largento

Thanks, everybody! I greatly appreciate the words of encouragement! JimD, I do have a series of iTunes apps for the first story and I'm working on doing them as individual issues that are available via oxicomics. My goal is to complete this story so that I have a second graphic novel and go from there.

Thanks, Mark! I'm doing something new in the strip these days. After a sabbatical/come-down-off-of-the-ledge period, I decided to do the strip as comic book pages, rather than comic strips. I've been converting the strips into pages for print, and the results have really been great, but I like the idea of being able to design the page from the beginning, rather than design it after the fact. A computer crash set me back a couple of weeks, but I'm once again trudging along and I really like doing the pages. Since I'm only doing one a week, I can spend more time on it and I think I'm starting to get better at making the set-up in the choreography better match the layout in my head. It also gives me more space and a broader canvas. This story is also going to play with some comic book tropes and having the full page means I can do some homages to some of my favorites from the past. Here's the first couple of pages:

I use the AI wizard often when I'm making anything mechanical. As Rodney suggests, You can plan ahead in Illustrator by making the points in the path make sense to A:M. I almost never leave it up to the plug-in to fill in patches, though. I just bring in the path and do that on my own. I've found it helpful to create several parts in one AI file at the same size and bring them in all together. For a background machine I made recently, I also threw in some common shapes that I knew I would be able to copy and paste for creating things like buttons and switches.

Just voted! Keep bumping this thread up to remind us!

Nice!

Bravo!

Stunning as always, Stian! Speaking of patch count, has anyone enountered a patch limit with the latest versions of A:M?

Very nice! Shaping up into a genuinely creepy little dude!

And now, for something completely different... :-) That's quite an exercise regiment you've got them doing. I keep waiting for them to drop. :-)

Greatness.

Looks like a mystery to me, too, but a general caution: be mindful of when you have Mirror Mode on. It's the usual suspect for many an odd behavior.

Don't know how I missed this before, Jirard, but WOW! That is a great-looking model!

Thanks, Ken. I really want to do something different and fun with this next project and I think it will have a better chance of gaining an audience. I'm excited about it. Plus, I'm thinking in the interim, I can go back and look at the Wannabe Pirates models and improve upon them. Make that last story really look snazzy. Robert, that comic's about the current battle line between syndicated cartoonists (who fancy themselves anointed as true cartoonists by the syndicate Gods) and webcomics. The tired line is that webcomics creators are all just wannabes who give away their comics for free and make money from selling T-shirts. What they fail to take into account is that most folks never considered buying a newspaper as paying for comics. In effect, people already thought of comic strips as being free. Sure they did get paid by the distributors, but the truly wealthy cartoonists made their wealth by merchandising their characters. Dave Kellet has a documentary coming out about the effect of the the newspaper's demise is having on cartoonists. You can see a trailer for it on his Kickstarter page.

Thanks for the comments, Rodney! I've given it a lot of thought and at this point, it's really a post-mortem examination. :-) • As you indicated, comics today are very indy/alternative. I can't tell you how many more readers I'd have if I introduced a lesbian into the strip. :-) Face it, though, the indy/alternative *is* the mainstream. I'm not hip nor can I access any hipness. :-) I'm reminded of my first semester as an art major in college. I had started wearing those knit ties of the day. Most of my heroes were stand-up comedians and stand-ups wore ties back then ...at least when they appeared on TV. So, I'm sitting in my freehand drawing class surrounded by classmates in tie-die shirts with the big rips in the knees of their jeans and being told how I'm such a conformist. And I'm laughing at them, saying I'm the only guy in this room that is dressed differently. :-) My sophomore year, I switched my major to broadcast journalism. • I am not going to win any friends or enjoy my life any better by being the jerk posting on every forum about how CG comics deserve a chance and having to defend every other CG comic out there just to champion the cause. They are mostly right. The vast vast vast majority of the CG comics being produced are horrible. There are a lot of people who are interested in doing CG not as an art form, but as a replacement for art. Personally, I see it as a valid art form. Others don't. It's their loss that their vision is so narrow. The vast vast vast majority of drawn comics out there are horrible, too. :-) • I'm ready to move on. As much as the comic strip version has been fun to do, I sort of fell into doing it. It was never my plan. I was vigorously against it! :-) Whatever the case, I feel like I've done it. I've checked it off of the list. • As you mention, Dreamland Chronicles is a success, but at a significant cost upfront. Sava had an enormous amount of capital to invest in paying people to produce the assets for the series and it wasn't that many years ago that it *wasn't* a success. In 2008, I took part in a discussion of 3D comics with Sava on a webcomics forum. At that time, I still believed that doing 3D comics was just too much effort and felt the Wannabe Pirates should stay 2D. Sava was very candid and estimated that up to that point the comic had cost him "over $150,000 in modeling, designs, rigging environments and props." His answer to the direct question of "Would I do it again?": "Not unless I win the lottery." Three years later, I'm sure that expense has grown even larger. Even now, with his large audience, I suspect that he may not have made back his initial investment. But, Sava hasn't just done Dreamland Chronicles during this time. He's branched out and written other series and books and has been actively pursuing movie deals. Before beginning DC, he worked in CG in movies. Me, I'm unemployed, homeless and running out of options. :-) The plan (unless it changes) is this: I'm going to continue the webcomic until the end of this story, which will probably get close to the end of the year or barely into next year. I'm going to change the comic book to bi-monthly, so that 6 issues will come out each year. With this new schedule, the webcomics content will end in issue #20 which will come out in August of 2014. At that point, I'm going to do the "BIG" Wannabe Pirates story as a comic book only (freeing me from the format of the webcomic) that will run probably another 10 issues. It will be both a continuation of the story, as well as a stand-alone story. I'm going to basically treat it as The Wannabe Pirates movie. That will get me into 2016. Further than that, I don't know. I may continue the comic book with new stories or stop it and have three graphic novels and 30 issues of comics to show for it. The comics will be made available digitally as well as print on demand. By 2014, I'll have been able to write the ten issues completely and may even have them already finished. More importantly, I'll be free to pursue other avenues of creativity. I'm circling around an idea for doing an animated series that I think would have more potential for creativity and audience. RE: The licensing it to the community idea. I love these characters and have spent the better part of four years now having them running around my head. I feel the same way I'm sure a parent would feel at the suggestion of giving away their children.

Big thanks, Rodney! Right now future plans for The Wannabe Pirates are iffy. I hate to even think about it, but it's very likely that this current story will be the last. It's just not finding an audience and there's an ENORMOUS prejudice against CG comics. I read it in every place that mentions them. People basically say they won't even look at a comic that is CG. I honestly thought that doing The Wannabe Pirates in CG would make it stand out from the crowd. I wasn't expecting it to make it stand out because it's a leper! :-) I'm not saying there aren't any terrible CG webcomics out there, because there are. The stereotype is that a CG comic is done by someone not talented enough to draw their comic on their own, so they turn to Poser and the result is amateurish and primitive. Additionally, I can't recommend ever doing a Google image search for "3D comics" with your Safe Search setting off. What comes up is a sea of pornographic Poser comics. I wouldn't be surprised if there are family filters out there that just block "3D comics" altogether! What's really frustrating is the vast majority of webcomics are extremely poorly drawn and even many of the big comics are doing a kind of limited animation thing where they reuse drawings over and over again. I can't tell you what a let down it is to know that a giant percentage of comics readers won't even give The Wannabe Pirates a chance. I mean, the comic was featured in an article on MTV.com and only got one click! And that person only looked at one page! Then there's the terrible irony I've found that many people who do encounter the comic assume that it is done by a studio full of people and assume that I'm massively successful. So, where many comics are able to generate a fan base that supports the little guy, The Wannabe Pirates is assumed to be a corporate/commercial product. The question is, do I want to get out there and try to fight this prejudice and likely get my nose bloodied and have to be "that guy with a cause" or just move onto something else? After all, it was four years ago TODAY that I started The Wannabe Pirates thread and began working on modeling Flemm. That's the longest I've ever worked on a single project and will there really be any difference to a future employer whether I've done 300 pages or 400 pages? They are only going to want to look at one or two of them. Then there's the fact that comics are for all real purposes a dead medium. I've been circling around an animated project and I honestly think I'd be better served pursuing it. Of course, this isn't the first time I've had the thought just to toss it all and go do something else and I haven't done it yet, so who knows... :-)

Yay! The second issue of The Wannabe Pirates comic book is now available! Go here to get it! Makes great gifts for kids you know!

Thanks for the links, Rodney! I've enjoyed both of the videos. Only wish they'd stick around longer. :-) Most of the concepts I learned in college, but I like how Sherm demonstrates them and there are some new things I wasn't aware of. Really wish I could afford the set. Maybe if I start saving my pennies. :-)

Excellent, Gerry! I really like the look of it!

Beautiful, Paul!

Glad to see you going for it, Chris!

Not sure if this has already been suggested, but one possible way to solve the window problem would be to have the rooms dark and the first part of any sequence would be a light being turned on. This would attract the attention of the camera/binoculars and be the motivation for them focusing on the room. The footage could start off being an image sequence placed into one of the windows and then once the camera moves in, it switches to a straight on shot not requiring the full apartment building model.

Thanks, guys. I saw the density of the splines running through the mouth. It only seems half as dense when you're working on the one side. :-) I'll pull out some of the splines when I focus on the lips. Definitely wouldn't want to take that many splines into the mouth. Nope, nothing like that, Darkwing. I draw the entire profile of the head from the bottom of the front of the neck to the bottom of the back of the neck. Then I draw half of the front of the head. I then start stitching like I'm creating half of a wire basket, putting in the features like the eyes. It's like working out a puzzle. At a certain point, I copy/paste/flip the one side and work in mirror mode, so I can see how it looks as a whole. Once I have all the parts filled in, I attach the two parts and then continue to tweak in mirror mode until I say, "that'll do." :-) I always say that modeling in A:M is more like drawing for me. Poly modeling is more like sculpting and that's completely alien to me. To me, trying to make a head to attach the mask to seems awkward. I don't know how far I'm going to go with this, it was just an exercise to try doing something more realistic. I'll most likely end up donating it since the thought of doing a project with even semi-realistic models instantly stresses me out. :-) The splinage comes out different every time I model, Zaryin. :-)

With everybody making head models, I felt the urge to play with making one today, going for more realistic than I normally do. I borrowed the ear from my v3 Krok model. Not liking the mouth right now, but still, fun to mess with... I should point out that I model the whole head rather than doing that face mask thing.

I guess I'm mistaken about A:M being able to record mouse movements. For some reason, I have a memory of seeing a video of moving a ball around with the mouse and being able to record that movement. I thought for sure it was A:M. Then I thought maybe it was something in Flash, but don't see it there, either. (Might have been in an older version of Flash.) Only thing I can find is Motion Sketch in AE. This plug-in isn't for A:M, but would be the answer. The example videos are impressive. [EDIT] I guess A:M can do realtime mouse movements. :-)

Robert, could that be done with realtime input? Isn't there a way to use your mouse to record realtime movements?