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Thanks, Gene! Hey Jason, I'll get in touch with you next week after the holiday and we can discuss. I think I could be interested in something at that level of involvement.

Thanks, Jason! Wow, I'm impressed with your entrepreneurial spirit, but coming up on my 44th birthday, I don't think I'm up to trying to compete with Korean sweatshops. :-) I don't have the energy I had when I was in my 20s. Hopefully, I'll find something where *I* get to farm out the work. It's interesting to me how pervasive the Muppets are. I'm creating puppets, but like Kleenex, people think all puppets are Muppets. I recall seeing a 60 Minutes story about the Muppets from back in the days when the TV show was on and they pointed out that even though Hollywood would normally generate a slew of counter-puppet shows to cash in on the Muppet's success, they weren't doing it because it was far too expensive to do. Like Apple with the iPad, Jim Henson's company was already too far ahead of the curve. The Muppet Show was being funded by a wealthy guy in the UK. I think pursuing the Muppets for work would be counter to what I'm doing. It would be saying that all puppets are Muppets and I don't agree with that anymore than saying all cartoon characters are Looney Tunes or that all CGI films are Pixar movies. I'm also really aware that I have a limited time ahead of me and I want to work on independent projects that excite me. I want to toss around some of the ideas I've had over the years and explore them and see if I can come up with something I can market effectively and something that I'll have a passion for. The puppet format allows me to do them quickly. (Henson went into puppetry for the same reason. He wanted to do animation, but the process was too time-consuming. Puppets were faster.) And yes, puppets aren't human, so they stay firmly on the friendly side of the Uncanny Valley. One thing I observed doing these last two conventions was that even folks who had their own properties were making the majority of their money doing sketches of Marvel/DC/Star Wars characters. It reminded me that the Mad comic book didn't take off until they did a parody of Superman. I think that's a way to get an audience's attention, so I'm planning on stacking the deck with parody stuff which hopefully will be the bait that gets them in for the new stuff. About the Sesame Street idea, I don't have much of an interest in education ...especially on the preschool level. It was suggested many times that I dumb the Wannabe Pirates down to go for a children's market, but I just couldn't get excited about doing that. Specifically with Sesame Street, you aren't dealing with Jim Henson Studios (which is owned by Disney), but the Sesame Workshop (formerly the Children's Television Workshop), which is its own entity out of New York and a non-profit. They would happily sue my ass off if I gave them even the slightest impression that I wanted to enter their space. :-) Ironically, McCrary and I discussed pitching the Wannabe Pirates to Henson Studios about a year ago and what info I was able to find made it unlikely that any inroads would be possible. Essentially, they can't even get most of their own properties into production, so they aren't looking for outside ideas. I am excited that you get dollar signs in your eyes when you look at the images, though, since maybe that means I might be on track to figuring out how to make something successful this time. :-)

Thanks, Rodney! I am having a lot of fun with this. So nice to be freed from the pressures that I was feeling on the Wannabe Pirates.

Thanks, guys! While working on the characters for that short animation, I decided just to go ahead and play with the idea on the Wannabe Pirates site. Since I wasn't getting anywhere with new pages, I decided I'd try out these ideas on the strip and see if anything comes from it. So far, it's been a nice shot in the arm. Part of the fun is that I can create the characters quickly enough that I can do anything on a whim. Tomorrow's strip features a parody of the old Captain America theme song:

Alternately, while in the pose, right-click on the name of the model in the PWS and choose New-->Decal. That will bring the decal up in the pose that you are in.

I think it succeeds in feeling like weight is being put on his heels. One suggestion I think would help would to have his feet turn out a little. Right now they feel a little robotic.

Happy Birthday!

I'd go with a material with an Environment Map. Then you can turn reflections off.

Lookin' good, Darkwing! Looking forward to the flythrough video when it's done. Somewhere I've got a Star Trek sound effects CD with like a one or two minute bridge sound effects mix. I think it might be in storage, though.

It's good looking, Gene, but I think it doesn't have enough personality for your animations. I think it should be more askew and have some kind of life to it.

Keep bumping this thread up every day. I vote every time I see it!

Experimenting is the key. You might also look at some compositing or post effects, too. This is just me taking the first two images you posted and compositing them in photoshop with some layer effects. It would take some experimenting, but you could use the A:M compositor to achieve the same kind of mix. I went for a spookier look and used a blue filter to desaturate the warm colors. I also added some blurred noise layers to simulate adding a little bit of fog and did a small amount of blurring to simulate depth of field. A small amount of black fog and depth of field might help give it more atmosphere.

That's looking great, Gerry! The lizards came out great. I wonder if you could use one of those "morph" apps to make the tear-to-lizard transition a little more subtle?

Another winner, Myron/Gene!

Thanks, everybody! Robert, unfortunately A:M Track is still Windows only. I fear my Windows installation for Parallels won't work after losing the last hard drive since Windows will inevitably think it's another machine and all the license info is in storage. Nancy, the felt look is simple noise via the Surface settings. The hat and coat use the ToonNation->Joyce attribute.

That's pretty spectacular, Mark!

Thanks, guys! Well, obviously for brand reasons, you can't call him a Muppet, but the idea is to treat the characters like a mix of marionettes and puppets, which is where the Muppets get their name. Of course, in this case it'll just be a simulation of a marionette/puppet. I've been obsessing for months about the idea of animating puppets. Puppets can be more "animated" in their performances and they aren't as complex and subtle in their movements as people are. The bar for "realism" with puppets is significantly lower. :-) He's the former, Paul. I haven't completely committed to it being entirely black and white, but I know at least part of it will and I want to see if I can achieve some film noir with it. I may desaturate the non-b&w parts so that just a touch of color is there. I'm thinking of this as part proof-of-concept. The goals are to see if I can accomplish simplifying the animation process by using puppet-models and also see if I can get a more polished look. The short should be around 4 minutes long.

Having trouble getting any Wannabe Pirates work done, so I figured I'd try working on something different to see if I can get myself back in the groove. This is something I've wanted to do for awhile. Started working on the first of two character models for it:

Super neat stuff!

Well done!

Hi David, That's a glitch with the Mac OS that showed up a few OSs ago. There's a workaround, thankfully! In the case of there just being one windeow (ie Save As...), just switch to another app and then back to A:M and the options won't be greyed out anymore. You can do this quickly by using command-tab. In the case of a finder window on top of another window (say you've got the render dialogue box open and want to select where to save the render), use the Hide command FROM the application menu and then go back to Animation:Master. It's become second nature to me, but it was quite frustrating before I figured out a way around it! :-)

I remember feeling the same way (and still do sometimes.) Like any big task, the key is to tackle it a little bit at a time. Then it starts to get cumulative and doesn't seem quite as overwhelming. I've had this conversation before with people about how once you start to get into it, you realize, hey, this isn't so hard ...but then you realize the sheer volume of work necessary to create an animated project and you get overwhelmed again. :-)

Nice, Gene! Very cool!

Wow!

JimD, just do a search for "greyhawk" on the iTunes store and you should find them. ("The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island") They are optimized for both the iPhone and the iPad. For the iPhone, the app will go through the stories panel-by-panel (programmed by the guy who wrote the app.) It works really well. Rodney, you might want to check with Ka-Blam and see if they lost your order. I remember them saying they had some computer problems awhile back. There is a 2-page "making of" article at the back of the graphic novel which has some of the original character design sketches and info about how the book was created. Oxicomics is about to go into a closed beta, but I really like the idea of digital comics and hope they catch on. I think low prices are key to that, though, and there's pressure from the brick and mortar comic shops against the publishers not to lower prices for digital comics.