largento

Thanks, guys! Holmes, the sea serpent was actually just a hologram, so it's possible that somebody on Greyhawk's team was having a little joke at K'Bor's expense. :-) Wasn't intentional by me, though. :-) Myron, the very earliest version of K'Bor (when we were first creating the character in '94) had even more teeth! McCrary wisely chose to streamline them. My initial concept for K'Bor was an alien version of Little John, where he looked big and tough on the outside, but was actually a nice guy.

This week, I get to do a big knockdown-dragout fight between Flemm and K'Bor! (Big thanks to Mark S. and his rigging expertise!) In the words of that other immortal bard... "It's clobberin' time!" :-)

LOL, Poco is rigged, but he doesn't like scraping his knuckles on the ground. :-) Virtually all of my characters keep their arms bent because they have very short legs. :-) Poco's case is probably more pronounced, since he's hunched over all of the time. I will admit that there is a generic stance Action that I usually drop on Poco since Poco is rarely involved in what's going on. Poco is an odd character. There are times that I use his facial expressions to indicate that maybe he realizes just how dumb Flemm is acting, but there are many times when I feel like he's just not paying attention and is off in his own world. At the final size of the strip, most of the subtlety of those expressions is lost unfortunately. In the strips where Flemm is buying the Sea Anemone, I actually had a whole deal where Poco is seen looking at the ship and then is roaming all around in it through the next several strips. Unfortunately, almost every time he was just too small to be noticed or covered by a word balloon, so the effort was in vain. Yet, I always work in important plot points for Poco to do to move the story along. He's also great for instances where I need for Flemm to have someone to talk to, but someone who can't tell him that he is doing the wrong thing. That's why I had him with Flemm during the scenes with the chickens.

Gotta' go to Google, don't know this reference... Oh, "Scrubs." I've never really watched that show.

Not much in the way of new models. Most of what I've been working on for the upcoming strips has to do with the interior of Greyhawk's cave. I did think it would be fun to add another character, though. I'm going to explain that the majority of Greyhawk's crew are out on a mission, explaining why there are so few of them around. I don't know if I'm going to give this guy a name or not. He's kind of a junior space cadet sort who idolizes Glimey and Glimey is going to call him only by nicknames. This lets me have another background character and the model itself is a simple refit of Glimey. Still, I think it's going to be fun to have some interaction between a Wannabe Starbuckler and Flemm.

Looks really good! That's a pretty challenging thing to model.

I notice on his storefront, there is a link on the left side of the screen to "Send this user a message." He used to post on these boards, but I don't remember what his screen name was. I contacted Barry before I bought them (they were on DVD then) and he was very helpful.

That is hilarious!

By far, my favorite tutorials for character modeling are Barry Zundel's which can be purchased here.

You are welcome, Gene! They look great on your ark!

Hmm... Something must've gone screwy. I'll try breaking it up. Here's the files in 3 zip files... materials.zip model.zip images.zip

I love the characters, Gene! Your style is really showing through in your modeling! Here's a couple of materials I made when I was modeling the monkey ship that might be helpful to you with your ark model. The materials make it look like the surfaces are made up of boards. They are cartoony, but I think that will work well with your style, too. Note the custom settings in the object groups. I give the materials negative bump percents and mess with the scale (to make the boards the right size.) Here's a super-simple model to show what they look like. The negative bump percent cuts the grooves into the surface. You can choose your own colors. Here's the zip. Sorry for the enormous size, but the deckpattern image I made is enormous. shipstuff.zip

I'm starting to think you're pulling our legs here. :-) Okay, your example is one spline ring with additional splines coming out of that one. Not sure why this isn't getting across, but a single spline ring makes a *hole* NOT a patch. In Myron's example, there are four splines. Two vertical and two horizontal. They are attached at the four CPs, forming a patch. Try this: Make a vertical spline with four CPs. One at each end and two in the center. Copy and paste it and move it over to the side, so that you have two identical vertical splines. Now, click the "a" button to begin making a new horizontal spine and then click on the CPs of the two vertical splines as you draw your horizontal spline. Repeat this for the second horizontal spline.

Very nice and believable!

Elliot, you've got to think of the splines and their continuity. Like I said before, one spline making a ring is a hole. In order to get patches, you need to use splines that intersect, like this: 5-Point patches are a special consideration. 3 and 4 point patches occur naturally. 5-points were created to aid in modeling.

Elliot, a continuous spline that attaches back to itself is a hole. In order for a patch to occur, at least two splines must be involved. The extruding example in the square was a short cut. When I extruded the spline, it made new splines so that I ended up with four splines intersecting instead of one spline. Draw splines and have them intersect, say three splines that where they intersect draws a triangle. That will form a 3-point patch. See the "long" way in the square tutorial to see what a 4-point patch really looks like.

There are some great ones out there! For a start, check out my comic-book-style basic tutorial pages here. They cover some of the basics of modeling in A:M including continuity and the difference between a patch and a hole.

Great movement, Robert! Very cool! I've always avoided the hook/5-point patch, too, but I thought I heard somewhere that the 5-pointer wouldn't close if there was a hook attached to it. Nice to know differently!

720x480 is the size of the image on a DVD. The trick is that widescreen (16:9) or standard (4:3) isn't exactly proportionate. So the DVD either stretches or shrinks the pixels. For standard (4:3), the aspect ratio is .91 for widescreen (16:9), it's 1.2121. You can set this in the resolution settings for the camera in the "Aspect" setting.

Wow, that looks really great!

Thanks, Rodney! Yes, Greyhawk is getting close to the end of the first story (only 5 more pages, I think) and The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island is getting into the good parts. :-) The second 100 parts are going to be heavily sci-fi, which is a lot of fun for me. People have this impression that I am a crazy-go-nuts pirate fan, but I'm really just a minor fan who likes the old Errol Flynn movies. Sci-Fi is something I hugely love and I'm going to see how much of a blast I can have with Star Wars/Star Trek references and the like. :-)

Been spending most of my time working on the interior set for Greyhawk's Cave. It's massive. But more immediately, I needed to give Glimey a plazter (or as Flemm will call it, a fancy pistola): pistola_s.mov

I do love this new feature! My old workaround was that I would select a single spline ring of the group that had the surface settings I wanted to copy, copy and paste it (which created a new group with the same attributes), delete the spline and then rename that new group and use it for the new part of the model. This has the advantage of making it easier to create a library of commonly used materials without having to start from scratch.

*VERY* Nice!

Thanks, Gene! I *always* appreciate your saying so. :-) Here's something different. Here's Greyhawk's ship, the Renegade 2. In thinking about how to bring it into The Wannabe Pirates world, I thought it would be fun to make it like it was a toy. Coming this Christmas from Kenner! The Renegade 2! :-)