largento

Nice model as always, Paul! Not sure about the hair, but I haven't really messed with hair much. I hate to hear about your hard drive. I hope you didn't lose too much stuff.

This is great, Robert! Here are a couple of images that Stian found that I've been using for the ropes on the Sea Anemone: [EDIT] Looks like you already found some. :-) The problem I've had is that I have to go and turn the decals for many of the patches. This sometimes means going 180°.

Have a great birthday, Steffen!

Great job! I've started a re-watch of ST:TNG. I'm just now starting the 2nd season. Many of these I haven't seen since they were originally broadcast. Anyway, they were discussing some of the visual effects in the extras for the first season and mentioned that the shield effect was done optically by turning the camera sideways and dropping salt onto a black sphere on a black background. :-)

#6 in the series! This definitely was the toughest one yet! Sheldon by Dave Kellett is bar-none my favorite webcomic. It's also very much a line-art comic, so imagining the characters in 3D was difficult. That said, I'm really happy with how it came out. Arthur the duck just seemed to come alive when I put in rigging, so I ended up doing this one as multiple images, so that I could put him in different poses.

#5 in the series! This is Gus the dog from David Wilborn's Urban Jungle webcomic. I shared a table with David at the Webcomics Expo I went to in August. He's a really good guy and does a great webcomic! And the stereo version:

Impressive! Very cool!

That looks great, Matt! Great movement and character!

#4 in the series! This is "Robot" from the great webcomic, Robot Beach by Matt Forcum! I was supposed to wait until Friday to work on this, but I started fooling around with his foot last night and just couldn't bring myself to stop working on it until I had it finished. And here's the stereo version!

Cool snake, Gene! The snakey-tongue movements work well!

Thanks, guys!

Looks like it to me! Cool that you can use Google Street View to see the building. That's never occurred to me.

Thanks, Gerald! The keys to smoothness for me are: 1) Paying attention to spline continuity; 2) Using the x, y, z and combo restraints when adjusting CPs; 3) Placing the splines roughly in the middle between two splines. I virtually never use the bias handles (I keep them turned off while I'm modeling.) The curves I get just come from placing CPs. I usually use the porcelain material for skin, too. Not really to make it smooth, but to make it seem puffed out.

So, with the big commercial job out of the way, I took some time today to continue this series! This is a redneck squirrel named Jimbo from the VERY funny webcomic, Fuzznuts! It's fun trying to adapt different art styles into my 3D style. And again, a stereo anaglyph...

Thanks, Paul! I am counting on the speed of the commercial to cover a large quantity of sins. :-)

Very nice! I'm with Gerry, the specks of light really do give it a magical look.

Thanks, Gerry & Rodney! For the newer users, here's a couple of images showing how I set up the rig for the car. Very simple to do and it worked very well!

Thanks, everyone! That means a lot! Jake, this was definitely a case of me taking almost no money just to get my foot in the door. That said, I do normally set a price for the whole project rather than an hourly rate. The reason for that being that I'm usually pretty fast and think it's unfair that I should be paid less for the doing the same amount of work as another person, just because I can do it faster. I should be rewarded for that. I broke down my schedule into parts for the time estimate. It was originally based on what was supposed to be something simpler, but I allowed: Storyboard & Character Design: 2 days Modeling and Rigging: 5 days Animating and Rendering: 5 days My expectation was that there would be days in between while I waited for approval, but they were really in a hurry, so it was pretty much continuous. I think I should really work up some sort of contract to use in the future, that's a good idea. This one was kind of by the seat of my pants. Actually, Rodney, if you'll look closely, you'll see the car is wrecked in both 15 seconds. It's backed into a pole during the first part, and it's messed up pretty good by the time it gets to "3rd" chance. That one goes by pretty quick.

Hey thanks, guys! The timeline was pretty rushed. I started the storyboards and character design on Saturday, the 16th. So, from then to now is 13 days? Admittedly, there was a lot of time lost to learning. But there's no better way to learn than by making mistakes. :-) Tony, do you know that's the first time I've seen their new website? The one that was up before was all blue with red type (why do people do that?). That 2D image was the character design I did for this. I think I'm a little bit put out by the fact that they are using it. I told them it wasn't for public consumption.

Thanks, Gerry! We shall see. So, here it is! Probably not going to win any awards, but as always, each one of these projects is a learning experience. The original job was supposed to be a 30 second commercial, but by the time I got the gig it had been transformed into two 15 second commercials. When I came in, they had the scripts, the audio and some very generic idea of what the visuals could look like and they wanted the white screen background. I think my ideas were probably too complicated for the short amount of time I had, but I was able to work them in as best as I could. Because I wanted to incorporate the on screen words with my animation, I went ahead and volunteered to do all of the visuals. The "iPhone" dialing was created in Illustrator as an illustration and then I created the frames in Photoshop. I could then time them to the audio in Premiere. The endscreen with the company's logo, I did in After Effects. Unfortunately, I didn't push to get the final specs right away and did most of the work under the assumption that it would be widescreen. I only found out a couple of days ago, that it needed to be 4:3 standard def. I didn't have time to figure out how to create slaves for each of my processors, so I used multiple instances of A:M (seven, since I have 8 cores) to render and it went really fast. I did all of it using the v16 Beta and it was fast enough that I could do full quality renders along the process. The woman I was working for told me the client "loved it." I feel confident that I at least gave them more than their moneys' worth. My first animated commercial: 30sec_spot.mov

Hope your birthday was a great one, Chris!

Very nice!

Thanks, guys! I'm reminded of an interview of comic artist Howie Post I read awhile back. He said doing the humor books was easier. Doing the serious books took twice as long to draw, but you still made the same amount of money, so he stuck with the humor books. He said they called the guys who did the serious books "wrinkle artists." I am *not* a wrinkle artist. :-)

Thanks, David! This will probably be the last thing for awhile. I've still got more rigging to do and some other pieces and parts for the animation, but not interesting enough to post.

LOL! Nice job, Matt!