largento

Looking forward to it!

Hmm. I don't save Projects, myself. I have places that I save my files, keeping them independent of projects. Opening a choreography or an action, automatically loads the needed files, which works just fine for me. Haven't had a problem with Choreographies forgetting where the files are.

Thanks, Ken! You misread the first, it isn't "Have at it," It's "Have at you." "Have at you" is great old Errol Flynn sword-fighting talk. Here's the definition of it from Wiktionary: have at you (dated) an exclamation indicating that one is about to strike the person addressed, typically with a sword or other hand-held weapon. E.g., "Dark and sinister man, have at thee." Barrie, Peter Pan. I actually did write out the dialogue with "and" the first time and then decided it didn't sound right and changed it to "until."

Thanks, Gene! Today's strip is the oversized one with Flemm and the monkeys sword-fighting!

Could it be possible that you have an accidentally caused a very large number of patches? (Right-click in the model window and select "Info..." to get the number.) Your symptoms sound like what happens while working on a very complex (ie large patch count) model. It is possible to have multiple CPs in the exact same space caused by holding down the extrude button, for instance.

Just a reminder that today is The Wannabe Pirates webcomics' 2nd anniversary! Be sure to read the blogpost on the site and enter to win the poster and graphic novel! And if you're really feeling generous, vote in the link below!

Sounds cool to me, Rodney. Thanks, Mark!

Thanks, guys! Could be a ninja monkey, Myron ...but if he was really a ninja we wouldn't be able to see him. :-) Ken, Flemm is having the time of his life!

Seems fine to me, Rodney. :-) Have you added the Wannabe Tutorials to the tutorials section?

Thanks, Animus!

Been having fun today working on an over-sized strip for Tuesday. This one's all Flemm sword-fighting with monkeys... :-)

Thanks, Jimd! Okay, here's a quick overview of a *very* simple rigging for the character. This doesn't have any of the cool bells and whistles of the rigs David and Mark and others have built, but it's easy enough to do and for my character's needs, it was sufficient. I start off, with one big bone, I name "Main." It will be hidden, but the other bones will be children of it. From the Main, I create the "Body" bone. I'm having to supplement some of the screenshots, that I didn't make. From the Body, I created a couple of spine bones running up to the head. Also from the body, I create the Pelvis bone and the leg and foot bones (thigh, calf, foot and toes). Note that they will be created in the center of the model. You'll need to switch to the front view and use the translate tool to move the leg bones over into place. Also remember to add "left" to all the bone names that will be mirrored onto the other side of the body. From the Spine bone in Top view, I created the bones for the arm (shoulder, bicep, forearm, hand and the finger bones.) To keep the character simple, I modeled it to only have one joint in the fingers. Again, you'll need to switch to the front view and translate the collection of bones up or down to match with the arm's geometry. For my floating eye piece, I created a bone called Eye (parented to the Head bone) and then made a null that I scaled down and placed in the exact same spot. In an On/Off Pose, I constrained the Eye bone to the null. That way I can move around the null to move the eye. I also added another bone from the Head called Visor that by rotating the handle, will rotate the visor of the helmet. Finally, I went through and attached CPs to the various bones as needed. The normal process is that I select the geometry I'm going to attach to a bone and hide the rest of the geometry in model mode. Then when I switch to bones mode, all I have to do is select the appropriate bone and draw a selection box around everything. There were a few spline rings that needed to be weighted between two bones, but not many. With one side complete, I used the Mirror Bones plug-in to create the rest of the rigging. This is by no means perfect, and like I said, it's nothing fancy, but this allows me to pose the character to the extent that I need to. I'm not going into great detail (after all, this is only a *semi*-tutorial), but this is the basics of starting a rig. From here you can create additional cosmetic bones and then create control bones that you have the geometry and cosmetic bones constrain to in a pose. If you keep in mind how you want things to move and how best to attach the geometry to bones, you can greatly simplify the process. Hope this helps a little and inspires you to give character modeling a try!

Thanks, Darkwing!

Thanks, Andy! Definitely see it in 3D! Personally, I do not think it is the best movie I've ever seen, but I did enjoy it greatly and it really succeeds in taking you to another world. I recommend it highly!

Great looking model, Jirard!

It hardly seems possible, but this Monday, February 1st, will mark The Wannabe Pirates webcomic's 2nd anniversary! I'm going to put up a blog post about it on Monday. As part of the celebration, we're going to have a drawing for two cool items: a 20" x 30" poster of The Wannabe Pirates and a signed copy of the original 1997 graphic novel, "Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean!" See the blog post on Monday to find out how to enter the drawing! I think we've finally got everything in place and this third year will hopefully be our best year yet!

Thanks, everybody! Despite the terrible weather yesterday, I had a great day! I enjoyed Avatar even more the second time and my friend said that it might be the best movie she's ever seen (she went in with very low expectations.) Now back to The Wannabe Pirates. I've got to write next week's strips... I blink and I'm behind again... :-)

Thanks, Matt! I think we're a day apart... (mine's the 28th). Rodney gets to start his days waaay earlier than us. :-)

Thanks, everybody!

Thanks, Al! It was fun doing it this way! I realize this is probably the least organic of any of my characters, but the process I used on the torso is pretty much how I do everything on an organic character. Create those two outlines and then work on filling 'em in. 'Course, normally they include limbs or mouths and eyes which makes the process more difficult. :-) This was good for me, too, since it put me on a deadline and gave me the extra push I needed to get him done! And thanks, too, Rodney! I'd hardly accept "master," yet, but all of this is done in service to the story. I'm starting to feel more comfortable taking on the harder stuff. I can't wait until a couple of years from now when I *really* know what I'm doing. :-)

Thanks to all of you!

Thanks! I took screen captures of the rigging, but am going to wait and do the write up later. Here's me playing around with it... :-)

Thanks, gentlemen! Gonna' celebrate tomorrow by going to see Avatar again. :-) I'll drink to that! :-)

Can you go for another walk and make it about a 4 or 5 hours long? :-) Thanks, Nancy!

Okay, rushing along, the arms! To create the gloves, I mostly used circles again. I may change my mind later, but for right now, I've chosen just to stick the fingers on like sausages. :-) A big directive for me on this model is that it be easy to rig, so the gloves are separate from the arms and the arms themselves have been divided into parts. Here's the elbow piece. Rings of splines set up so that they can move with the bend. Then for the shoulder, I've created these shoulder rings (made one and then copied it and scaled it for the two others), which will work similar to the elbow. Because of how the helmet turned out, I chose to lower the arms so they wouldn't conflict with it. And here's basically the completed model. There's a couple of things I want to play with and I haven't added his backpack yet, but I've got to stop now and get ready for dinner. Here's another quick render... When I get back from dinner, I'll do the simple rigging. [EDIT] Forgot to mention that I've placed Flemm in the choreography for scale.