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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 94 - 97 | Jul 31, 2009 12:15 AM PDT | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:I should mention that generally lights, stars, etc shining in space won't have a big beam or halo, since there's nothing in the vacuum of space to reflect light like there is in the air around us here on Earth. I've been doing a lot of halos and things in this current episode 5 scene, though, and I suppose the excuse I could make about it is that the scene takes place in a planetary ring system, and those tend to have lots of dust and ice particles in them (even though mine is unusually "chunky" with all those big asteroids), and those could cause light to scatter and create halos and beams and things.
The *real* reason though is that it looks cool. ;D Especially in the dailies, which don't have the benefit of animation, it's been helping me illustrate depth and direction; this ring system setting is kind of tough for that, because there are tons of objects floating around, but nothing concrete about most of them that can give a sense of scale--you can't tell just from its outline if an asteroid is small and close by, or big and far away--so using atmospheric depth and depth of field effects in grayscale helps with that. And I've been using a larger halo effect here and there to help show in which direction the system's Sun can be found, which hopefully helps to orient the viewer in this big field of rubble.
Oh yeah, and beams and trails can help give a sense of the animation in the non-animated dailies, so I've been using them for that, too: missile trails, and in these last couple dailies, to help punctuate the change from lights off to lights on--in that big whatever-it-is that Selenis has a gun pointed at!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 92 - 93 | Jul 30, 2009 2:37 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Phew! The pose for daily 92 fought long and hard before it would come out properly stylish; in fact it came out looking rather familiar to one you've probably seen before elsewhere, only upside-down. Here's a hint (and the latest episode 5 art gallery entry--click it for the full size version):
And then I found myself revising the helmet in this one like four times:
Just one of those try try try again days, I guess. =P
Also finished up that swinging sequence from yesterday, here it is all color--er...blacked in (click it if it isn't animating for you):
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 90 - 91 | Jul 29, 2009 12:20 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Got through two quick frame-by-frame sequences today, or mostly, anyway. The first was a pretty easy one with just the rope swinging down (I think I'm going to be hating that rope by the end of this episode!), the second a more complicated one with Selenis in full swing. Still not quite done with that yet, but here's a non-inked-in preview (and I still have to draw the rope, dar!; if this isn't animating for you, click it to make it go):
If you saw the earlier test version on the forum, you'll notice that this one goes twice as fast; the original speed wasn't quite zippy enough. Fortunately the cut frames won't go all to waste, as I can use them, transparently, to make the motion of the remaining frames look smoother, like I did in the version above.
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 84 - 89 | Jul 28, 2009 1:30 AM PDT | url |
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Added 6 new A* comics:Selenis has started swinging around on her grapple, and you know what that means: time for a fully animated action scene. This one goes on for...ohh longer than I want to think about right now, and goes through all different directions and flips and asteroids— Well, it's going to be pretty wild, if I survive to finish it.
Here's the grapple and run seen partially in dailies 87 and 88:
Extra points if you noticed that she leaves a footprint behind. :D
Also added a few higher-res bits from today's work to the episode 5 art gallery. Small previews (click 'em to go to their gallery page to see the full version):
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| A* art now available as hand-signed prints | Jul 25, 2009 3:24 AM PDT | url |
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All A* daily comics and art gallery images are now available as hand-signed prints! That's right, I will now whip up the daily comic or gallery image of your choice as a printable graphic file, tote it over to the printers', have them print it up as a nice 8.5" x 11" glossy on heavy "cardstock" paper, sign it just for you with a fancy-schmancy metallic silver pen, run it over to the post office, pop it in a Priority Mail envelope, and whisk it off to you post-haste, pretty much anywhere in the world! Just look for the "buy hand-signed print" link next to your favorite A* images.
So that's my excuse for not actually having any new comics for you this afternoon (I did upload one at about 3:00am tod-- err, Friday morning, but that's not really the spirit of the "daily" idea, I know >_<). I fully intended to have time to squeeze out at least ONE new comic today, buuuut Perl scripting pretty much always ends up taking twice as long as I figure it will (you'd have thought I'd have learned this lesson from game development =p). The art galleries have a slick(er) new layout and should be easier to browse in the new print-enabled system, and you can access them directly from the episode list page now, which also got a layout upgrade.
By the way, if you've never signed anything with a metallic silver pen, I urge you to try it: it is way fun and instantly makes you feel like an unqualified rock star. Thanks to Walrus and surplus MXO boxes for teaching me this guilty pleasure.
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 81 - 83 | Jul 24, 2009 3:14 AM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:It takes me a lot longer to draw Selenis than Vero, on average, but girls are fun to draw, so I'm not exactly suffering I suppose... And I think today's drawings came out pretty well, so to make the most of them I made fancied-up high-res versions of them that will be in the episode's art gallery when it's done, but you can go check them out now at deviantART. Here are some tiny previews, and links to the large versions:
No more hiding
Landing
Come out
I'm still not entirely sure what to call these rocks you see here. They're part of a ring system around a planet, Gabbot's Claim, and my initial thought was to call them "asteroids." But when you actually look into naming conventions for space rocks, well, they're all screwy. Most of the definitions of asteroid (which comes from Greek: aster ("star") + oid ("form"), ie a star-like object, so that doesn't really help) say that it's a rock/metal/body/thingy orbiting the Sun, which seems like a silly definition since what would you call one orbiting a different star? It's all kind of loosey-goosey, so other groups and organizations, most notoriously the International Astronomical Union, have stepped in to confuse the matter. Depending on whose word we take for it, instead of "asteroid," an orbiting space rock (as opposed to a non-orbiting one, which is pretty definitely a "meteoroid," like in A* episode 2) should be called:- a "Small Solar System Body" (SSSB--if you want to be really generic, just roll this one off your tongue!)
- a "dwarf planet" (if they're big and round enough; Ceres in the Mars/Jupiter asteroid belt is now classed as one of these, for instance)
- a "minor planet" (if it orbits the sun and isn't a planet or a comet! >_<)
- a "Trans-Neptunian Object" (TNO--if it orbits the Sun on average farther out than Neptune)
- a "planetoid" (if they're big and round enough and the namer is slacking)
- a "planetule" (nobody likes this one)
- a "planetesimal" (if it's involved the the formation of a planet)
- a "comet" (if it has a tail, and usually an oblong or off-center orbit that takes it out past the planets)
- a "centaur" (if it orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbit of one of the giant planets)
- a "Kuiper Belt Object" (KBO--if it orbits between Neptune and about twice as far out)
- a "Scattered Disc Object" (SDO--if it has a funky orbit and is anywhere from about Neptune to three times farther out)
- a "Greek" (if it orbits the Sun at Jupiter's L4 (Lagrange) point! :P)
- a "Trojan" (if it orbits the Sun at Jupiter's L5 (Lagrange) point! >_<)
As you can see, this is a mess, and anyway most of them are only things orbiting our Sun. Ugh. Things in ring systems around planets, if they aren't big and round enough to qualify as moons, only seem to get called generic names like "rocks," "boulders," or "moonlets." Grr. So technically I should just call them "rocks," but that's just so...so...terrestrial. So I think I'll just call them asteroids, and nyah to all these silly astronomers overclassifying things. ;P
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 71 - 80 | Jul 22, 2009 11:19 PM PDT | url |
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Added 10 new A* comics:- A* Episode 5, Daily 71
- A* Episode 5, Daily 72
- A* Episode 5, Daily 73
- A* Episode 5, Daily 74
- A* Episode 5, Daily 75
- A* Episode 5, Daily 76
- A* Episode 5, Daily 77
- A* Episode 5, Daily 78
- A* Episode 5, Daily 79
- A* Episode 5, Daily 80
I hope you're ready for more action, because Vero vs Selenis is *on*!
Let's hope he does a little better than Sal. :o
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| A* episode 1 in German by Vitruv and SEPET | Jul 22, 2009 3:09 PM PDT | url |
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Vitruv and SEPET have teamed up to produce A* episode 1 translated into German; I think it was Vitruv handling the translation, and SEPET doing the actual subtitle and movie creation. Nice work, guys!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 64 - 70 | Jul 21, 2009 9:09 PM PDT | url |
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Added 7 new A* comics:There! Told ya it wouldn't be long. ;)
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 59 - 63 | Jul 20, 2009 6:27 PM PDT | url |
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Added 5 new A* comics:Ooh, breaking off mid-line. Hm-m-m? We shall find out tomorrow!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 51 - 58 | Jul 17, 2009 7:28 PM PDT | url |
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Added 8 new A* comics:Hurrah for flashback sequences! Those are easy. :D >_>
I felt compelled to make something more with Selenis' head from yesterday's Ep. 5 daily 50, and got to experimenting with drawing some fairly exotic space things like a nebula, a milky Milky Way, and a black hole. These all got crammed into a piece called Irresistible which until episode 5 is done can only be seen in high-res on deviantART (which is where that link goes). Here's a small preview version:
Have a nice weekend everyone!
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| A* Episode 5, Daily 50 | Jul 16, 2009 9:19 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Episode 5 hits Daily #50! Leaving the animation-intensive Selenis to her "cutting" and your imagination for a bit (and just a bit), tomorrow we'll go catch up with Vero in that lonely ring system around Gabbot's Claim.
The finalish version of her landing-on-Sal's-hull animation came out like this (RSS/Facebook readers may need to click it to get it to animate):
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| A* Episode 5, Daily 49 | Jul 16, 2009 1:04 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Phew. Just gotta do the shading on the other frames in this second acrobatic shot, then it's back to less animation-intensive stuff for a while, so I can have more dailies for you.
The generally-final version of the first one looks like this (RSS/Facebook readers may have to click to get these to move):
And the rough test of the second one (of which today's Daily is approximately the last frame):
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| A* episode 1 in Italian, now with sound | Jul 15, 2009 4:37 PM PDT | url |
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SEPET is updating his subtitled-in-Italian versions to have sound (music and English voices), and he's got A* episode 1 with sound and Italian subtitles done now. Thanks, SEPET!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 47 - 48 | Jul 15, 2009 12:44 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:We're now into the first of Selenis' acrobatic shots in this episode; I'll have to draw her frame-by-frame in these because of all the flipping around she's doing, so they'll take a while, but hopefully they'll look pretty cool once animated. Daily 48 is in about the middle of this one-second shot where she's being towed into the distance by the grappling cable she's just embedded in the hull of Sal's ship. I don't have the other frames in this sequence shaded in yet, but we can see them animate in silhouette in a sort of "pencil test" of the character's movement (if you're viewing this in an RSS reader or Facebook you may need to click this image to get it to animate):
That took a while! I think it was mostly because it's a complicated pose: in perspective, with the body twisted around halfway; plus, it has to feel like it's being pulled backwards and to the left by the right arm. In the storyboard of this shot that I showed a while back, I had first drawn her being pulled by the wrong arm; I redrew the arm quickly in the storyboard doodle so I wouldn't forget which was the correct arm when it came time to draw the final art, but the weighting of the pose was still on the wrong arm, and I knew I'd have to correct for that later--ie, today. For some reason it stumped me for a while, and I was thinking that maybe I had to change the whole pose up, maybe have her twisting around the other way or something, so I wasted time trying out two alternate poses before I finally came back to the original one and just redrew it so the weight was on the correct arm. Bah I am silly! But at least I got a nifty picture out of one of the alternate poses, which you can check out on deviantART.
Tomorrow I ought to get to the next sequence, which is her finishing her flip and landing neatly on the hull of Sal's ship. Moooore full character animation, eep!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 43 - 46 | Jul 14, 2009 2:27 AM PDT | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Not quite up to full speed on the art for this episode yet, but I did figure myself out a little tweak for making my el-quicky starry backgrounds a little nicer, sooo a smidge of progress there anyway.
Tomorrow we'll reach the first of the real acrobatic shots requiring frame-by-frame drawing for the animation, eep!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 39 - 42 | Jul 10, 2009 8:24 PM PDT | url |
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Added 4 new A* comics:Finally a somewhat good look at Selenis. If you're saying "Selenis wha-?," the end of episode 2 should clarify things for you!
I got the idea for that forearm thruster of hers from the EVA scenes in the semi-hard-sci-fi (up until the end :P) movie "Mission to Mars."
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 36 - 38 | Jul 09, 2009 9:11 PM PDT | url |
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Added 3 new A* comics:Didn't get very far today, but at least I ended on an interesting one!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 28 - 35 | Jul 08, 2009 11:03 PM PDT | url |
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Added 8 new A* comics:Despite all the grayscale tricks up my sleeve, the hand on the stick of the space ship in today's Dailies is an example of something that doesn't translate easily into a non-animated format, so I just had to give in and show it separately in both before and after positions. Animation is so much easier sometimes!
I put a large version of that one on deviantART.
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| A* episode 4 in Italian by SEPET | Jul 08, 2009 4:15 PM PDT | url |
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A* episode 4 has been translated into Italian by SEPET. His translated subtitles are actually way more detailed than mine. :)
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 21 - 27 | Jul 07, 2009 9:36 PM PDT | url |
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Added 7 new daily A* comics:They may be exaggerated, but dang are those big laser beams fun. Will Sal have more luck with shot number 2?
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 17 - 20 | Jul 06, 2009 10:42 PM PDT | url |
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Added 4 new daily A* comics:The original version of the last line wasn't "eat." OMG self-censorship!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 15 - 16 | Jul 04, 2009 1:47 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new daily A* comics:Have a great weekend and don't blow off any fingers or toes!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 11 - 14 | Jul 03, 2009 4:43 AM PDT | url |
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Added 4 new daily A* comics:Hm a rather plain, constant last name there...
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| A* Goes Daily! | Jul 01, 2009 7:08 PM PDT | url |
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Added 10 new daily A* comics:- A* Episode 5, Daily 1
- A* Episode 5, Daily 2
- A* Episode 5, Daily 3
- A* Episode 5, Daily 4
- A* Episode 5, Daily 5
- A* Episode 5, Daily 6
- A* Episode 5, Daily 7
- A* Episode 5, Daily 8
- A* Episode 5, Daily 9
- A* Episode 5, Daily 10
A* goes daily! There are already ten episode 5 comic "dailies" up, starting with:
ZOMG spoilers! :P
You can start reading through them right here, or just start off on the front page of the site, which will always show the latest one, with a handy drop-down list and arrow links to jump back in time to wherever you'd like to start from.
Episodes 1-4 have also been added in daily comic form, and you can get to them through the same handy "dailies" browsing UI, or from their animated episode page, or from the "episode list" page.
I hope you'll enjoy the dailies, and I'm looking forward to being able to talk about the progressing story as I'm drawing it, instead of having to stay mum for a whole month between animated episodes--which I'm still going to produce, of course!
You'll notice that Vero's friend Sal is the star of episode 5 so far, but who's this mysterious "pirate" (ARRR) accosting him out in interstellar space?
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