The Wannabe Pirates

[itsjustme]

Great stuff, Mark!

[kwhitaker]

you have so much talent and lots of experience. Largento. congratulation on the new strip. ! love you work and page 1

[largento]

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:

 

[apprentice]

Looks good, Mark! He's got really long arms.

[KenH]

Cool character. I'd expect him to have a crazy hat as a witch doctor. He'll be easy to lip sync!

[largento]

Thanks, guys!

 

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

[largento]

 

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...

[largento]

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.

 

[apprentice]

It looks good! Like the lighting. 4 hours is good, Mark. Looking forward to see more what you have in store!

[KenH]

What's the slowest part? I assuming posing the characters is fairly quick. Four hours is quite long if you're doing it every day.

Are you doing the poses in a pose window of the model? It would be good to have some base poses that'll be used often....then you can vary them in the chor.

 

On a preference note, I think something could be done with their feet. They look to "defaultish". And Sneezes' left pinky looks odd to me in the last pose.....it's like he's sticking it out to drink his tea. lol Otherwise it looks great. Is the wall directly behind them missing a texture?

[largento]

What's the slowest part? I assuming posing the characters is fairly quick. Four hours is quite long if you're doing it every day.

Are you doing the poses in a pose window of the model? It would be good to have some base poses that'll be used often....then you can vary them in the chor.

 

On a preference note, I think something could be done with their feet. They look to "defaultish". And Sneezes' left pinky looks odd to me in the last pose.....it's like he's sticking it out to drink his tea. lol Otherwise it looks great. Is the wall directly behind them missing a texture?

 

 

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

[largento]

...finished the spaceship!

 

 

and re-rendered the turnaround vid...

 

finalship.mov

[MJL]

NICE HAT!!!!!!

[largento]

Thanks!! :-)

 

[apprentice]

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.

 

Oh yeah, that's true. Simple and still able to communicate well.

 

Liked the spaceship! Are you a designer, Mark? I like the design.

[TheSpleen]

LOL love all of it!

[HomeSlice]

Great looking stuff. Its funny too! Thanks for sharing some of your panels with us.

[largento]

Thanks, guys!

 

Liked the spaceship! Are you a designer, Mark? I like the design.

 

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.

[apprentice]

Thanks, Andy! Well, I worked for years as a graphic designer, does that count? :-)

 

Oh yeah. Your stuffs just look good. You must have understanding of design, colors and the likes.

[largento]

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. :-)

 

[HomeSlice]

largento, you are a machine

Keep up the great work.

[largento]

Thanks!

 

 

Here's the finished model... I'm calling him Barney now...

 

I like how he turned out!

 

 

[apprentice]

Ooh, that looks good. I like the color scheme.

[largento]

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! :-)

[TheSpleen]

That hats gonna put somebodys eye out!

Great job as always!

[largento]

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...

[KenH]

Oh maybe to get more readers, you could compile a few strips into a video and put it on youtube. I think Greyhawk would open a sizeable following.

[robcat2075]

Another great looking character!

[largento]

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.

[apprentice]

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! :-)

 

Well, Greyhawk & Co are going to appear in future Wannabe. So maybe that person will have a different opinion then.

[NancyGormezano]

Here's the finished model... I'm calling him Barney now...

 

Barney? He'sa look like a Pasquale or a Jean-Pierre - but Barney ???

 

Nice character!

[largento]

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. :-)

[largento]

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!

[TheSpleen]

looks really really great!

[KenH]

I think you arrived at something very dynamic. I dare you to find a way to get someone to be emerging from the top of the frame....upside down. Now that would be really dynamic. It's a little hard to make out the docs face. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.....make 'em wait till the next one.

How is the lighting done? Did you mention it? Made blue in photoshop or rendered that way?

Oh and I know you're going for simplicity, but I'd love to see something break up the line where the wall meets the ground.

 

PS A tip to make something stand out might be to use the ambient colour property.

PPS And I've just noticed you changed the frame colour to black. Why?

[largento]

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!

 

[mtpeak2]

Looks great Mark, though they look a bit dark or too blue?

[largento]

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. :-)

[robcat2075]

Looks great Mark, though they look a bit dark or too blue?

 

a touch of rimlight from behind the characters would really help define them without making them too light.

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=299467.

[largento]

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. :-)

[NancyGormezano]

I'm ok....sorta...with what you've got there for night time lighting, when I think about this panel in context with the rest of the strip. As a stand-alone panel - no.

 

So in case you might want to experiment for future:

 

Here's a simple trick, to "silouhette" your models, that I stole from Holmes the Hustler, who stole it from the Bigboote Boy: A FAKE rimlight MATERIAL (no electricity, foreign oil needed)

 

1) create a gradient material

2) add an ambiant color of your choice in the 2nd attribute only - Normal people might choose light blue/off-white.

3) change the percent ambiance to something 50-100

4) set the edge threshold property to something other than 0. (the higher the percent - the more/wider the rim light edge effect). Tasteful, subtle people choose 10-20

5) drag material to model

6) play with edge threshold, color, ambiance % (in the model instance) to taste while doing progressive screen renders. You must render "progressive render" to see effect in real-time.

 

It's an interesting look...but may not suit your taste.

[largento]

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. :-)

[robcat2075]

I do have a rimlight in there, Robert, but I lack the precision to keep it from effecting the overall lighting.

 

Lightlists.

 

A light can be made to illuminate only certain objects

[MJL]

A light can be made to illuminate only certain objects

 

 

How, Robert?

[largento]

Wow!

 

Another thing I didn't know about... doing a search for that right now!

 

A lot of good info!

[largento]

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.

[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...

 

[NancyGormezano]

Okay, decided I didn't like that new one.

 

me too, didn't like THAT new one.

 

I like THIS new one better than old one.

[largento]

Thanks, Nancy!

[itsjustme]

Great looking strip, Mark!