largento

Okay, decided I didn't like that new one. Here's another stab, closer to the original (which I still like BTW), but not as contrasty and dark...

Okay, let's give this a try... :-) Here's a before and after of Strip #2: Before: And After: I did a few things, obviously, including using depth of field.

Wow! Another thing I didn't know about... doing a search for that right now! A lot of good info!

Thanks for the tip, Nancy! I may very well got back and revisit the lighting and backgrounds (I realized today that this isn't going to start running on the website until December 1st), but I can't fall into that trap of endlessly fiddling with these things. I just have to take the path that I'll learn as I go what works and doesn't and improve on the next one. Otherwise I don't have my 50 strips done by the start day. :-)

I do have a rimlight in there, Robert, but I lack the precision to keep it from effecting the overall lighting. I suppose I could render the figures with the rimlight in a separate render, but I've been been okay with the impression that it's dark. If nothing else, the contrast should be significant when the sun does come back out. :-)

Thanks, Mark! Yeah, that's a story thing. The sun has been completely blotted out, so I'm trying to convey they are in the dark. The sun comes back out after a few more strips and I'm going to really be glad. [EDIT] Ken, I just realized I didn't answer your PPS: I made the background of the strip black to go with it being dark. As dark as they are, they would look even darker surrounded by white gutters. I did the same thing when I re-visited the Greyhawk pages for going online. The pages in space have black gutters and the ones in the daytime on Earth are white. What I don't know is if I'm going to switch to white when the eclipse is over. Part of me thinks it will look better staying black. I'll find out when I get there. :-)

Cool! Thanks for doing this!

Thanks, Gene! Thanks, Ken! Upside down, might be a little *too* dynamic. :-) I'm doing all of the lighting in Animation: Master. I've got a normal 3 point setup with low intensity levels and an extra light with slight negative intensity to help darken it up. For effect on some of the panels, I'm lowering the keylight to get that scary lighting. There's no question that the backgrounds could be better and they should improve as I go. For right now, my primary goal is just to keep 'em rolling. :-) I'd like to think that after a couple of hundred of these, it'll come as second nature and I'll be able to focus on some of those secondary things. I was able to knock out this next one in just a couple of hours (I ran two instances of A:M, so that I could pose a panel while rendering the previous). I'm heading out soon to see Paul McCartney and wanted to get one done before I left!

A couple of more strips! I think they're improving as I go along... I'll be glad when the sun comes back out, since it will be brighter and more colorful then. One of the cool things about doing the comic this way is that it allows you to experiment with solving problems without having to do a bunch of drawings! For instance, in both of these strips, I've got situations where I need one character to speak before another (meaning I need character #1 to be on the left and character #2 on the right) that swaps in another panel (meaning I need for them to swap sides.) In the first one, I've got Sneeze behind Flemm in panel 2, leaning to the right side of the frame to deliver his line and then in panel 4, he leans to the left side of the frame so that he can speak first. Similarly, in the 2nd strip, I've got Flemm in the left side of the frame, following Bokor, but a slight camera change in panel 2 brings Flemm to the right side of the frame. I don't think the second solution especially would have come as easily to mind if I didn't have the 3D space to move the characters around in. Also, a giant THANKS to Mark S. for his rigging excellence! Mark rigged Doc Bokor with his 2008 rig and it is a really great rig! The hand controls are awesome!

Thanks, Nancy! Well, his brother's named Charlie and I was thinking Harry Mudd when I was doing him, so I really hadn't intended him to look French or Hispanic. :-)

Thanks, Robert! I've thought about doing something like that, Ken (a "commercial" for Greyhawk.) When we first published Greyhawk in 1997, I had done a bunch of web design for a local company that owned three or four radio stations and I took half of the payment as air-time, so we ran a Greyhawk radio commercial for our book signings. I've been thinking about trying to dig up the copy for it and make one. Our numbers have definitely increased since we went to 5 days a week with Greyhawk.

Yes, and I actually toned it down some from how it looked in the strip McCrary drew! :-) Thanks as always, Gene! Next up is a trio of Parrots for the Parrot Review Board! (Really just one parrot duplicated with some mild variations.) Which means I gotta' start working on some rotoscope drawings...

Thanks, Andy! I've got a bunch of other non-character things I have to build before I can move on to the next characters (Greyhawk and Co.), but I'm really looking forward to creating them! We got our first negative comment today. It was sort of backwards from what I expected. This person demanded that we stop doing The Wannabe Pirates and *only* do Greyhawk! :-)

Thanks! Here's the finished model... I'm calling him Barney now... I like how he turned out!

Thanks, Andy! I'm working on the model for the used ship salesman. I'm doing a gag where the old used ship salesman is in jail for fraud and his brother is covering for him, so that frees me from having to have this character match up exactly with the original guy. It's funny, but I was kind of thinking of Harry Mudd when I was doing this and I think he turned out looking a little like Mudd. :-)

That's pretty cool, serg! What's it for?

Thanks, guys! Thanks, Andy! Well, I worked for years as a graphic designer, does that count? :-) With this spaceship, I sort of had a basic idea for the shape and design and then played around with building the pieces in A:M... doodling in 3D. :-) For characters and more complicated things, I draw rotoscopes.

Thanks!! :-)

...finished the spaceship! and re-rendered the turnaround vid... finalship.mov

The water spray certainly adds a great deal to it! Now it really *feels* cold!

Gaduunka, I'll second the recommendation to get Barry Zundel's video tutorials! They were really my key into being able to do stuff in A:M! I've got a few little comic-book-style tutorials here that cover some of the fundamentals of modeling. It does take time and experience to learn how to model, but you can learn while you're doing, so it's not too much time lost! :-) When you run into specific problems, post a question on the forum and you're bound to get some answers. I say plural because there are many ways to do the same thing in modeling. Good luck and we look forward to seeing your movie!

Thanks, Andy & Ken! I did have to experiment to come up with "darkness." You'd have thought it would be a no-brainer. :-) I definitely think it'll go faster down the line, Ken, which is why I think this is promising. This time I was having to set up templates in Illustrator and creating a seamless tile for the ground plane. I also spent some time experimenting with the lighting and actually had to save out altered models of the cast with no ambience settings(leftovers from my "shiny" period). Throw in rendering and lettering and it's easy to see how time can go by. I certainly wasn't rushing. :-) I think I'll save out some poses as Actions that I can re-use, but right now I'm fully posing them. One of the things I really like about doing this in 3D is getting to experiment with the layout of the panels and the posing. It's fun to try a few different things. My goal isn't to make this a factory build. It wouldn't be any fun that way. :-) Yes, there's only a decal on the front wall (it's unfinished, as I said), but I may very well leave it that way in this strip. The average reader will probably spend 30 seconds or less reading the strip and they'll assume that anything I did, I did on purpose. Hopefully I'll be able to master simplicity. The more detail in the background, the more likely it is to draw their attention to it, which would actually be a bad thing. Have to spend time lettering 5 more pages of Greyhawk today. I hadn't really counted on how much work was going to be involved with running it. The original page art is having to be processed and I'm not able to resist trying to improve on the dialogue and lettering. :-) On the upside, when it's all finished we can print a 2nd edition that will actually be different than the first edition. Maybe it'll make the first edition more valuable! :-) Every once in awhile, I'll do a Google search for it and find some places selling it for $20! I was visiting family yesterday and so didn't get too much done. I did start working on this little spaceship for the story. Fairly early on, Flemm finds it and is convinced it's a "lucky" hat. :-) Here's a quick turnaround-type vid that I threw together last night. I still have some unfinished sections around the engines that I want to beef up, but this is it's basic shape: spaceship.mov

I'm not going to stick up every strip here, but while it's still new to me, I'll show some! Took about 4 hours to do this one today, which is promising. I haven't completed the building model in the background, but I think it's actually okay as is. Keeping the backgrounds simple will be key to being able to accomplish this, I think.

Put together this quick approximation of the Treasure Chest that Henrietta gave the boys at the end of "Henry Morgan's Treasure." Wrote seven strips today. My goal is to have 50 completed strips by November when it starts running on the website. I've been gathering up some reference drawings to use for a street set, so that's the next piece of the puzzle...

In the Output Options of the Camera setting under resolution. YouTube's widescreen videos are 640x360, but that's a really low resolution to start with.