largento

Thanks, Steve! Okay, quickly rushing past the legs... The legs are mostly just cylinders and I spend some time shaping them. For the foot, I drew the outline of it with a spline and placed that below the leg. To create a simple foot, I extrude up once and then create a circle for the ankle and work to create the inbetween. Trying to keep this model very simple to rig, I'm separating the upper leg and lower leg into two pieces. This is how they come together... And another quick render showing the progress.

Thanks, Gene! Onto the torso! I start off by drawing splines to outline the side and half of the front. I then hold down the 3 key to drag the front spline into place on the side. Now I begin connecting them, adding or deleting CPs as necessary. Once I've got them done, I select each cross spline in turn and zero out the y-scale to make them straight. With that done, I use the y-key to add CPs between the vertical splines. I then connect them with splines. I change my angles so that I can see the curve of the cross splines and use the new CPs I've created to make the curves more round. I then go back and connect the last of the splines, keeping the cross splines level. I then do a copy/paste/flip (I attach it manually) and use the mirror tool to make the bottom and top curves round. And that gets me to this... If I can stop getting distracted by all the stuff around Apple's iPad announcement, I can get this finished today. :-)

Thanks for the encouragement, guys! Myron, the piping is just there... and I used the original sweeper path as the bottom of the apron. Any movement of the head won't include the bottom part, so I'm not afraid of the apron breaking through the piping.

Okay, let's do this puppy! :-) I got up this morning and started with creating the rotoscopes. I find that my drawings are always very asymmetrical, so I work in Illustrator, creating one half and then copy/pasting/flipping to see how it looks. I tend to cheat some on the side-view, just to get it moving. I'm making the model for me, so I give myself permission to stray from the rotoscopes. I do the front and the side on the same image, so that I don't have to worry about scaling issues from the two views. You'll be able to see that I indicated in yellow the shape of the eyeball, to make it easier to create. I also gave some thought to the coloring. Once they are in place, I add some transparency, so they aren't overpowering. Normally, I work on one half of the model only, but in this case, since most of the helmet parts are circles, I modeled the helmet whole. Starting with the spheres for the "eyeball" I distorted the shape of the spheres to match the rotos. I used a combination of transparency and glow to create the effect I wanted. From there, I moved onto the rest of the helmet, which is mostly made up of ellipses. As I create these shapes, I use two methods: I extrude if I want to keep continuity (and have curves) or I copy and paste and then stitch together if I want it to be straight (and have edges.) For the piping along the bottom of the helmet, I created a circle and then using the mirror tool, shaped it into the shape I wanted. I created a circle to use as the cross-section and used the Sweeper plugin to create the piping. And here's where I'm at right now (before stopping for lunch): And here's a grab of a quick render in a choreography...

The new Quicktime player also allows you to trim video for editing, but yes, most of these don't have editing tools built in.

LOL, Gene! That's pretty awesome! I'll take it as high praise that you were so inspired! And I thought *I* was fast. :-)

I've not used Camtasia, but purchased Screenflick a couple of years ago and like it. (It's only $25, too!) Additionally, there are: Snapz Pro for $69 iShowU HD ($59.99 for Pro, $29.99 for base app) and Screenflow for $99. Chris Been did a course on Screencasting with the Mac over at Lynda.com and takes it more formally than most of us would.

Hey all! Doing the Wannabe Pirates webcomic in A:M has meant a *lot* of modeling, but modeling is probably the aspect of using A:M that I enjoy the most, so that kind of works out. I thought it would be fun to do one of the characters out in the open and sort of make a sort-of tutorial as I go along. This character is going to first appear in strip #72, which will be online on the 10th of February, but I'll actually work on the strip the Friday before, which is the 5th. So it'll have to be finished complete 9 days from now. (I won't actually spend that many days working on it. In fact, I'm hoping to only spend *one* day working on it.) Here's the rough sketch that I did back in July of the character: The design was a bit of a compromise. The aliens are supposed to have big appetites, but McCrary really wanted to see an alien with one big eye. Not sure why, but that's the compromise. :-) I decided that they would be in spacesuits and that the eye would just be a part of the spacesuit and we'd hold off seeing what they really looked like for awhile. Even though it isn't the style of the Greyhawk graphic novel, I really wanted to make the sci-fi aspects of this story very classic sci-fi ...the kind you would see in old kids' comic books. Knowing that I wanted to keep the rigging simple for this, the space suit will be mostly be made of rigid parts that don't bend. That's the idea, anyway. Let's see how it goes from here. :-) Today's a "writing" day, so I probably won't work anymore on this today. With luck I can knock it out tomorrow, but I'm going to take screenshots along the way to show the process. Hopefully it'll be interesting to somebody. :-)

Thanks, Kat!

Thanks, Ken & Gerry! (Have you guys ever considered making ice cream?) :-) After the initial drop, I had a whole strip where the gloop is around them. For this, I put emitters over the heads of the three characters: Then I rendered out a clean version with no gloop to use as a background plate. Took both into Photoshop and with some selective deleting, got the final look. *Very* glad this was only for one strip!

Working on strip #60 today and I have a panel where Flemm is going to get doused with banana creme. Thought I'd play around with achieving it using A:M's fluids. Still mostly guessing with many of the settings, but after some tests, I got something I think will work. Since I'm working with stills, I'll be able to render elements separately and have many frames to choose from for the final. I eventually stumbled on the way to get the fluid to do what I want by constructing an invisible funnel with a trap door. This allows the fluid to build up enough so that when it's released, it gushes down all at once. Some fluid does escape the simple trap door, but that won't be a problem for the still image. Here's the test video. If you scrub through the frames, there's some funny ones. glooptrapdoor.mov

Haha, thanks anyway, Rodney! Stylistically, I like that all of the monkeys are identical except for items they may be wearing... and there is no plan to have recurring monkey characters. The monkeys are a concept rather than a collection of individuals.

Thanks, guys! That's one of the things Flemm struggles with. He thinks monkeys are cute little things and can't quite come to grips with the fact that they aren't friendly... despite the fact that his every encounter with them reinforces that they are evil. :-)

Admiral! Thar be MONKEYS here! :-) Still need to put in some simple facial poses and add some props to individualize the crew of the Monkey Ship, but I'm getting there...

Thanks, Ken! And much thanks for the donation! It is really appreciated and I'm honored that you would do so! You're a great friend!

Wow, today's strip is Part FIFTY of this story! I can't believe I've done that many already! I was plugging numbers into my calendar (which helps when it comes time to upload them to the site, since the file is named for the date, but I also need to know the strip # for the post title) and was just getting overwhelmed seeing how many strips I'm going to have to do to keep up the 5 day a week schedule! March 22nd is when I'll reach 100! By the middle of August, I'll have done more 3D strips than the 2D strips we did in over a year and a half! After a couple of years of doing so many, I might actually get good at doing them. :-)

I'm going to keep churning on The Wannabe Pirates and keep doing 5 strips a week. I'd love to do some other things, but that's pretty much going to eat up all of my time.

Thanks, guys! Now I have to finish the monkey model! I only ever modeled the head and that was a loooong time ago! (December of 2007, according to my files!)

Coming up soon is my first chance to have a sea battle. Flemm is going to come up against some evil monkeys at sea. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Since my buffer is nearly exhausted, I'm having to model quickly, but I love the fact that with A:M you can model quickly. Here's the model for the Monkey Ship. It's 50% of the size of the Sea Anemone, but where I could, I've incorporated parts from the Sea Anemone. And here's a turnaround... monkeyship.mov

About what, Gene?

Super nice job, Gene. He has a ton of character!

Thanks, HomeSlice! Yes, I'm moved into my sister's house. Hopefully I'll be able to find some work in the next few months and move into a new place. (Fingers crossed!)

Thanks, guys! Ken, there are story reasons as to why it looks like a prison and why Flemm is lit the way he is, but I won't spoil 'em here. :-)

Thanks, Gerry! Gonna' stay positive that it will all work out in the end! The good news is I'm back to work on The Wannabe Pirates and was able to finish next weeks' strips today! I've got a lot of work on my plate and my buffer is now very small, but I'm sure I'll get it back up there eventually. Here's a render from next Friday's strip that I liked...

This is going to be an incredible accomplishment, Stian! Bravo!