The Aardvaark

Discovered an interesting web service today - ToonDoo They allow you to create your own webcomic by dragging and dropping various components via a pretty easy to use web interface. What I came up with appears at the end of this post.

My cartoon is not a commentary on America or the Bush government or politics in general :p It’s actually about something which happened a couple of days ago in a mailing list I was on.

The thing is, I think that most people take that kind of behaviour for granted and don’t see the harm in it. We punish small children to stop them from doing something bad. Sometimes we spank them. We see nothing wrong. In fact, we’ll come up with all those old truisms like "spare the rod and spoil the child". But what are we actually teaching the kid? If we don’t explain things to them, then we are simply teaching them that it’s OK to physically intimidate somebody else.

And don’t get me started on how we carry on this kind of behaviour after we (supposedly) reach adulthood. I’ll let the cartoon speak on my behalf :p

My Cartoon

Of comics and cars

Still working on the idea of developing a comic based on the characters from "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" There were a few things that I needed to put together first though - for one thing, I wanted a landscape which reflected the turmoil and the destruction of the bygone eras. This was fairly easy to do.

Then I needed a hover car. I created one by modifying an existing model of a sports car and while I did like it, it didn’t have quite the futuristic look that I would have liked. Then I found another model which provided just the look I wanted but it had some other issues with how the final setting looked. A few tweaks and changes later, that too was fixed.

I thought I was ready for my final test render before I introduced my characters but that was where I hit the biggest snag of all :p And it was something rather simple as well - the road. I have two of my test renders further below (one showing the sportscar hovercar and the other one the later version I used) and if you look at the yellow hovercar picture, you will notice that the road is really smooth. I didn’t like that. Besides that, it wasn’t really following the contour of the land, which was rather tumultuous This was because I wasn’t sure how to do the road in 3D.

I’d first tried a road which was a modeled object but it would not (as I mentioned above) fit to the contour of the land. Not only that, in some places, the road would actually be several feet above the land - though I’m not really sure if you can see that in the image :p I spent several days trying out different techniques to get the road to lie on the land instead of under it or above it or through it and finally, met with success today. The second hovercar shows the results.

So, onwards and upwards! Next, my adventures with creating characters

Sportscar Hovercar

Futuristic Hovercar

A horse with no name

I’ve been playing with the idea of self-publishing "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" again. In considering the process and what needed to be done, I also thought about doing the cover myself. Of course, me being the kind of person I am, thinking about doing the cover meant that I went overboard on the whole idea and started collecting 3D objects and images and meshes and what not even before I had actually figured out what I was going to do.

In the middle of all of this (and learning about various 3D software to boot), I thought, "Hey, why not do a comic strip about Normal and Johnny?" In case you’re wondering, Normal and Johnny are two of the characters from "Honest" :p There was only one problem, I hadn’t really gotten everything together for doing the comic yet. Being the impatient type, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. So instead of a comic about Normal and Johnny, I came up with a cartoon which involved (of all things) a crash test dummy and a scorpion

I made two versions of the cartoon - one for Simon Haynes, because he’s such a great guy, about his Hal Spacejock and the other my original idea for the cartoon. As to whether it’s any good, you can judge for yourself :p

Cartoon - Hal Spacejock version

Cartoon - original version