Last week, a magical Scrabble board intervened in a fight between Bear and Scottie before the wielding of the mystic forces each command could tear the Monopoly board entirely apart. Seeing they would not listen to reason, as a last resort, the Scrabble oracle sent the two pieces through a dimensional rift, where they would learn to work together — or perish.
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Since this (and part of the next) comic take place in a computer-generated dungeon, I figured this would be a good opportunity to practice lighting and set design. When I’m photographing on the Monopoly board, I try for weird angles just because I have that freedom. Here, it’s one lighting model, one set, and everything had to be acted out by the pieces.
I had to model the 12-sided die, the dodecahedron. This was REALLY not as easy as I thought it would be. After trying for a couple of hours to figure out the math for the twelve FACES (as opposed to the vertices or edges), I just went to the web and found a mesh. I was out of time by that point, so wasn’t able to put numbers on the faces.
The last actor had to be the monster they’d fight. I went to my box of toys and found a Rattata back from when the kids were into Pokemon. PERFECT! Plus — killing rats, right?
My sister gave me a huge statue of a knight for Christmas. I looked at this on Christmas Day and wondered just what in heck I was going to do with a foot high pewter KNIGHT?
Oh. Hello, Lord Belgian!
The last thing I wanted to work on was the balloons and lettering. They are usually pretty awful, so this time I wanted to do them as if I cared, WHICH I DO, so that’s a good reason to make it LOOK like I do.
I (accidentally) discovered that you can fit text to a shape, something probably I should have found out when I started all this. So, from now on, you’ll get decent looking text balloons.
Unless I get ambitious and do Oracle Part III during the week, I’ll be a week late for it, since I will be away Sunday through Wednesday next week.
By Sigmar’s sizzling sausage! Lord Belgian’s a big lad, eh?
Just think how high those dungeon ceilings must be! They must have to pay a FORTUNE to heat the place.
Another wonderful addition. I was just thinking about it too and wondering if you had another update published. 🙂 My only criticism is the font used for the dice was VERY hard to read. Even after magnifying the browser much larger that font is hard on the eyes. Really hard on the eyes.
Really? Hmm… I have been lately wondering if the text in AiM is TOO BIG just because I have poor eyesight, and I am making it convenient to read for myself, so I’ve been experimenting with making the text smaller. I agree, though, that the die’s font is not quite right. I’ll try something different next week. Thanks for the feedback! I thought doing a webcomic based on just captioning pictures with speech balloons would be so easy, but every new week I think I learn something, but mostly the goal of having a professional looking and enjoyable comic seems just as far away.
Even just having a well-lit, with white light, shadowless set would be such a victory.