This is a concept piece for my huge, looming, and intimidating comics project, “Empire State Patrol”. Which I think will take about as long to finish as the cathedral at Chartres. Go on, look it up. I’ll still be here.

There’ll be a common layout for all ten covers, which I think will be pretty much what we see here, and I’ve added an illustration for a scene in the second chapter. Since this is the cover for issue #2. I’m probably not really done with it, but finishing things like this makes me feel like I might be getting something done. Silly, silly me.

That’s Jake Rothman up on the rock, Marco Lippi down below, and Clay Hooper out back. They used to be construction workers. Now they’re rocket pilots. Life’s just crazy that way.

Technorati Tags: empire state patrol, comics, comic book, graphic novel, sci fi, science fiction, retro futuristic, dieselpunk, retrofuturism, rockets, buck rogers, flash gordon, dan dare

Here’s a public service poster from the Future That Never Was: the Retropolis Civilian Conservation Corps’ TREES FOR TOMORROW program endeavors to replace all the trees we foolishly chopped down before we realized that we needed them.

Under the watchful eye of a Corps member, even an inexperienced robot is able to plant a new, living sapling out in the wilds beyond the wind farms and thereby make his own investment in breathable air for Tomorrow. Which he won’t need to breathe, of course – being a robot – but that’s just proof of his selfless dedication to a good cause.

This sprung up (if anything that took this long can be said to have sprung) out of my thinking about how Retropolis can do better than we’ve done not only when it comes to flying cars and faithful robots, but in making sure our planet stays a nice place to fly our rockets around in. I’m ditching the worst mistakes of the retro future (highways? cars?) and trying to reimagine it into something that makes a lot more sense than what we’ve actually done. So far.

One of the things I like best about the future is that there’s still plenty of it, after all.

There’s an archival print and there will be a poster quality print – once a bug in my printer’s online system is resolved, so I can make it available.

Technorati Tags: retropolis, trees for tomorrow, public service announcement, robot, retro future, dieselpunk, science fiction, reforestation, wind power

Big-brained Andy Murdock has gone mad, I tell you, mad! with a deep discount on Automatron, his enormously powerful character animation system for 3DS Max (version 8 or later). It’s a system he designed based on what he needed for his ongoing film project Lots of Robots and it’s chock full of useful features and subtle enhancements.

I was one of the beta testers for the system and although I’m not the smartest tester in the world I was excited by the way it works.

Automatron uses a custom character rig that’s controlled through Maxscript. Once you’ve skinned your character to the rig you can use the Automatron controls to create custom walk and run cycles, pose all or part of a character, load and save any of those settings, and apply post-processing adjustments (like “Harryhausen”, a simulated stop motion effect). There are loads of options for additional IK targets and IK blending.

But wait! There’s more!

Automatron also has a crowd control system that’s been tested with up to 500 characters, and can animate characters moving across surfaces that are also animated. Now how much would you pay?

Normally you’d pay $149.00, which isn’t a bad deal, but through April 30th Andy’s dropped this to the low, low price of $49 – and although Automatron doesn’t require a license on a render farm’s nodes, the program can be licensed on two separate machines.

And if you haven’t seen Lots of Robots, well, you should, you slacker. The DVDs include Max tutorials for many of the techniques and effects he uses.

Technorati Tags: computer graphics, character animation, 3ds max, automatron, lots of robots, andy murdoch, walk cycle, crowd animation, plugin, maxscript

Mad science! Sleepwalking! Drowning Fish! Helpful Flies!

Welcome to the mad dreaming world of Halbtraum, a short animated film by Marco Jeuring and Tobias Wüstefeld.

…and there’s a “Making Of” short, too.

High res, Divx versions here

Low res, Youtube versions:
Halbtraum
“Making Of”

Technorati Tags: Halbtraum, computer animation, computer graphics, short film, sleepwalking, mad scientist, drowning fish

In the past week or so I’ve seen an ice storm (my first, and pretty interesting to see), a snowstorm, some power outages and an internet connection that was up and down and up and down… and so on. So while I haven’t posted here, I was busy – I’ve wrapped up my six-weeks-long work on this retrofuturistic city picture, then discovered that there was a t-shirt and even a clock design in it, and now that I’m predictably online again I’ve added those to my online shops in nearly every way it can be added.

By “nearly” I mean that although it’s now available as an archival print, I don’t yet have a poster quality version of it up. There’s a bug in the printer’s system that’s preventing me from making that available in a standard framing size. Once that’s sorted, there will be a poster too.

I didn’t expect any part of that large rendering to turn up on t-shirts, but I found that there was a pretty nifty shirt hidden away in there. So in the long run, it’s become an archival print, a greeting card, a clock (!) and a whole collection of lovely and talented shirts.

The name I finally settled on for the picture is “The Clouds Will Soon Roll By”. That’s the title of a popular song from 1932 which I first heard as part of the soundtrack for Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven.

I think I’ve got a couple more of these in my head, about ready to force their way out in the near future; we’ll see!

Technorati Tags: the clouds will soon roll by, world of tomorrow, if you lived here you’d be home now, retro futurism, monorail, train, robot, rocket, metropolis, retropolis