Wet Paint

It has been quite a while since the gremlins showed up on social media and if you are here on the website you might be wondering what had happened.  Did the gremlins quit?  Did I run out of material?  Perhaps something worse??

No, we have been under construction!

I have been attempting to learn the 3D application, Blender and incorporate it into the Pesky Gremlins Comic strip. The last several postings, which only appeared on the website, chronicle some of the effort that has gone into trying to get Blender to create images as if I drew them.

Here is a quick recap of our construction process. Drawing all of the backgrounds that appear in Pesky Gremlins had grown tiresome. New backgrounds were taking a great deal of time. Even more time than writing and drawing the gremlins themselves. I was aware of the 3D application, Blender (as I had tried to learn it before) and thought that I could possibly get it to do line drawings of some of the stuff that appears in the backgrounds like the garage clutter, the cars, or the interior of Elmo’s house. I also (wrongly) thought that I could learn how to do all of that in a month or two. I underestimated how long it would take to get through Blender’s initial learning curve. This was my own fault as I wandered through the technical wilderness of 3D modelling. However, while I wander in the vast technical wilderness, I learned that Blender was capable of doing many more things than I had originally envisioned. I therefore, ran into what the business world calls “scope creep”. In other words I wanted to add and do a lot more with Blender than I had initially conceived. This, of course, added more and more time needed to learn 3D modelling and that which goes with it. There are quite a few steps that go between this: …and this Most of the steps can be seen here http://www.peskygremlins.com/comic/pesky-gremlins-comic-714-looking-good/

While all of the things that I was learning were great, the time that the strip was not appearing kept adding up. With that in mind, a compromise seemed to be in order. The gremlins will now be showing up on Wednesdays while the work continues to get them moved into the digital realm.

Here are a few of the things that I would like to accomplish in the future:

• Complete the garage scene
• Create poseable models of the main characters
• Model some of the scenes that appear frequently (Computer Room, TV Room, etc…)

Here are a few shots of the Lucas model that is now useable, but still needs a bit of work on both the model itself and the underlying rigging: Check back here on Wednesdays to see how things are progressing.