…Still Populating Retropolis for the Thrilling Tales

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

My Thrilling Tales character work continues: here we see the skinned version of our friend Al Bowlly, rocketeering maintenance man and window cleaner of the Future That Never Was.

I’m banking several new characters in advance right now, so that I won’t have to grind to a halt when I’m cranking out the illustrations for the next Thrilling Tales. Well. I know that I’ll be grinding to a halt anyway, as I build new sets and whatnot. But I won’t grind to a halt for these, anyway.

Next up: Harry Roy, in progress, and miscellaneous officers of the Retropolis Air Safety and Astronautics Association. I’m getting there.

Since the air outside the Secret Laboratory isn’t steaming any more I find myself wishing that I could sit out on the porch and write… with something other than pen and paper. Someday maybe I can do something about that.

A couple of new characters for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

August is nearly half over and here’s my first post of the month. I’ve been very busy with working on the assets for the next Thrilling Tales stories, in the mornings, and fleeing down the stairs of the Secret Laboratory to escape from the heat, in the afternoons. Or anyway that’s how it often happens. By late evening it’s sometimes safe to come back up here.

In other news, yesterday I mailed off the last of the rewards for the Thrilling Tales Kickstarter project. I should probably write up my Kickstarter experience sometime soon (before I forget). It was an interesting journey and I learned some things that I expected to learn, and a few that were a complete surprise.

By the way, if your name is Michael Church or Alain Cayrol, please get in touch with me through the Kickstarter messaging system. I still have no idea where to send your stuff.

You can see from the illustrations here that I’m not doing the sensible thing. The sensible thing, you see, would be to concentrate on the Clockwork Book stories first because I need to start posting them while I work on the Toaster With TWO BRAINS. It probably wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me to see that I’ve failed the sensibility test.

My brain likes to bounce back and forth between the two, anyway, and since that seems to be working for me I’m not going to impose any more order on it. I won’t need to exercise that kind of discipline until I’m done with one or both of the scripts. I’m thinking about writing the scripts for both Part Two and Part Three of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, so that I can start on Part Three as soon as Part Two’s done. We’ll see if I’m sensible enough to follow through on that idea. Hmmm.

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual at Kickstarter – Last Call!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The Kickstarter promotion for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is down to its final hours! The good news is that we’ve reached the funding goal – so the pledges will be redeemed, the Fabulous Prizes will ship out to the project’s backers, and people, by which I mean me, will be dancing in the streets.

The rest of the news isn’t bad. It’s all good. Really!

But as I explained in the project description I set a funding goal that I believed we could reach.

The actual expense of producing the next chapter of The Toaster With Two Brains and the non-interactive Clockwork Book stories will be quite a bit more than that. I’ll be making up the difference myself, of course, but as far as the Kickstarter project goes… well, the more the merrier.

So if you’ve been thinking about pledging to support the project in return for books, prints, exclusive t-shirts and so on, well, this is your last chance to pile on.

The pledge drive finishes at midnight, U.S. Pacific Time.

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, interactive fiction, multiple choice, art, design, illustration, retro future, retrofuturistic, raygun gothic, science fiction, space fantasy[/tags]

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual: a Call to Arms!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual Kickstarter drive is almost down to its last two weeks. After a sluggish fortnight, yesterday saw a big surge that pushed us up to 70% of the funding goal.

That’s thanks first to Laughing Squid, and then to a big, big retweet of the Laughing Squid post by the ever-awesome Felicia Day. She’s my heeeeero.

I don’t want to get all melodramatic, or hit you with some kind of hard sell. But that Kickstarter drive is going to mean a lot to the Thrilling Tales, and to me. If we don’t make the fundraising goal, though… nothing happens.

So if you like the idea of multiple-choicing your way through the retro future in The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, or just sitting back and enjoying the non-interactive illustrated adventures of the Clockwork Book stories….

Well, you can really help out. Either by becoming a Kickstarter backer, or by spreading the word about the Thrilling Tales and the funding drive.

If you’ve missed the trailer, view it here.

As I write, there’s less than $1000 of the $3200 goal left to go. That’s just ten backers at the $100 level (either the "Space Pirate" or "Space Patrolperson" levels, with prints or T-shirts, and books as rewards), or just twenty-two "Rocket Pilots" at $45, with signed copies of Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves.

Or, you know, some other number of the other levels. I’ve kind of used up my arithmetic for the week.

The upshot is that there’s not that far to go – it’s just that there’s not a lot of time, either. So pledge if you can, and if you can’t, accost strangers on the street and get them to pledge. That’s what I do. And as soon as I make my bail, I’ll do it again!

Tallie’s Adventures in Pre-Productionland, Continued

Filed under Computer Graphics, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Okay, I got that out of my system. I finished up Tallie’s brown hair, which will end up on somebody’s head someday, but then I wheeled her back into the shop.

As I textured her I started with the fabrics, which led to the complexion, which led to the hair; and when I’d reached the end of that road she wasn’t quite who I thought she’d be when I started. Sometimes that’s good – characters often know themselves better than we know them – but this time, I think, I’d just put the cart before the horse.

So here’s much more the Tallie I thought I was making when I started her. I had an interesting time with her skin tones – it’s so easy for pale skin materials to end up looking dead – but eventually I came up with something that I like (again!) using very much the same techniques as the earlier version. The paler areas have a surprising amount of blue in them, to suggest that translucency you need in skin that’s not undead. So today… this is what I like :).

One other thing I know about Tallie is that she’s quite fond of hats. Happily this hair will adapt to headgear a lot better than the other.

Character Update on Tallie – Hair, Freckles, Vertex Colors and Me

Filed under Computer Graphics, Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Here’s an update on Tallie, that new character I’ll be using in the Clockwork Book stories. I had some adventures with her hair, which I now sort of like – it’s sculpted with Mudbox, which is something I haven’t done with hair before. I just about always do some retouching on my characters’ hair, so my goal was to come up with something that’d nearly work.

Which might be a larger lifetime goal than I realized when I started to type that sentence.

Anyway, one of the things I like best about Tallie is the way I constructed her skin material. It’s based on two copies of a SymbiontMax material ("Human"). The first skin material’s pale, while the second one’s freckled.

I’m masking between those materials using vertex colors. You can see Tallie’s vertex colors in the lower left image.

All the heavy lifting for the vertex colors was done by baking in the lighting from an overhead light source. (In Max, that’s done with the Assign Vertex Colors Utility.) I positioned a directional light so that it cast light where sunlight would. That way Tallie’s more tanned, freckled skin tones show up just where more tanned, freckled skin tones really happen. I touched up the vertex colors around her throat and on her hands, but other than that it’s a pretty simple simulation of the way her skin would really be affected by the Sun. Neat!

Then a painted material gets masked on to affect her lips and eyebrows. But apart from those details her skin’s completely procedural.

Now, I regret to say, I have to skin her to a skeleton. That’s the part of character work that I always dread. But first… the lawn! I dread yardwork slightly less than character skinning.

Update:

This comment interested me enough that instead of skinning the character (which I know sounds awful; that’s just what it’s called) I’ve been modifying her ridiculously complex hair material to see what kind of brunette Tallie would make. I find that I also sort of like this version, and maybe more than I sort of like the original one.

I also established that the best example of a brunette (brunet?) in Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves is wearing aviator’s headgear, so you never actually see his hair.

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, clockwork book, 3d character, vertex colors, materials, hair, mudbox[/tags]

Clockwork Book Update; Kickstarter Update; and a New Character

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

As thunderstorms, ice cream trucks and even earthquakes (in Ohio?) do their will outside the Secret Laboratory I’ve been working away on the Clockwork Book and its room – you can click the picture above to embiggify it.

It’s come quite a ways, with its potted mushrooms, its beaded curtains, its palatial carpet and more pulleys and gizmos than ever before. I still have to work on the opposite end of the room, but I’ve been diverted by working on the Book’s assistant. Because even though it doesn’t strictly need one, the Book has always had an assistant. She’s not what you might expect given the Book’s ominous face and alarming reputation. Life’s just like that. There’s a work in progress shot of Tallie below.

But first, a reminder that the Clockwork Book and his room are relying on my Kickstarter fund drive to launch the next stage of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual… more than ever, in fact, since I’ve now had to replace my ailing monitor. That wasn’t something I’d planned on, and it’s left me on that side of the ledger that is more red than not. It’s sort of flashing, too, which I think must be a bad sign.

I resolved not to worry too much about the Kickstarter drive as we neared the halfway mark. Although the pace of new backers had dropped off a bit I could see that we were running about even when I compared the percentage of funding with the percentage of time.

That’s no longer quite the case and so I will soon Actually Be Worried. The Kickstarter fund drive stands to make a big difference to the success of the Thrilling Tales (not to mention the success of my refrigerator) and since I haven’t sold actual hundreds of books (yet!) that fundraiser is likely to be a big part of how I take the project through the months ahead.

So if you might become a backer, please do! And if you can’t, or if you already have (thanks!) I’d sure appreciate anything that you and your tweets and your Facebook pages might do to spread the word about Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual and its Kickstarter drive. It, by which I mean I, could sure use the help.

Anyway, here’s that work in progress image of Tallie, the Clockwork Book’s assistant. If you think she’s charming and cute… remember what you shouldn’t judge by its cover. Tallie is not to be trifled with.

I’ve rendered her hair as a strange ghostly mass not because that’s neat, although I think it is, but because so far I’ve just roughed in the mass of her hair and that’s what I’ll be working on next. I thought I’d give it a shot with some sculpting software this time.

So thats it for now. Remember Kickstarter!

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, retropolis, interactive story, clockwork book, ray gun gothic, steampunk[/tags]

Work in Progress: the Clockwork Book

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

This is a preview rendering of the scene I’m now working on for a series of non-interactive stories we’ll be seeing at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. Click to embiggify it.

The Clockwork Book is unusually steampunk, for me. It’s a mechanical being that was built quite some time ago, as we measure time in Retropolis, and was designed to use simple, mechanical technology because part of its purpose is to last for a very long time. Here’s a little snippet about the Book:

There are always plenty of stories about the things we never talk about. That’s not a contradiction: it’s probably Quantum Mechanics.

So everyone knows about the Clockwork Book in spite of the fact that no one talks about it.

The people who visit the Book are perplexed, or obsessed, or desperate, and sometimes they’re all three. They Need To Know. And if you Need To Know, it’s maddening that somewhere below your feet lies the Clockwork Book in the midst of its Bookmaking machinery, calmly annotating the very thing you’re after. It preys on your mind. Until one day you slip down the quiet street where a hatch opens onto a shaft that leads far below the city to a tunnel, at the end of which lies the Book.

The Book, as I’ve said, accumulates stories. It does this by trading the stories it knows for new stories. This sounds harmless. In fact, it sounds beneficial. Until you think about it.

Because stories are not neutral. Stories always say something about the person who tells them. They often say more than the teller realizes, and it’s easy to become so wrapped up in the telling that we tell too much.

Everything that the Book learns becomes part of the Book. And the Book grows by trading the stories it knows – to anyone who asks.

Also… a very long time ago the English language decided that the word "spell" could mean two things: the way to form a word, or the way to distort the universe. This decision was not made casually. If you take the point of view that the English language recommends, you begin to see the Book as a very large, ever-growing nexus of words that may someday rip the fabric of reality into tiny quivering shreds.

Of course, the English language is excitable, and it tends toward exaggeration. But still…

Over the decades since the first part of the Clockwork Book collected its first story, people have gradually learned to avoid the Book despite the fact that, in general, we really want to know things. And there must be a reason.

There’s a way to find out for certain, of course: you just have to be willing to ask.

The Book exists to contain stories; it acquires stories by learning new stories; and it shares these stories with anyone who’s willing to trade. So in some ways you might point at the Book and say "Hey! A metaphor!" thinking of things like the Internet itself, or Facebook, or what have you. And although you’d have a point… I’m pretty sure you’d be wrong. The Book is what the Book is.

And for my purposes, at least, the Clockwork Book is the central character I was looking for to stand or, well, squat, anyway, at the center of the linear stories I plan to add to the Thrilling Tales web site. If you’re one of my Kickstarter supporters you’ll know a bit more about how I invented the Book a long time ago, and how I found it again as I rummaged around in my Idea Closet much more recently. And if you’re not one of my Kickstarter backers, well, I’m not telling. So there.

Because I’m just like that. No, that’s not it. I am just like that, of course, but since those good folks have chosen to help me out with the next stage of the Thrilling Tales, I want them to get something nobody else has got. And at the moment, that’s the tale of the Clockwork Book and Me.

So! In my not entirely subtle way, this is a reminder that if you enjoy the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, and you’d like to see more of them – including Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS and the tales of the Clockwork Book – well, have I got a pledge drive for you!

A Clockwork Eye from the Secret Laboratory

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Click the image to see it animate!

I’ve been working on this mechanism – well, it’s a 3D model, so it’s not a real mechanism – for the past few days. In ways that are known only to my Kickstarter backers, this is a part of the next stage at my Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site.

It’s unusually steampunkish for me but that makes sense because this object is just the eye of a mechanical character who’s much older than anything else in Retropolis. A character who was built in the earliest days of the Mad Science we know and love. I added an eyebrow as a backplate for the band drive – and after much agony I figured out how to set the objects up in 3DS Max so that the whole thing animates when you turn its drive wheel.

The iris mechanism here is based on a real, working design that was featured at Boing Boing a few days back. The original forum thread (with many revisions!) is here. My version is based on one of the earliest of them – I wanted to start with something simple before I got all baroque about it. Which I felt was likely.

Anyway what this means is that I’m working maniacally on some new stuff for the Thrilling Tales site. And now… to that I shall return.

“Thrilling Tales” Kickstarter Update and the Fall of a Mighty Monitor

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Mostly because my Kickstarter update has scrolled off the front page of my blog and, well, I just can’t have that… here it is again.

You don’t get much historical perspective here since the image updates while the pledges roll in… but let’s see. My last Kickstarter update here was six days ago. At that time we’d raised almost 20% of the goal – while today we’re at 32%. That’s almost a third of the way, in 22% of the time.

That’s great progress!

As I predicted, though, the traffic at the Thrilling Tales site is tapering off since its incoming links have begun to grow stale. I figure that’ll continue and I’m sure it’ll affect the rate of new pledges.

This is happening alongside my discovery that the eyestrain I’ve been noticing lately has a cause: my Once-Mighty Monitor has entered a new phase in its long, slow decline. A phase in which focus has become a relative thing.

Since a monitor of mine has got to have unusually good specs (contrast, color fidelity, sharpness), I’m now cheering on the Kickstarter project with a whole new level of enthusiasm. Though I hadn’t exactly factored in the cost of a new Mighty Monitor when I launched at Kickstarter.

So: life, lemons, check. Next?

[tags]thrilling tales of the downright unusual, kickstarter, fundraising, illustration, art, raygun gothic, interactive fiction[/tags]