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Very cool, Robert! It did occur to me watching it, that if the rocket ship were going clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, it could shoot through one of the O's at the end.

Superb as always, Sebastian!

Before I move on, I rendered out a turntable of the Asimov model. I rigged him so that he could be bendy. spin.mov

Excellent, Tom! It really is a small world. :-) Thanks! (and thanks to Rodney, too.)

Another great (song and animation) job, guys! Astonishing how quickly you can do these, Gene! A role model to us all!

Thanks, everybody! Continuing in the series, here's a robot character called "Asimov" from the webcomic "Marooned." He just updated the character design and I thought I'd give it a go! I just finished it a little while ago, so I haven't heard back from the webcomic's author, but I hope he'll like it! Here it is: and here's the stereo anaglyph version!

I ran out of words ages ago, Stian. This one is *all* of those words. :-)

Cool stuff, Gene! Are we about to see an election year animation?

Another amazing job, Stian! My first car was a dilapidated '73 Super Beetle. Floorboards were rusting and had big holes in them and the rearview mirror would snap off if you tried to adjust it. No air and only an AM radio. Man, I loved that deathtrap. :-)

Thanks, guys!

I felt inspired yesterday to create a piece of 3D fan art for another webcomic called NPC. This is one of the comics I read on an RSS feed for another forum I visit. The comic is about a female gamer and features her two blue cats, Chloe and Bink. I'm not a cat person, but I get a kick out of them. Anyway, I was looking at one of her comics and felt compelled to see if I could recreate Bink & Chloe in 3D. Warning for the saccharin-intolerant, they are very cute characters. Although, in truth, their looks are deceiving. :-) I also created an anaglyph version: The creator of the strip seemed to really like the images and posted them on her site. I'm thinking about doing some other webcomics character fan art, so this may be a continuing series...

I'm curious, too, Mark!

Kerpapple and Dittzleboog are revealed in today's Wannabe Pirates! When I decided they were going to be in this story, I wanted a way to tell them apart. I had eventually gotten around that in the last story by giving them two different colored suits, but since they weren't going to have the suits, I decided on giving them these devices that would change their voices to sound human (and free me up from those alien word balloons) and allow them to be in disguise. I've been letting the early part of this story go where it wants to go, which has been fun. I had a thought that Flemm might think he had rats on the ship and then go down and find Kerpapple and Dittzleboog. Then I thought it would be funny if they actually were disguised as rats. Then it became a matter of trying to figure out when and how to do the reveal. I thought it would be fun to have one of them turned into a giant so that I could have an action sequence. That's where the story is going right now.

Looks great, Gerry! One thing I do to achieve that is to hide groups in the model window. (They'll disappear in the choreography window.) It's only a temporary thing, but it works for me (I frequently need to hide parts of things to accommodate the camera.)

Thanks, Rodney! I'm just pointing the domain name to a subdomain for the start of this. If it starts generating enough readers to justify paying for a new hosting plan, I'll do that.

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.