Though I fear flying more than anything on earth, I am going to Vegas. I shall be away for the next several days at NAB. I'll be back on Friday morning.
I will likely get started on a Griff comic when I get back. I have really put off deciding what projects to work on until this trip is over.
I wrote 16 pages of a short film script on Friday. It just flowed. It's not the most original thing, but it has some interesting characters and it will be nice to have a finished script of over 10 pages under my belt. I think the tentative title is "The Haunted Treasure of Lonald Limbega".
I just added General Zerrin and the Taldar soldier models to the WIPs page. I am extremely happy with them both, at least at the moment. Both are rigged now, and I hope to finish redoing the title sequence tomorrow or maybe Saturday.
The soldier's mask fills me with joy. Not almond joy. Just regular joy. It has some of the evilness that the original helmet had in sketches, but didn't really have in the model. It might get a bit of a colour change just because I first drew a sketch of it last night that made it look more like an alien's head, with the breath mask resembling teeth and gums, so that it looked like it was growling. If I can figure out the right colour scheme to make the mask look like that, I will probably go for it, as it will make them look more fierce.
I worry about how cartoony I can animate everything with these new designs. While they are far from realistic, they have a certain amount of details that makes it much harder to exaggerate their poses and animation. I guess time will tell.
I finished modeling Zerrin, Griff's major enemy, last night. In a brief moment of stupidity, I gave him hair. It made him look like very strange. It reminded me of the hairstyle the actor Leon (of Cool Runnings and Eight Legged Freaks fame) had when he played Little Richard in that TV movie. It was big and it was strange. So Zerrin will remain bald. I just did a side by side look at the old Zerrin and the new one, and they look like the same guy. I was initially trying to make him look like Delroy Lindo, but I screwed up somewhere along the way. Now the only similarity between them is the baldness and tallness. Oh well.
The internet needs more pictures of Delroy Lindo. Mr. Lindo, if you're out there, please post up pictures. Big ones.
I hope to model the soldier helmet tonight, then it shouldn't take long to rig up a soldier using the average male body and Zerrin's belt. I also renamed the bad guy army from the Reigyn forces (which didn't sound very impressive really) to The Taldar Legion. See? Sounds more powerful or something. I also remade their logo into more of a weird side-ways S thing instead of the little baby chicken-looking logo they had before. Baby chickens are not scary. Unless they have avian flu.
Less than 2 weeks until NAB. Vegas, baby, Vegas. I am also preparing some scenes and footage that we'll possibly use to show off pI. Should be an interesting show.
There's a fun little (at least I think it's fun) Ash image in the WIPS page. I got excited over the new Army of Darkness comic that Devil's Due is putting out, and thought it would be fun to make Ash. It allowed me to test out my average guy character on something new, and it forced me to build a rig for the average guy bodies. Once Ash was rigged, it was only a matter of a half hour or so until I was able to skin Griff to the rig, and it should be even less time to do Robin.
I started reediting the Griff title sequence animation with the new character. It looks about a thousand times better with this new style so far. As if a different person is revamping some lousy artist's designs. I can't believe how much my modeling has improved in the past year. Thank Bjorn!
I wonder how it will look animated. I also started writing the Griff script. Only 3 pages are done so far, and I don't know if it will ever get used. It's a dialogue sequence that sets up Griff to go on the mission that I had animated which leads him to all his troubles. I kinda think it takes him in the wrong direction. I will probably just write what I know has to happen and leave the initial introduction to a later time.
I updated the Store with 3 of the new posters and fixed what I think may have been dead links. It is a temporary solution until I can come up with a better way to present the store.
There are also so illustrated-ish experiments in the WIPs site. I planned to do a few more, but Corel Photo-Paint just stopped working on me. Starts up and crashes. Uninstalling and reinstalling is no help. Oh well. I guess its about time I updated from version 9.
