largento

Whoa-ho-how! That fog and the lighting really help with the scale. Looks great!

Great job, guys! I laughed out loud at the dancing dove.

Cool image, Mark! I like the low angle and the poses.

I only have a passing awareness of the Thomas the Train show, but they look fantastic, Stian!

Keep in mind that specularity will be solid if your surface is flat. So when you're making your robot, it's best to avoid large flat areas. Give them some roundness or break them up with additional details. You can also do a search for the matcap shader and use a metallic sphere image.

Whoops! :-) You can use my real name, Gene: Mark R. Largent Thanks!

Thanks, guys! The Toy Story nod comes in today's Wannabe Pirates strip!

Happy Birthday!

Thanks, guys! Ken, I was going to keep his collar, but it ended up looking kind of goofy, so there's a black turtle-neck kind of thing in its place.

Next weeks' strips feature Flemm in Space! I've been looking forward to this part of the story for a long time! I hadn't intended to, but with Toy Story 3 out, I thought it would be fun to give Flemm's space suit a bit of the Buzz Lightyear look. I even Frankensteined some pieces from the Spaceman model that was on the Extras DVD. :-) I am rapidly approaching the end of this story! I was shooting for 200 strips, but one of the sequences I had planned ended up getting thrown out because I thought it would slow down the ending. I've plotted out the story ending with strip #185, but I may add a couple as I go if gags occur to me. Today's strip is #169.

Thanks, Mark3D. To me it looks like the letters are just floating slightly above the Denny's logo. I created the white outline as a shape in Adobe Illustrator and brought that in with the AI plugin. Same way I brought in the red type. I then positioned them to make them work. The red type has sides, but the white is just flat. It's positioned so that the red type breaks through.

Happy Birthday, Martin! Hope it's a great one!

I also took a couple of stabs... I used a yellow/orange global color (80%) and then a couple of lights. One orange rim up and behind on the right and a narrow yellow key below on the right. I did turn on AO, but I don't think it contributed very much. I tried one with depth of field and a little bloom post effect... [edit] I picked up the Denny's logo from "Brands of the World" and used the yellow and orange color values from that file (the outer frame is actually a different color than the interior.)

Knowing the care and attention to detail you possess, David, I know this is going to be worth the wait!

Set the Global Color to a warm yellow/orange. That should make the shadows orange instead of black. I wouldn't use AO myself. I'd set up some lights, so you can cast shadows within it.

Using Global Color is one step. The image in the commercial doesn't have black/gray shadows. It looks like the lighting is softer, too. You don't want such harsh shadows.

Thanks, guys! I ended up changing the scale to make it more threatening.

Here's a fun thing I'm building for tomorrow's strip: The Great Intelligence's Attack Module! I've been wanting to build this for awhile now. It's part chicken-walker and part War of the Worlds Tripod.

Just to put an endnote on this thread, I found Dark_Jedi's Deviant Art page and though he's moved on to using other applications now, he did finish the General: http://cc-5052.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1we7dm He's got a nice turntable animation with some images surrounding it. A very talented fellow!

Or you can render the same sequence. Say it's 200 frames long. Set one to render frames 1-200 and set the step to "2". On the other, set it to render frames 2-200 and set the step to "2". The first will render all of the odd frames and the second will render all of the even frames.

If you have more than one processor, you can run more than one copy of A:M. If you set them all to render frames (you can do a step for the number of instances you use), then all of those instances of A:M will be rendering at the same time, dividing your render time by the number of instances.

Gene, are you running multiple instances?

Two places. On the right sidebar of the website, there's a blue button that says "TWC Top Web Comics" with "Click the button to vote for us" and there's also a link in my signature below.

Thanks, Tony! Every vote helps! Robert, I'm pretty sure that alternate edit wouldn't help my chances for getting accepted on the "Family Webcomics" website. :-) ...and thanks so much for the donation!! I sincerely appreciate it!

Thank you, gentlemen!