to them seeing it and saying, I've heard of this and considering a purchase.

Just an interesting bit of process, folks might find useful if they try a KS in the future. My webhost offers $25 in Facebook Ads credit that I've never made use of. Wanting to get the word out, I thought I'd give it a try, so I set up an ad linking to the KS page and targeted it to The Walking Dead and some categories that matched it. I set my budget at $5 a day and have run it for four days. According to the stats, during those four days, the ad appeared for 45,724 unique Facebook users and they were exposed to it 1.9 times. It was clicked on 45 times, so basically one in one thousand. Not a whole lot of clicks and I don't know if there were any pledges that came from the ad. It's an option, though and you can target your audience.

Thanks, Matt & Rodney! I don't know about them having much value outside of the A:M community, Rodney. I've never really worked with a polygon/subdivide system for modeling. Mine's purely A:M-based. My goal with it is to show a user how to create a simple, yet neat-looking character that they can then customize and use to make their own A:M projects, be it animation or web comic, etc. Hopefully, folks will see value in them and help get The Wobbling Dead funded. I should point out that's just the one model up there. He's just in three different poses.

That's impressive! I got the impression that Pixar's patent claim analyzed this after (?) the posing and somehow made the compensation based on analyzing the two poses, which would be different than this, but it seems like A:M's solution is much more practical and easier to implement.

Sounds right, Robert. My impression of it all was that it looks at Pose A and Pose B and adjusts the interpolation between the two to have realistic movement, removing the need to go back and key in-betweens to fix the straight-line movement of the joints. I'd think the patent would have to be for their process of accomplishing this, not the actual doing of that ...since the end goal is to mimic real world anatomical movement, but the document was so dense, I gave up on reading any more of it. :-)

Here's a side-by-side comparison. On the left, the Amplitude plug-in, on the right, manually synching with the pose slider: jimmycomp_s.mov Hands down, manual is better, but for time-saving instances, I could see going with the Amplitude plug-in. Especially for a long speech delivered by a character who isn't in close-up. I'm debating another project (if TWD doesn't get funded) that would be episodic. Essentially as close as I could go to doing an animated webcomic and being able to simplify things will be key to making it doable.

Agreed, but can be helpful to look at real fencing and then exaggerate from it. That way it looks less like they are just wildly moving about. :-)

Ignoring movie fencing, part of the posture is to keep the torso facing perpendicular to the foil. That gives you the maximum arm length. If you turn towards your opponent, your reach lessens. There is a move in fencing very similar to what you're doing here, I can't recall what the name of it is, but essentially the first foot movement is more a less a "fake" and then you go in for a long thrust with the second movement. So, if you can imagine it, the first foot fall is done to make noise and fake out your opponent and then the second part is a lunge. Alternately, you could bring the back foot forward after the first move and increase the distance of the lunge. I took a couple of semesters of fencing in college, so my knowledge is limited, but there was a guy in my class who was vertically-challenged and he used to use that all of the time, but he almost made it a sort of hopping action. It wasn't at all intimidating, but it was very difficult not to laugh, which made it somewhat effective. :-) I was very disappointed early on when I found out real fencing and movie fencing had very little in common. :-)