Kenny Chronicles

[Garrett Williams]

I'd better get my pimping done before this corner gets crowded!
Kenny Chronicles is a comic set over 100 years in the future that focuses on a teenage fox that has to deal with customers, and having the flying robot of his now-deceased enemy that he TOTALLY didn't kill, but he tried, and people still blame him for that skunk's death and the stench that lingered.
I've recently started doing my backgrounds in 3D, and I'm quite happy with the results. The first 3D background didn't suck at all!
Kenny Chronicles will be turning 2 years old in April, and I have a super-secret surprise planned in celebration.

I should also be working on tomorrow's comic right now. Link bannerdom is as follows...

[Rob]

Your humor is both random and alarming. LOL. The panda suggesting he "isn't going to shave" made me laugh.

What program are you using for your backgrounds? I use Animation:Master made by a company called Hash and I'm slowly converting my main comic over to it entirely and we'll be starting a new comic that was created in it soon as well.
;)

[Garrett Williams]

Second Life. I was going to use Blender because it's free, but so far I haven't mastered it. After I got into Second Life and found how easy to use those tools were(drag 'n drop textures? yes please!), my SL experience totally leapfrogged my Blender experience. It helps that Second Life is more than just a 3D modeling program and I'm already roaming around it regularly.
I still plan on furthering my Blender knowledge, since SL's shading and lighting is primitive(it's designed for live-rendering, not Pixar animation), plus I want to make animations that don't require screen-grabbing from what's basically a video game(fps is low already).

At the moment, I don't plan on using 3D characters until I can get Pixar quality with the efficiency of drawing. Facial expressions and one-shot or background characters are the biggest drawbacks to 3D.

[Rob]

Indeed. Getting those facial expressions correct is a mother. The rig in Animation: Master to do proper facial expressions is the MOST complicated part of a model and I know guys on the forums who get paid $5k or more just to do the rigging. No modeling, no animating, no textures or anything. All they are doing is putting the bones and presets in place to make the face as lifelike as possible and able to look properly when it speaks. It's crazy hard.

That's why we're seriously considering drawing the faces onto the characters after they are rendered. I may not do art well but I can usually handle eyes, nose and mouth.