These just in: desktop wallpapers and a screen saver from The Lair of the Clockwork Book, on the Downloads page at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

Because after all these many months I’m down to the final stretch on the story’s illustrations, and I finally have enough pictures to pick and choose for the freebies!

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The Lair of the Clockwork Book will be reaching its conclusion in April. Like Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves, the whole story will be available then as a paperback book (in full color!)

But I’m hoping to release a limited edition hardcover version of The Lair of the Clockwork Book, too.

The hardcover edition will be printed on heavy weight archival paper. It’ll be bound in linen-covered boards with foil stamping on the spine and front cover, a handsome dust jacket and – just like the paperback version – it’ll have 126 full color illustrations in its 130 or so pages.

It’ll be pretty much the bees knees, with its retro bookbinding, a lot like a the kind of beautiful book that was an everyday thing a few decades ago – in those days when we were dreaming about The Future That Never Was. The first time around, I mean.

But this is a Kickstarter funded project: if enough people don’t sign up for the book in advance, it simply won’t happen. We’ve got to raise the whole amount before anyone can get their limited edition copy.

So I’m counting on you, your friends, and even that guy you always avoid at the laundromat to Tell Everybody, and I do mean Everybody, about this spectacular little book that won’t exist unless we make it happen.

I think that it would be just plain tragic if we fell short, and the limited edition hardcover did not happen. If you’re inclined to agree then I hope you’ll rush on over to my Kickstarter page and think about reserving a copy of your very own.

Once upon a time, some books were sold by subscription – in fact the Direct Market for comics works just about exactly that way now. A book would be solicited, and interested readers could sign up to buy one in advance.

Of course the way this differs from the Direct Market is that you’re not reserving a copy from a dealer. Kickstarter’s fundraising engine has become the middleman – but that doesn’t really affect the outcome. If enough of you reserve a copy, the edition will exist. If you don’t, it’ll remain an imaginary, though beautiful, book.

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So The Lair of the Clockwork Book is due to finish its run at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual sometime in April, if I can do the math – which I’ve often shown I can’t – and so this week I’m thinking about its print version.

In fact, I’m working on the print version. I’ve got over 50 pages laid out more or less beautifully, so far.

This is a real joy, compared to the layout for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. The interactive stories have a lot of constraints on page layouts so there’s very little room for the words to breathe. When its sequel is ready, I will probably do a second edition of Brain Thieves because I can see now how I can make some improvements.

But back to The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It is shaping up so very nicely that I’m thinking again about a Kickstarter promotion for a limited edition hardcover, in addition to the softcover book I’ve been planning all along. I think it’d make a very nice little book, with a foil stamped spine and front cover under its stylish dust jacket. The idea’s really growing on me. It would be quite expensive, which is why I mentioned Kickstarter just above.

One ingredient for a successful Kickstarter campaign is an attainable goal. Realistically I can’t be said to have a large, enthusiastic crowd of fans. (No, you’re not in Doctor Cyclops territory or anything, but… you know.) So what I’m thinking about is a very small limited edition hardcover – probably just 100 copies – with any excess funding going to a larger, unnumbered version of the same hardcover book.

There’s even more math involved in planning a Kickstarter campaign and its rewards… so who knows exactly how this would pan out. But that’s what I’m considering.

If I go forward with this it’ll need to start pretty soon. I don’t want to slow down the launch of the softcover book (in March?) if I can help it. Still, the Kickstarter campaign would need its own video, promotions, and a surprising amount of time and attention – judging by my last one.

Time? Attention? I’m not sure where I left those, come to think of it. But it would be so cool…..

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Yep, I shifted the gears of my brain almost on time to return to the final illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

I skinned my fourteen new semi-generic characters – very few of whom turned out to be generic – to their skeletons. I wish I had thirty or forty of them, but when all’s said and done it’s just me here in the Secret Laboratory and, well, I sleep sometimes. I’m not sure what’s causing that.

To further complicate things I’m now working on a CD packaging project for Leslie Fish‘s upcoming Avalon is Risen, from Prometheus Music. I’m happy to be doing some Celtic knotwork on the side again but it’s also a pleasure to do because it’s been twenty-five years, somehow, since I did the cover and illustrated songbook for Leslie’s Cold Iron. It’s nice to see the old neighborhood again.

But as you might expect that makes my schedule for the next month or so even more exciting than it was before.

I’ll be finishing the last couple of dozen Clockwork Book illustrations in this phase. Once those are done I really do have to do some re-evaluation of how Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is running my life – I love working on the stories, and a serial is a necessary part of the site, but the serial’s inflexible schedule has made it very hard for me to complete Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS which – for those of you who remember – was the main focus of Thrilling Tales in the beginnning.

I wouldn’t want to have a hiatus before the next serial starts; but that’s one of several things that could happen once The Lair of the Clockwork Book concludes. And I have some format changes in mind for the next serial.

It may have longer updates that come just once a week, for example, and what I have planned for those updates won’t fit so well into the existing layout of the site. So whatever happens I’ll have a lot to do before you even see the final page of the Clockwork Book. One way or another I just have to be able to set aside the time to work on TWO BRAINS, not to mention any other freelance jobs that come in. And somewhere in there I’ll be laying out the print version of The Clockwork Book, too.

So the short version (too late!) is that The Lair of the Clockwork Book is headed toward completion, although it’s sharing my days with the CD project; that I’ll have at least as much to do while those pages play out for you; and that my serial schedule has been playing hell with TWO BRAINS and everything else. Film at eleven.

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For today only – in what may be a misguided celebration of Pearl Harbor Day – you can get 25% off all of my archival art prints at Retropolis and The Celtic Art Works.

You don’t have to do anything to get the discount except, now that I think of it, ordering an archival print. D’oh.

You do have to do that.

Today is also the final day of a free shipping offer on my T-shirts and hoodies from The Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees: get free Super Saver shipping on a shirt order of $20 or more with the coupon code 2011SuperFree, or blow out all the stops and get free Standard shipping on an order of $50 or more with the coupon code 2011StandardFree.

The shipping offer on shirt orders runs through midnight Mountain Time, while the 25% off sale on archival prints runs a little longer – Midnight, Pacific Time.

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So here are the last of my new Retropolitan men, with their unique morphing faces and slightly less unique clothing that’s made to be easily retextured and modified into a wide variety of parts. My new system for characters is cranking along; even that minor problem I mentioned last time, with the modifiers I used to grow a character’s cowl out of his head, is working fine. I still don’t know why I had problems the first time. The fact is I’d love to keep going with these if it weren’t for the two ominous facts that 1.) I still need to skin all my new characters to their bones; and 2.) I need to get back soon to the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. There are lots of pages queued up in the buffer but I know that this last set is likely to be pretty challenging. I’d like to make an early start. In the meantime I’ve been thinking about the serial that will follow The Clockwork Book. There are some things I’d like to do differently; but those things may not work well with the existing layout of the Thrilling Tales web site. Some of my thoughts may be wrong headed, but if this works out it could mean good things for the print version of that story – which, I think, wants to be a longer form story than The Clockwork Book. Still some things to figure out there; and as always, the frighteningly unfinished Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS is moaning at me from my hard drive. It’s got a really scary moan. Someday I really need to work on just one of these at a time. But I can’t believe that’s going to happen any time soon.

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What began as a frenzied effort to make a bunch of characters that I can use in crowd scenes for both The Lair of the Clockwork Book and The Toaster With TWO BRAINS has unexpectedly turned into a whole new character creation process and, along the way, a whole new generation of character models. I’m excited about this even though I continue to worry about my Thrilling Tales schedule.

Because the object structure of my male heads is different this has meant repeating a lot of the setup work I’ve done for my women. But I’ve also done something new and neat that nearly works as planned – more on that below.

It started during the summer with tasks that I sprinkled in between my Clockwork Book illustrations. I created a series of very low resolution clothing objects and used Mudbox to sculpt them into much higher resolution models. Then I exported them in high and, um, less high versions. I completed the materials and textures on the high resolution models, then baked that texturing and the higher res normals into my medium res objects. (I did this in two different image resolutions, so I could switch between textures depending on how large a character appears in a scene).

Since then I’ve been working on new character heads that use morph targets for their expressions. More importantly, though, I’ve been working on the process for creating those heads so that it’ll be much easier to make new ones now, and the results should be much better.

A morphing character head consists of a base object – the head in a neutral state – and a bunch of other variations on it with expressions or other changes. So long as the structure of all these heads is exactly the same you can dial up one expression or another on the neutral head. In effect you have a single head that you can vary as needed.

Some of the things I’m doing involve changes to the objects. The simplest of those is lowering their resolution. Now, making changes to morphing objects is extremely tricky. You have two choices: either apply those changes to the neutral head after the morphing modifier – which is perfectly safe – or apply the exact same changes to every version of the head before the morphing modifier. Some modeling changes just can’t ever work on the raw targets. Some work most of the time. Some seem to work all of the time. As I work on my modifiers, I have to test them repeatedly. And it’s also important that these changes will work in the same way on every new head I make.

But the results are worth it: ideally, I can create any male character head and apply the exact same changes to it. After all that initial work what I have is a much more streamlined system to use over and over again.

Like I said, polygon reduction was the main thing I was interested in – but as of this morning I have a usable system for doing something completely different.

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