largento

I can do that, Vern. I'll start doing them both ways next week. Not sure which browser you use, but leastways on a Mac using Firefox, "command – +" (plus sign) will zoom in and "command – -" (minus sign) will zoom back out. I'm assuming there's a windows equivalent.

Haha! A "tutorial tutorial"? :-) There's not a real trick to it, Al. To make it easy on myself, I'm using an app that ships on new Macs (at least it used to) called "Comic Life." It's sort of an everyman's comic book page maker. You can drag on images and panels and resize them. I'm pretty sure they make a windows version of it now. (Just checked and they do make a Windows version... and it looks like it no longer comes free on new Macs.) If I were to do them in Illustrator, I'd end up spending hours being more intricate with them. The limits of the application make it easier... if that makes any sense. The hard part, of course, is figuring out what to do the tutorial about and how to demonstrate the lesson. Then it's just a matter of opening up A:M and doing all the steps and making screen captures of what I need along the way.

Wow, it's Friday already? Time for another tutorial on the Wannabe Way! This week I'm adding control points!

Lookin' good, Gerry!

Thanks, Matt! I would take no offense at all. I certainly can't pretend I'm the first person to think of doing instructions in comic book form.

Vern, you need to trademark this immediately! I can see this being a whole series of sci-fi/horror films... FLEAS FLesh Eating AndroidS (FLEAS)

>sigh Moving on... :-) Thanks, guys! I greatly appreciate the support! Especially when you consider how far I have to go! (I'm not even ready to introduce the concept of patches yet!) Vern, you honor me, sir! The new ones will go up on Fridays.

phatso, 5 constrains to the direction of the intersecting spline that isn't selected. If you think of a simple x/y intersection, if the x is selected, holding down 5 would constrain your movement along the y. Robert, the holes are imaginary. I think you're taking the visual aid far too literally and missing the point. It is not an illustration of a model. It is an illustration of concepts. Your critique was that it should only have holes on four sides, allowing for only two splines to intersect. However, if you make a very simple model of a cube, the corner points have to allow three splines to connect from three different directions. If my example of a control point only had 4 holes to allow (for example) a spline in the x-axis and a spline in the y-axis, then it would negate the possibility of adding a spline in the y-axis... and I wouldn't be able to model a simple cube with it.

Thanks, everyone! I'll file that one away, Reza! Robert, the illustration was merely to introduce the concept of a control point not just being a point but as something that a spline can pass through. It was not intended to represent an actual model. A 4-holed cube would ignore the requirements of even a basic model of ...a cube. :-)

Thanks, everybody! Ken, the actual ads appearing on the websites are clickable, these are just the animated gifs. I don't know if anybody is doing their webcomic with animated gifs everytime. That would add a few more extra layers of difficulty and time spent! I liked it for the ad, though, since it might make the viewer pay more attention to it to follow it through. I am very happy to say that I finally finished the 2nd draft of the script for Chapter 1 of the movie this weekend! In the end, I bribed myself with a burrito and sat in the restaurant with my laptop until I finished. :-)

As I've mentioned, one of the neat ideas we had was to create a webcomic version of The Wannabe Pirates as a way of introducing the characters and hopefully building up an audience for when the animated versions appear. This has been great fun, a LOT of work and it's actually retro-influenced the cartoon. As I'm working on the new script, I'm including some of the ideas that were introduced in the webcomic. We didn't do much to promote the webcomic originally, because we wanted to wait until we had enough content up to make a visit by a reader worthwhile. Now that we've got just under 50 strips up and have begun a new storyline, we decided it was time to do it. Beginning last week, we started placing ads on some other webcomic websites and it's been fun looking at the stats and seeing how many people are coming to the site and reading the strips. In the 4 months we've been keeping track of it, we've had visits from all 50 states and many from around the world! Hopefully they'll be entertained by what we've done and will want to keep coming back. Because of the dual nature of this project (3D & 2D), we decided to make both a 3D and 2D version of the banner ad. There were definitely limitations to what could be done because the ads couldn't be larger than 100k, but I think they came out pretty cool! Here they are... I think it will really be a plus for the cartoon to have the audience be familiar with the characters. To them, it will be like the cartoon is a 3D version of the strip, even though we started on the cartoon first!

Thanks, everybody!

It's Friday again and time for another page! This time, it's about using the constraining keys to control your movement!

Yeah, but you'll need extra disk space. Just drag a copy of the Animation Master folder from the Applications folder. Launch one and then the second and you'll have two versions running at the same time. Works with the subscription copy, too.

She bears more than a passing resemblance to Captain Jack's own Black Pearl...

Thanks, guys! You know I hadn't thought of doing it, but when I get a bunch of these done, they could be gathered up in a ComicBookRAR file and viewed as a comic.

Wow, Eric! That looks fantastic!

Thanks again, everyone! Here's this week's page:

Isn't Bender's mouth always the same shape? I don't think it animates.

Thanks, Nancy! I think the comic book/strip is a fantastic form of communication. Thanks, too, Phatso! That's high praise indeed! And Thanks, too, Matt! Exactly the audience I'm trying to target. My goal is to do 1 a week, so the chances of 1000s of pages are pretty slim! :-) But hopefully I'll do enough to make having this be it's own section worthwhile.

Great character, David! Looking forward to seeing him come alive!

Thanks, guys! Hopefully new users will find these helpful.

Continuity explained! Note: You can find all of the Wannabe Way Tutorials collected in the Modeling Tutorials section.

Just an update on what's going on with the movie: Haven't abandoned it, I promise. :-) I foolishly thought that I could work out all of the story stuff while storyboarding from the rough draft script. Turns out I got into a different frame of mind and just kept reproducing what was already written... and I wasn't satisfied with that. So, I finally recognized that I need to go back and do a couple of more drafts of the script first. The decision to break the movie up into four 5-minute chapters also means that I need to balance them out more. The first part of the story didn't really do much more than introduce the characters, so I'm trying to punch it up so that it works better as a stand-alone chapter. The second chapter is more or less being created whole-cloth. I've brought in another friend of mine to help me make it better and to put me on a more rapid timeline for its completion. The webcomic is still going strong. We're close to finishing up the second storyline and the third storyline will begin in a week and a half or so. We've started to pick up a few readers and our numbers are going up. We're planning on doing some advertising around the start of this new storyline, so hopefully we'll get even more. The great part of doing the comic is that it gives us a chance to develop a potential audience for the movie... even though we began the movie first, it'll seem to the folks who come to the site that it's a 3D animated version of the comic. I just today checked and September 19 is National Talk Like a Pirate Day. It'd be really great if I could at least have the first trailer for the movie done by then.

Well, I think you could buy it in a bundle with some of their tutorial disks, but they were separate products. They are no longer offering them for sale. On occasion, I've seen some of the folks here selling their copies.