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Great job, guys! Only a couple of years in and you've already done a biblical epic! :-)

I'm a-scared! :-) But it's a great start, Myron!

This isn't free, but these tutorials were the keys to creating characters for me! When I bought them, you had to get them on DVD, but now they are available as downloadable files from here: Barry Zundel's Animation Master Training videos I can't recommend these high enough! Barry goes through the entire modeling process, discussing what he's doing and why he's doing it. The other parts cover rigging and animating in A:M.

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

I know! I'm trying to reach a place where I don't feel like having to create models limits the storytelling. That may never happen, but at least I won't be stuck with *too* many limitations. I don't think I did anything special with the lighting on it, other than I think the keylight is angled up from a lower angle. The sea monster is really large. Not toon render on the teeth, just a design choice. :-)

Sea Monster! Flemm will be fighting with this fellow in this weeks' strips!

Looks incredible, Eric! Between you and Al, somebody needs to make a cool Star Wars fan film with these models.

Thanks, everybody! Nancy--Greyhawk has one electronic eye ...a space piratey sort of replacement for having an eyepatch. He can see far distances with it. Ken--There are indeed, Ken--Randarr, Scanner, Baxter, Deexler, Rhisha, etc.---but I'm trying to keep the numbers of new characters to a minimum. :-)

Whew! The last major new character for this story! Greyhawk! The long hair was definitely a challenge. (I took some cues from the way they did Anakin's hair in the Clone Wars series.) Greyhawk will make his first appearance in strip #100! Here's a turnaround greytrn2.mov

Cool, Eric!

That was great, guys!

Great job! Very clean looking design!

For me, it seems like longer sometimes. :-) The 2-year anniversary is for the website. Production actually began at the same time this thread did, at the beginning of September, 2007. Stalled Trek was always a substitute for not having an idea. It allowed me to have at least some focus while I was learning, since I was *very* much a newbie, too. (I only seriously began trying to learn A:M when I upgraded in February of 2007 after briefly messing around with it for a month back in 2004.) However, since it was a parody of an existing property, I kept feeling pressure from the comparison to the real thing ...and there was at least one stinging remark that I wasn't really working on my own thing. That said, I didn't expect that The Wannabe Pirates would become an ongoing thing like this. The idea was to do a quick short film and maybe some sequels. I think it's important to note that I'm not doing the webcomic in place of doing the movie as much as I am making sure the webcomic continues at the cost of not doing the movie. There's an important distinction there. I didn't say to myself, I'll dump the movie because it would be easier to do a webcomic. I was facing the end of the webcomic unless I kept it going and that meant not doing the movie. In some aspects, I think doing the webcomic is harder. For one thing, it's never-ending, which means new characters, sets, props, challenges. It's not like a short film, where you can see an ending coming. And for another, once you begin, there are real deadlines. I'm at the point where I'm always less than a week away from when the strips go up on the site. It's produce or die! :-) Pumping these out, as you say, is an enormous amount of work. But I think the rigors of doing a 5 day-a-week strip are allowing me to continue learning and growing with A:M. I certainly feel like it's given me a tremendous amount of practice with posing characters and as challenges come up, I'm exploring new features of A:M that I hadn't before (fluids, flocking, fog, etc.) By the time I make it to the 5-year anniversary, I should be pretty good at all of this stuff. :-)

Holy cow! Thanks, Mark! Now I gotta' lotta' patches to mess with. :-)

Thanks, Gene! Mark, I haven't any clue how to make the rope decals work on both sides. The strip is pretty small, so it's not too noticeable, but I'd love to figure out how to make it work...

I'm loving using the Technocrane camera rig! It really gives you a sense of control and it's fun to play with the focal depth, too.

VERY nice!

Myron, I think these are great and could really catch on big! A really cool update on that look!

Thanks, Jake! Ken: the way I've been explaining it is like the old DC Comics multiverse. We can call the version of Earth that Flemm is on Earth F and the Earth that Greyhawk is on is Earth G. So, this would be the versions of the Starbucklers that live on Earth F. Presumably there's a realistic version of Flemm on Earth G (if he's managed to survive this long!) So the designs will match Flemm's world. It also gives me some freedom to not stick exactly to what we have in the Greyhawk strip... specifically some of the elements of Greyhawk Island. K'Bor's tusks definitely prevent him from doing too much with his mouth, although it does extend enough to allow for some movement of the corners of his mouth. his "eyebrows" and body language are going to have to carry most of the weight when giving him facial expressions. Glimey is the one that I think will present the most challenge that way. His eyes are up on stalks and his mouth is kind of turtle like. The last of the characters (on the Starbucklers' side) that I need to do is Greyhawk. He presents his own challenge in that both Greyhawk and Flemm were based on McCrary and so look very similar (besides hairstyles and Greyhawk has an electronic eye instead of an eyepatch.) It's not part of the plot that they look alike, so i'm thinking the way to go is to try to make them look different. Although it would be much easier just to use the Flemm model and change the hair. :-) Maybe I should change the plot. :-)

Thanks, Nancy! In this case, it's a plugin for Photoshop called Aurora 2.1 from here. It lets you create custom skies (including water) complete with 3D clouds. I found it on sale through another site a year or so back and picked it up. I haven't used it enough to unlock it's full potential, but it has presets you can use as starting places. (This image is actually scrunched up since I just stuck it in the camera at the last minute.)

And I keep rolling merrily along... Here's another one of the Starbucklers of the Caribbean characters: K'Bor! K'Bor's a sort of gentle giant character and Greyhawk's protector. Had some trouble figuring out how to do him and ended up working sans rotos and just starting with the eye and working my way out from there. A very different approach than what I normally do. Big thanks to Ken H. I Frankensteined the legs and arms from the Giant Gorilla model Ken did for me.

Yeah, it has the same gold material, but since the patches are flat, there's nothing interesting to see. For the final in the strip, I added some roughness to achieve contrast that way.

Thanks, Nancy! Here's a quick prop I threw together today for the next couple of strips I'm working on. The idea of this was part of the original animated story McCrary and I worked on. This is the Indescribable Treasure of the Coconut King. Big thanks to the MatCap shader. Really makes the gold look cool.