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That looks fantastic, Gene!

Thanks, guys! Ken, I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a thought when giving him that mustache! :-)

Thanks, everybody! Paul, do you mean the liquid level in the mug? I need to rig it so that I can control that. Here's where I'm at with Doc Bokor, the Witch Doctor:

Working on a new character. This is old Doc Bokor, the local Voodoo Witch Doctor. Well, his head anyway. :-) wd_headspin.mov

Thanks, John! I appreciate it!

Thanks, Andy! That's very flattering! I do think that there will be inevitable comparisons to "Dreamland Chronicles," even though they are very different stylistically. I won't ever have the resources to create full 3D environments and charcters like Sava has, but hopefully I can find enough creative ways to work around this and produce a nice looking product. Thanks, Mark! Well, the cost of doing this is abandoning the animated version, but I'm beginning to feel even more okay with that. I feel more like I know what I'm doing with the comic. The real challenge will be to see if I can meet the 5-days a week deadlines! That's a lot of content to produce! Running Greyhawk will give me some lead time to build up a buffer, but that will disappear quickly if I can't keep up. We've kind of stayed away from heavy dialect stuff. The anachronistic spirit is alive and well in The Wannabe Pirates. Despite the fact that we say Flemm is from England, he speaks with a generic American accent. Mr. Sneeze tries out the pirate talk, but he's not very convincing in it. The storyteller does have a bit more of a "pirate" voice, but it's not put on that thick.

Thanks, Stian!

Keeps getting better and better! Just occurred to me that the big green fellow bears a strong resemblance to Phil Harris from the Jack Benny Program (minus the fantasy bits, of course.) :-)

Thanks, guys! This page came together pretty quickly since I didn't have to create any new models for it! The next one requires a new character, so I'm going to have work to do before I can finish it. Ken, I see what you mean about the first panel. I think there are a few things that contribute to that. Certainly the lighting and the blurred background, but also I think his mug looks like it could be plastic and I used a global color in the choreography that was overlayed onto the background art, to create the look that they shared the same light. You mean like production art? That's a good idea. I'll have sketches of the characters that I make while designing them and there'll be a whole lot of that, at least for this story. I'm hoping that the following stories will require less and less new stuff ...which is probably just wishful thinking. :-) I am trying to mostly stick with recurring characters and locations (besides the story-specific stuff that has to be done.)

To be sure, I am, Ken! After my hard drive went kablooey last year, I've been even more cautious. In addition to the online and external drive backups I do every day, I have my 1TB Time Capsule set to back up my entire computer every night! 'Tis probably a bit early to be showing this, but I did the first 3D webcomic today!

Status update! Feeling pretty good! McCrary is in town and we not only knocked out the story for "The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island," but knocked out the next story for Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean, too! It's going to be a great experiment, but we're going to see if I can do 5 WBP strips a week and McCrary do 1 Greyhawk page a week (as a Sunday strip.) Very productive couple of days!

Thanks, Andy! Are you still working on the 3D versions of your characters? I think it would be pretty fun to insert them as a cameo in one of the strips!

Sorry, I wasn't more specific. I was talking about doing what Robert suggests in his 2nd option: In the video tutorials I used to learn to animate, it was suggested to split up the choreography actions into three different categories. One for moving the model bone in choreography mode, one for moving bones in skeletal mode, and one for pose sliders. The key was just to remember to select the correct choreography action before animating. It's a little easier to keep those three separate, though. Still, if you are used to keying different groups independently, it shouldn't be too hard to remain disciplined.

Thanks, Gene!

You can create folders in the PWS and separate them that way.

I appreciate that, Rodney! And I'm only "sorta'" insane. :-) I won't be doing all of the characters from the graphic novel, but we're going to use several of them. Of course, they'll be re-designed to look like they belong in the Wannabe Pirates. We're not going to do any of those alternate dimension things. There simply will be a version of Greyhawk's Island in the Wannabe Pirates' universe. Greyhawk and Flemm are contemporaries. "Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean" is set in 1689 and "The Wannabe Pirates" is set in 1691. I'm going to be modeling a *lot* of new characters, set pieces and props over the course of this. It's going to be a lot of work, but I'll get a sort of instant gratification from it, in that they'll be seen much faster than if they were part of an animated project.

Page One is up! Going to be curious to see what (if any) response we'll get to doing this. Hopefully there won't be any angry readers. (Fingers crossed.) I've made some slight changes to the site. I updated the header graphic to include the new logo and to acknowledge the Greyhawk story. You may have to refresh your browser to see it. I also added a list called "Stories" to the sidebar which lets the reader go to the beginning of any of the stories we've done so far. I'm planning on doing a full site re-design at some point before the new strip launches.

Voted! Good luck, guys!

Thanks, Rodney! I'm a little worried about how it's going to be received, since folks are coming to the site to see The Wannabe Pirates and Greyhawk isn't the same. However, we're going to need the lead time to get the new story up and going. Especially since I'm going to have to create a lot of elements, and this way we're at least providing content. And it will be relevant to the next story. Luckily, I still have the original files that we used to create the book, but I'm having to re-letter every page. Back when this was done, I was still using Pagemaker! Lettering a page a day isn't too much work, though. I sat down and re-read the graphic novel a couple of weeks ago and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. At this point, I don't remember what I wrote (I wrote the script in 1995), so it's like reading something written by a stranger. :-) I'm really jazzed about all of this, though and really looking forward to designing the cartoon versions of the characters we're going to use. I don't remember if I mentioned it before, but we're at least entertaining the idea of doing a Sunday strip with new Greyhawk material after this is all finished. But that's waaaay far away right now.

Wow, how quickly do things change! :-) Big news about to be posted on The Wannabe Pirates website! I'm going to make the Waldo Chronicles story a book-only exclusive! Instead of running it on the website, it's going to be bonus material for the book: and extra 15 pages of comics! In place of Waldo, we're going to start on Monday running our "Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean" graphic novel! It'll run Monday thru Friday for about 19 weeks! The big reason why is that we're going to make the next Wannabe Pirates story a cross-over story! Flemm & Co. will meet-up with a cartoonized 3D version of Greyhawk & Co. to battle invaders from outer space! :-) This way, we'll have fresh content during the break *and* we'll be able to introduce the Greyhawk characters to our audience. I'm very much looking forward to this! Now, gotta' go change the announcement on the website!

You may want to check out the latest "Pigeon Impossible" podcast. At one point, he shows a city scene broken apart into the separate elements and you can see an example of the ground plain being curved up to reach the horizon.

Yes, next to the name of the shortcut to the model in the PWS, there are a series of small icons. One of them is a wireframe cube. Click on that and a pop-up menu will appear. Select the top icon (the red circle with the slash through it) and the model will not be visible... but it will still render. Look in the properties for the shortcut to the model and you'll find an "Active" property. Change it from ON to OFF and the model will disappear and will not render. So you say and for you I'm sure it's true but in my case every time I have tried to push two models of different colors right up to each other I have gotten some bleed through from one model onto the other. Even when the models are the same color the lines seperating the two models look a little "funky" when they are pressed right up against each other. Don't believe me? Look at that flythrough of the Remedy short set I posted recently. You will see buildings right next to each other, that are the same color and you can tell where they seperate because the lines between the two models just don't look right. I don't know enough to even guess why. Here's what I'm talking about. Here's a top view. See how I've overlapped the two instances of the models? Now, here's how they look rendered from the camera: Ooooh! Cryptic and foreboding. I'm not even going to ask, I'll wait to find out with the rest of the masses. Whatever it is I hope it goes well. Just FYI the biggest webcomics centered convention in the country is coming up at the end of the month in Hartford, CT. You've read my post on the Wannabe Pirates thread, so it shouldn't be cryptic anymore. :-)

Thanks, Rob_T! Well, throw into the irony that we have two artists and we're not going to be drawing anything on the strip anymore. :-) (That's not entirely true, since I'm certain I'm going to be creating a lot of 2D art in Photoshop to look like extra 3D stuff.) I had not seen that secret agent webcomic before. I'll have to dig through it. His character designs are smart. Rigging those would be a breeze. :-) I'll check with McCrary re: the magazine. Fantasy/Magic has never been an interest of mine, but we're playing with fantasy/magic elements in WBP. I know I'm going to be swamped for quite some time to come finishing out this fill-in story and getting the 3D comic up and running. I do plan on starting to make some convention appearances later down the road. Once I've finished the strips for this Waldo Morgan Chronicles story, I'm going to put together our first book that will contain all of the 2D strips. The books after that will strictly be 3D. But as soon as I do have the book done, I'll at least start attending local cons.

You can build every part of the apartment, but when assembled in the choreography you will have the option to turn models on or off (as well as set parts to not be visible in the choreography, but still render.) Not only does this give you the ability to see through things, but elements that the camera won't see can be turned off, which will speed up your render times. It takes no skill. You simply put them together so that they overlap... no gaps. Thanks! It served my purpose to do so and I had no concern of being sued. This animation was done as my Christmas card. I created DVDs which I mailed to friends and family. It was not conceived of as a commercial venture. At worst, I might have received a cease and desist letter, but that was highly unlikely. As to online distribution, I purposely put it on YouTube, because they pay licensing fees to the different record labels, which keeps them safe from most of the music used in the videos that are posted there. As it was, I barely finished it on time. :-) I suppose that's a part of it, but it's not going to be a concern now. :-)

Would a skydome help you out? Because it's curved, you won't see the corners of your terrain. Some fog off in the distance or depth of field might help with keeping the line of the horizon not looking too harsh.