largento

LOL, vern!

I had intended to put together a PDF collection, but sadly all the original documents died with my hard drive.

Um... never, Gerry. :-) These are "wannabe" tutorials! Stian *ain't* no wannabe! It's Friday and this week we're gonna' break stuff!

Did you spot the helmet in last month's contest? So you did the Judge Dredd, Gorf? I got a kick out of seeing that. They reprinted the old Brian Bolland Dredds over here when I was in high school and I loved them. An answer to one of your previous questions (sorry, didn't see it at the time), about doing an irregular gradient fill in Photoshop. If you have the solid fill on it's own layer, you could use one of the layer effects (inner glow, emboss, etc.) to get that effect. If you've got Illustrator, you could build it up as a blend.

Can you believe I completely forgot about the tutorial last week? I was on vacation and oblivious as to what day it was. :-) I'm back at work now, and you can bet your sweet bippy I'll know what day Friday is this week! :-)

Thanks, guys. Some will argue that I never matured past age 10. :-) The frustrating thing is that we may be too old-fashioned for our own good. Not that we really have a choice. "Hip" is something I never was and I can't see that changing now that I'm 40. But, I do think the 3D cartoon aspect will get us attention. That will definitely separate us from the crowd.

So, I think the new computer is going to end up being a real plus for The Wannabe Pirates! I'm taking a vacation this week and even though I'm not going anywhere I've had to force myself to take a break from working on the cartoon this week, too. I need the rest! :-) The webcomic was reviewed today on a webcomics review site called Comic Fencing. It's a cool idea for a review site. They have a group of reviewers that picks one strip and they all write individual reviews. A neat way to get varied opinions about a strip before you check it out. The reviews were mostly positive (whew!) and they especially seemed interested in the 3D cartoon, which was really nice to hear. [EDIT] Another review went up since I wrote this which as none-too-complimentary. Oh well, y'can't please everyone. :-) One of the challenges for us is that we really want kids to be able to enjoy The Wannabe Pirates. I think nowadays there is a large vacuum in kid's cartoons where there are the cartoons aimed at very young children and then the ones aimed at young adults. McCrary and I really want to make The Wannabe Pirates something that we would have loved when we were 10 years old. This is not to say that we are in anyway trying to gear it only for kids, but it does mean that we're purposely avoiding the "hard" stuff that is so popular these days. Many webcomics and internet cartoons are successful mostly because they push the limits and you can do that on the internet where there's no censorship. I don't have anything against that, but it does leave behind a stigma that internet cartoons are edgier... and edgy is definitely not what we're trying to do. This will undoubtedly limit our success, but we really are doing this because this is something we want to do and are having fun doing. With that goal in mind, we're already a success!

My vote's for the juke joint! Great facial expression, Jirard!

Thanks, guys! Yeah, Vern... definitely not a fun experience. :-) Getting the new computer was almost entirely a step towards trying to make it easier for me if this were to happen again. Sounds like I'm not the only person who looks like he's defusing a bomb every time he has to perform some repair on his computer. :-) I've now had two hard drives go out on me and am no longer feeling any real confidence in the things. I definitely won't be turning off my Time Machine this time around! :-)

You are very welcome, Caroline! Glad it was helpful to you!

And just like that, we're back to another Friday and another Wannabe Tutorial!

Ouch, Gerry... ouch! :-)

No problems for me, but it did turn out that these are the same ones that were on the disc that came when I purchased it.

I've not ever used version 12. You do know that you can get a subscription version of v15 for just $50, right?

Thanks! I am happy to say that I'm mostly back up to speed. There are a couple of non-pressing things that I haven't tackled yet, but everything else seems to be working. I must say that I'm really digging the new super-thin Apple keyboard. I wasn't expecting to, but it's really nice. Having to start over from scratch, but the Wannabe Tutorials will return tomorrow!

Welcome to the party, Gene! There's definitely an element of modeling with splines that is a bit like drawing in 3D, which should be a plus for you. My first go at Animation:Master wasn't very successful. I took a "I can figure this out myself" approach and wasted a couple of months doing it the hard way and burned out quickly. The second time around, I made up my mind to learn everything and sought out as much information as I could. Unfortunately, some of the great video tutorials I purchased aren't available for sale anymore, but the main series that helped me the most still is! You can even get them as individual downloads now! Here's the link. I can't recommend it enough for getting started down the path! I'm now over a year and a half into my second go around with Animation:Master and feel "okay" with what I'm doing. I certainly don't feel like I've mastered it, but that's half the fun. I'm enjoying the learning process.

I think the shock has finally worn off and I'm starting to be able to enjoy the new MacPro. (This may have something to do with having found out that I'm getting a small inheritance which will offset the cost by half!) I've gotten most things up and running again. It's taking some getting used to and everything has been a "sure hope this works" kind of thing. I got a little bit of a panic when I connected my iPhone and I watched as a progress bar deleted all of my iPhone apps! Luckily, I was able to download them again from the app store and with a message saying "you've already purchased this, would you like to download it again for free?" Among the casualties of the crash of my iMac were the rendered frames for the one shot I've done (figures!) I've set about rerendering with some noticeable speed improvements. The biggest thing is that I figured since I now have two 2.8GHz Quad Core Xeon processors (8 cores!), I could get away with running two instances of A:M and rendering that way. Doing that more than cut the time in half from the renders I had done on my iMac! Unfortunately, the animated material I'm using for the ocean didn't match up and so I got glitches where the separately rendered frames met up. I'm now doing another render with everything black except the water to that I can cover it up. Obviously that won't be an issue with the other shots, so I'm very jazzed that I'm going to be able to get things rendered so much faster. I haven't set up Bootcamp and loaded Windows XP yet. The last time I did it, I had to install Windows twice (once for Parallels to use and once for Bootcamp.) This time I'm going to install it on Bootcamp first and Parallels will use that copy of Windows, sparing me the second install. I'm considering buying an internal drive that would just be for Windows. I've got room for four drives. (Having used iMacs for so long, this ability to add on stuff is intoxicating!) I'm curious to see how fast things will render on the Windows side, but I've rarely used Windows (except for things that require it, like The Setup Machine), so I'm not in a real hurry to set it up.

Well, as you may have read on The Wannabe Pirates thread, my iMac's hard drive went kablooey and I've lost all of my tutorial files! I'm in the process of getting everything back to working and will be able to get back to rebuilding the assets I need, but unfortunately, there's no way that'll happen by tomorrow. So, no new Wananbe Tutorial this week...

Thanks, guys! I've just now started setting it up. The restore from the Time Capsule was miraculous! So many things are already working! My mail, all my bookmarks and passwords! As best I can tell, this backup is from early June, so about when I thought!

Thanks Nancy, Ken. I hope so. I just got around to looking at the backup DVD and it was from the 9th, so not as recent as I'd thought, but thank goodness I did it, since many of the things I'd backed up on it weren't in the daily backups. So painful to think about.

Disaster! Last night during a pretty rambunctious thunderstorm, I woke up and thought I should turn off my iMac just to be safe. This morning, I stumbled over to it and tried to start it, only to be faced with a gray screen and a tell-tale clicking noise from the hard drive. Sure enough, a flashing question mark appeared and booting up from the Leopard disk showed no hard drive to repair. (Insert blood-curdling scream here.) I have been fairly good about backing up my pirates stuff. I have a .Mac account (now MobileMe... ugh) and I use the backup software to back up my Pirates folders to my iDisk online and an external hard drive. In March, I invested in a Time Capsule which has a 1TB drive attached that uses Time Machine in Leopard to auto back up the computers on your network. I also periodically make DVD back ups of my Pirates stuff... and had just done one this past weekend. I did stop my Time Machine awhile back, though. I don't remember how long ago, but it seemed to be slowing things down. I'm hoping that my last backup was within the last two months. Well, the downside of the iMac is that swapping out the hard drive on your own isn't really possible. The case is vacuum sealed and requires a bunch of tools I won't have. I carted the 24" monster down to the closest Apple Store at lunch and was greeted by looks like I was an alien and told that I had to make an appointment. Okay. Soonest they could do was 5:40pm today. I asked if I could leave my iMac with them until then and was told they couldn't be responsible for it, so "no." I decided I would name my new hernia after the employee. Faced with all of this, I started thinking if maybe this was the time to get a new iMac and if maybe doing a lot of rendering in the future might make the case for getting something sturdier. I flipped and flopped (and flooped a couple of times) and decided that I would go back to the Apple Store sans iMac, purchase a baseline MacPro and use the appointment with the "Genius" to find out what my options were as far as getting the drive replaced and getting what info I could from backups. $3K and 2 hours of waiting later, I got to talk to the genius and asked him the questions. I was told that since my iMac was out of warranty, it was a much smarter thing to take it to an Apple authorized service center with a new drive, since Apple would charge fairly high for it. To what i'm hoping will be my relief, I was told that when I start up the new machine, I will be able to chose to migrate from a Time Machine backup, which will put all my applications, files and settings onto the new computer (the ones that were there at the time of the last backup.) This will be excellent if it works. And I already want to kick myself for stopping the Time Machine backups. I'm way too exhausted and beaten up to try it tonight (also, I still have to go and get a monitor). This has been an extremely stressful day. Thank goodness I have the laptop, so I'm not completely removed from the world. My plan is to get the new machine up and running (you'd think I'd be all excited about having it, but I'm oddly not) and then down the road, get the iMac fixed. Many things will have been lost, I'm sure. Sadly, the Wannabe Tutorials will be among the dead. After this is all over, I will rebuild and they will return, but for now, it's all about putting the pieces back together.

Wow!! Since the beginning of this I have been in awe, but these frames go even beyond that! Incredible! Incredible! Incredible!

Thanks, everybody! Most of the stuff in these I learned from these forums!

I think the sets integrated really well! Good job!

Whew! I almost forgot to do this today! Here's the next tutorial page!