After read­ing a bit of the book I have for my cur­rent class, I feel like work­ing on my comic again.  I think I know what’s wrong with it, and I have a bet­ter idea to fix it.  The biggest prob­lem is with the con­flict.  It’s there, but there isn’t enough of it, and there needs to be a cen­tral point of con­flict that the char­ac­ters have in com­mon.  Right now, they all have goals, but noth­ing that really uni­fies them.  I think I’m look­ing in the wrong place for the con­flict.  Before, Dierdre’s main quest was find­ing her father, but there’s another char­ac­ter in the story that played a much minor role who would fit bet­ter.  I’m just not sure how to go about it yet.

One new pic­ture added to con­cepts.  Orvil the cat.  :)  He’s a heav­ily edited ver­sion of a char­ac­ter I made orig­i­nally for another class, but trashed for Anna’s bet­ter design and per­son­al­ity.  Hope­fully the class I’m tak­ing now will help me give a decent per­son­al­ity to a fairly flat character.

I posted some final shots of the room in a new gallery.  It didn’t turn out so bad, though it’s not as detailed as I’d have liked.  It looks can­dle lit, which was one of my goals.  I’m going to play around with the pro­gram some more, maybe make some scenes from my story.  I think it’d neat to have mod­els of the envi­ron­ments where I can actu­ally explore it instead of just mul­ti­ple 2D drawings.

Work­ing with light­ing in the pro­gram.  It’s dif­fi­cult, but not for the rea­sons you’d expect.  It just takes so long for the lights to ren­der, espe­cially when you throw shad­ows into the mix.  I’m still play­ing with it, but this is what I have thus far.  It was enough to fool Ian into think­ing it was a photo, but it’s nowhere near perfect.  :)

Learn­ing how to apply mate­ri­als to objects in 3ds max.  My first attempt was using most of the mate­ri­als the pro­gram pro­vides.  Even­tu­ally, I got a lit­tle wiser and start­ing going around the house tak­ing pic­tures of var­i­ous wood sur­faces and some of the walls.  I don’t think I’ll ever use the wood mate­r­ial in the pro­gram again.  It just looks very, very fake.  Here’s the end result.  I’m still work­ing on more objects for the room, but it’s look­ing pretty good thus far.

I’ve been pretty busy for the past week.  I’m get­ting bet­ter with 3ds Max, and work­ing on some more per­sonal stuff on the side.  This is what I’m cur­rently work­ing on.  The first two are dif­fer­ent views of a room I’m cre­at­ing for my 3D mod­el­ing class.  The third is a pic­ture I’m work­ing on of my rogue.

I think I’m start­ing to get the hang of the pro­gram.  I’m mak­ing a room for Sleep­ing Beauty.  Loft­ing has become one of my favorite tools.

Well, my ani­ma­tion class is done, and I’ve since moved on to my first 3D class.  As of yet, it hasn’t been quite as demand­ing of my time, but the new pro­gram is very over­whelm­ing for some­one like me who’s never used it before.  The book for it looks like it could also dou­ble as a very deadly pro­jec­tile weapon.  Still, it’s kind of excit­ing ren­der­ing mun­dane objects.

I’ve got a cou­ple pic­tures I’ve been work­ing on.  My most recent is another pic­ture of my rogue, which will hope­fully have a lot more detail than the last.  I was also work­ing on a pic­ture of Dier­dre and Trance going to see Eleri, but I just can’t get the back­ground to look right.

Ani­ma­tion done for one of my classes using Anna.  Just a sim­ple walk sequence.

There’s a new comic up.  This one’s based off WoW.  It’s not very long, but I don’t really have much time for any­thing too in-depth right now.  I’m work­ing on a col­ored pic­ture of Anna, too.  That one’s prob­a­bly going to have to wait for any spare time I have tomor­row.  I’ve got a fairly dif­fi­cult assign­ment due.