largento

Thanks, Ken! I'm crying fowl, Myron! :-) Thanks! Nancy, I'll have to see if we can afford the licensing with our budget. We may need you to bawk "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" instead. :-)

Thanks, everybody! LOL, Nancy. I don't think I know that song, but it makes me think of "Young at Heart" ...and if the need ever arises for a chicken serenade, you'll be the first person I go to. :-) Never is too strong a word, Robert. I am committed to doing this webcomic for at least 3 years to see if I can grow an audience. This does mean that I can't make an animated film during that time, but I can work towards one. I think it's actually good for me in the sense that I'm getting a lot of practice at posing, building sets, lighting, etc. My goals for the animation were too lofty. I was feeling too overwhelmed by them, but as challenging as the webcomic is, I feel like I can accomplish it. And with the webcomic, I feel like I'm accomplishing something every time I finish a strip! I do have in mind doing a "commercial" for the printed book when the first story is done ...and I'll have all the assets I'll need for it once the story is finished! Heck, it might even be something I can do mid story to advertise the comic... but the primary objective has to be the comic.

Chickens! Chickens are a very important plot element in this story. I'm keeping them pretty simple, since they'll appear pretty tiny in the actual comics.

Thanks, guys! Ken, there weren't any other webcomics at the show using 3D that I saw. I've encountered a few just looking around, but the majority of them seem to be "poser" deals that I find bland and uninteresting. Of course, there's Scott Sava's Dreamland Chronicles which uses his own character designs, but he's spent thousands of dollars of his own money producing it. (As an aside, he just recently reached his 1,000th page!) I found a video showing the process that one of the 3D webcomics used and thought it was interesting that the majority of the characters' clothes were added after the fact in Photoshop, painted on. I'm struggling to get back into the swing of things. I'm about to have to make a move because most of my freelance work has dried up. I'm holding off until the first of December to make the decision, but I've already given 60 days notice on my apartment. Hopefully the economy will pick up next year! I'm going to keep going with The Wannabe Pirates, though! Maybe in a couple of years, it'll grow big enough to be self-sustaining. That's the hope anyway. :-) Dallas Art News is doing a deal where webcomic artists are recreating famous pieces of art with their characters and style. I've signed up to do one. I'm going to do the classic Howard Pyle illustration, "Walking the Plank." I'm just in the beginning stages: I am going to give Flemm the blindfold, but instead of being tied up, he's going to have a kid's inflatable float ring around him. :-)

Nice job, Gene!

Coming together nicely, Gerry!

Google pays a licensing fee to cover all of the music that's used on YouTube. However, different countries have different organizations that cover music licensing. A quick Google search shows that talks between Google and the German music collection broke down in April. I don't know if they had an extension or it's just taken until now for you to be notified.

That's really looking good, Ken!

Thanks, Ken! Hopefully I'll get some new eyes on the website. I'm just finding this out today, but I had a sort of long conversation with an older gentleman who asked me a lot of questions about the 3D and if it would look good in black and white and how I was making money off of it (I told him that I wasn't) :-) Long story short, it's only today that I'm finding out that was Bill Hinds who draws the syndicated strip Tank McNamara! I feel like a complete moron for not knowing who he was... I did ask him about his comics, but he didn't mention the one I would recognize.

Whew! I just spent the whole day at the Dallas Webcomics Expo. It was a lot of fun and I was able to give out a bunch of the postcards I'd had printed. Mentioned Animation:Master to all who asked the question of what program I was using and a few of them had heard of it! (I think that's partly due to Hash's presence at comic conventions!) It was great fun seeing how much the kids liked it. There weren't many there, but it was gratifying to see! One of the other webcomickers told me that she prints out several of the Wannabe Pirates strips and puts them in her kids lunchboxes! Hearing that was worth the whole effort of attending!

Nice! Yes, there's nothing like taking on an animation with a real deadline for your first one! :-)

You might want to start another thread about this. I'm a Mac user, so have no clue about Windows stuff.

That tutorial is now part of The Art of Animation: Master. You can find a PDF version of it here. It starts on page 139.

Thanks, Andy! I agree about the background. I had something else in mind, but couldn't get it to work. It's a wait and see on whether or not this brings in more readers. It's only been two days and I did some advertising yesterday. Our numbers did improve when we went to five days a week. Now it's going to be six days a week. Hopefully, it'll pick up. I'm going to do a small convention on the 14th and hope to get the word out to a bunch of people there.

Nicely done! The sound effects work perfectly!

Wow, where did the time go? The Wannabe Pirates strips start going up on the site today! I've just started to get back into doing them again. It's been hard to get started back up. I was in such a zone before, but I'm sure I'll get back there.

Thanks, Al! Of course, I'll share! Here's the choreography file and the modified model. You can see the changes that I made to the body grey material. I tend to go high with these sort of things, more moderate settings would probably give even better results. Basically I just set the diffuse color to a very dark grey and then made the specular color a light grey and made the specular size very large. The lighting is still three-point lighting, but I did set them up differently than I normally do. Still, the basics are always the same for me. I use a strong rimlight behind and above the central figure, I usually turn on "cast shadows" for the keylight and I use the fill light on the other side of the rimlight. b9_cho.zip

I was playing around with Al's terrific model... One thing I did find: the button labels are not assigned to a bone, so if you rotate the torso, they get lost. It's an easy fix, though. Just Use the button label group to select them, hide everything else and go into the bone mode and assign them to the bone that runs through the torso.

The page count will depend on how it's printed. If it's saddle-stitched (has staples on the spine), it will need to be set up to be a factor of 4. If it's perfect bound (glued to the spine), then it's only a factor of 2. Being as short as your book is, I would assume it would be saddle-stitched. Using CreateSpace, I would probably consider adapting the page count to what will provide the biggest margin of profit. :-) I would think they handle pagination, but if they don't I'd recommend putting together a simple chart to work out what pages would be on the same spread. For instance, if it's saddle-stitched, the first spread would have the last page on the left and the first page on the right of the spread, then the second spread would have the second page on the left and the second-to-last page on the right, etc. etc. The other thing to keep in mind is the physical size of the page and any bleed that might be used. I'd have to look, but I'm sure there's a standard bleed they'll require for anything that goes past the trim. Usually it's between 1/8" to 1/4" on all sides. It's always best to plan for the bleed, so you don't have to try to create bleed or risk having something important cut off. Also be mindful of their resolution requirements. Building the pages with their templates would be the best way to make sure that everything works. The scale material does give it some texture. Kind of looks like construction paper. I would look to see if the typeface has any licensing information. Given the fact that you'll be doing POD, I don't know that this would really qualify as a commercial venture.

Very generous as always, Al! Thanks!

That could be a very appealing way to go, Ken! The material Robert is talking about is what I did with the skin on the Glimey model. It's a material called "Scales2" (it's in the basic Data directory that is installed with A:M, look under materials/skin) and I set the scale to a very small value (5, I think.) Not sure what it would look like on flat surfaces and it does "break" in places.

Haha! That's great! You know, looking at the photos, it looks like the "gray" areas should be more metallic than a flat gray. I gather there were different looks from season to season. I found this company that will sell you a licensed automated replica for the low, low price of $24,500. :-) They look really amazing, though. The "design and construction" video on their video page shows a lot of details.

Lookin' good, Gerry! I agree with Ken about the irises. With them being black, they look like they are the pupils and that the irises are white... kinda' creepy. :-)

Cool!

It does seem awfully dark on the ol' Jupiter 2, Al. Those cables make you wonder how many times he fell over. :-) Yeah, James Doohan was injured during WWII. Ironically he made it up the beach during D-Day only to be shot at night by friendly fire while going between command posts. He was shot 6 times! One of those bullets took out the middle finger of his right hand. With that knowledge, it's fun watching old episodes of Star Trek and seeing how much effort he puts into hiding his right hand.