largento

He turned out great, Ken! (And the name of the current storyline should give you a hint as to what other character you modeled that will show up this time around.) Today, Greyhawk and the Starbucklers officially moved to its own website! Starbucklers.com now houses Greyhawk's adventures, while the Wannabe Pirates site now only houses the Wannabe Pirate strips! I think it will be interesting to see the two strips start to grow separate audiences.

That looks great! Bravo!

Lenny the Homing Gull is finally making his first appearance in the Wannabe Pirates today! Lenny, you may remember, was expertly modeled by Ken H.! Having Lenny laugh his head off at Flemm is something I've been waiting a long time to see. :-)

I think it's fine the way it is, but looking at it hard and really picking it apart: You might try overlapping some the movements. There is a definite sense that he is making one movement at a time, starting and stopping with each one. Overlapping them, will give the movement more fluidity. If you want him to have that kind of start and stop movement, maybe exaggerate the follow-through? For the fall, you might have him moving forward as he puts his foot out there and show that he is moving his center of gravity outside of the box and it feel more like he's losing his balance when he falls. Instead of having him rest his weight on his upper thigh, move it back more towards his center. That way you get the sense that he's already committed to moving forward when his other foot catches on the side of the box. Right now it feels like he leads into the fall with his shoulder. I feel like he should be moving forward then his foot stop his movement and then the quick fall. I would also cut the first shot of him falling sooner and start the next shot with him already in the frame. From where we left him in the first shot, he would already be visible in the second shot. It seems strange that he disappears. When he hits, I would expect a rag doll to maybe bounce more, but it's not really a hard hit: it's kind of a flip/roll he's doing, so maybe there would be more follow-through and his head would come up and then it could hit hard on the floor when it goes back down. Right now his rear end seems to take the brunt of his fall, but he rubs the back of his head.

Thanks, Tony! Glad you like it! I used a local printer that a friend of mine had a connection to. I think they did a great job. Thanks, Jake! I want to do animation at some point, but right now my focus is on the webcomic. Unfortunately, my freelance work has slowed to the point that currently I'm a little desperate. The money that I put aside to get me through the first six months is long gone. (It's been 17 months since I quit my job.) I've had to move in with my sister and I'm having difficulty finding enough work to cover bills. I've been trying pretty hard this month to get something going, but the business isn't coming. It's very frustrating, but I try to stay focused on working on the Wannabe Pirates so that at least I'm being productive. I keep thinking that it will help me in the end. :-)

It's easy, Matt. You just put some image link code into your signature.

Some new stuff! I modeled and rigged the rats today. I also went and heavily modified the Nash model to be Waldo Morgan. Not as accurate as he would've been had I started from scratch, but he doesn't play a very big part in this story. (at least I don't think he does. I'm kind of playing this one more by ear.) He actually looks kind of like a young Ben Franklin to me. :-)

Thanks, Xtaz! (I only just saw this post right now!)

I hadn't given thought of doing it, but I am going to have to re-do the story page when I remove the Greyhawk stories and put a link for the latest story.

Chris, I changed my mind and decided to scrap the "how I do it" and do "How to Make a 3D Webcomic" in strip form. It started here.

Check it out in this thread.

Very impressive! This is going to be something special! Have you experimented with the Technocrane model any?

Thanks, Ken. I play around as I go. I think the lighting is probably very similar to the first panel of the last story. I set up the lights and then switch it to IBL and use the Photoshop image I created of the wall at some percentage (like 40% or 30%). I use a lot of warm colors, even though I kind of think of the Storyteller as a bit of a mysterious character. Essentially he's like the Cryptkeeper or the Witch in the old horror comics. :-)

Thanks, Tony! Much appreciated!

Thanks, Rodney! I'm cranking away on strips trying to get ahead of the game for once. As worn out as I was by the end of the last story, I'm really having fun being back into it again.

Thanks, Robert! Rodney, there'll still be a window to get coloring books for a little while. There's a pirate festival here in October that I'm hoping to get them into and I'm expecting to sell out of them there.

Just making a note that the new story will be starting on Monday! Sword of the Rightwise King has been pushed back until the next story, although this new one will set up elements for it. The new story's called: "The Wannabe Pirates and the Amulet of the Apes."

Robert, here's the graphic ...and thanks for the link!

I don't, Robert, but I will very shortly. :-)

Thanks, guys! I had fun doing them. I've never done anything that went for multiple issues like this, so it was cool to get to play with changing the colors of the logo and picking out elements from each section rather than doing just one general, all-encompassing image. Here's a random thing I found interesting. For these apps, I have to create application icons for the various devices. It's wild, but the icons for the iPhone 4 are bigger than the ones for the iPad. It's because the iPhone 4 has a much higher resolution display.

Working on covers for the iPhone/iPad app version of The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island

Not in any way I'm aware of. When A:M renders an image, it renders a raster image. I would suspect that even if there was such a way, you would end up with a tangle of paths that you would never be able to make use of. In Illustrator, you can create graphic brushes which could have the look of chalk. Most likely there is already one in the graphic brush libraries.

Nice job, Jake!

Thanks, Rodney! Instructions are now up on the website if you want to order the Coloring Book!

I did come across a website that was set up to do that. At least that was my impression (I didn't stick around long.) A thought I had was to take a couple of pages, put copyright notices on them and submit them to some of these places that offer free coloring book pages to download. A kind of advertisement for free. What I found was mostly a wild west of copyright infringement. Obviously, that's not a huge concern in that I'm giving it away, but it seems like those are the kind of sites that could be packed with malware and that kind of stuff and I'd hate to have somebody email me that they got a virus because they downloaded my coloring book page.