I am starting graphics work on a female Midnight Mansion tentatively titled Search for Jack. I've pretty much finished the Jill character but I need opinions on the hair. Red or Brown?

Thanks all,

Joe B

---

Red. She looks more like Jack then. To make her look even more like Jack, put a girl's "jack suite" on her.  ;D

Definitely red. I'm a sucker for redheads. :D

I'm more of a blonde person myself:P, but red looks good for jack's sister. will she have new enimies? will they be evil lip gloss as medusas? toxic perfume for zapper beams??? ;D ;) :P :D ;D

joeb wrote on 25.02.2007 at 04:06:03:

I am starting graphics work on a female Midnight Mansion tentatively titled Search for Jack. I've pretty much finished the Jill character but I need opinions on the hair. Red or Brown? Thanks all, Joe B

Absolutely a redhead. They are the best.

Roger on the sucker for redheads, that's why I married one.....
Maybe I'll put up a version of Jill as a blond. Gotta be fair here...

Yes, there'll be new critters and since I haven't started designing them yet I'm open to suggestions, except for piranha which are definitely in.


Joe B

OK, here we go:


Red - Brown - Blonde - Pop Star Rehab



Joe B


sorry, couldn't resist

jb

---

Red with blonde stripes!

Yeah, take the Britney one.  ;D

Mmmmh... Reminds me of Spice girls a little bit ;) Maybe the blonde one.

How about a brunette with cherry or blueberry highlights?

Definately the red Jill. And the Britney Jill is totally awesome. Major props!

;D 8-) ::)

Don't make her wear the suit thats on her! Make her wear a jack-suite for girls!  ;D

Wingy,

How many brothers and sisters wear the same thing?

Here's an animation based on a red haired Jill at the correct size, 64X64. Since it's in Flash format you need to shrink the browser window to see it without pixellation.


M&J

---

That's kinda... well... I don't like it... She should wear a adventure suite like Jack's! His is a adventure suit!

She does seem a little ill-equipped for tomb raiding. She's got more of a cat burglar thing going. Part of what makes Jack so likable is that he's kind of dumpy and dorky. If his sister is too sexy, she'll just be another silly video game bombshell on an extreme mission for marketable awesomeness. I'd at least give her giant glasses.

The run animation looks fantastic, though.

Yes. We need a "sister" that wants to carry a rugsack!

Point taken Psychotronic....

I've been searching the boards for the software I'm using, DAZ3D for morphs that will allow me to make her shorter and dumpier and definitely LESS sexy.
FYI Daz3D uses geometric meshes to create and animate meshes. Jill is actually the free character mesh AIKO3. Morphs are modifications that can be done to the meshes. Several of the other character meshes have really nice morphs that allow you to scale there bodies to dumpy or fat or skinny or emaciated, etc. What I'm proud of with the animation is the smoothness of the motion. When I get Jills body right I can apply the transforms to that body. By the way I did the transforms in Poser 6 walk designer.

Which brings up another point. I've got a very spiffy backpack mesh which I'd like to use with her but there's no way to change to a set of graphics that have or don't have a backpack.

Joe B

Joe,

Have you seen Zbrush? It may not be suitable for your Jill character but something you may be interested in further down the road. It's like...sculpting in 3d...with pixels. Here are some links if you're interested:

Pixologic homepage:

http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/home/home.php

Zbrush forum:

http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/community/gallery/gallery-main.php

ZBrush Central / forum & artist galleries:

http://206.145.80.239/zbc/index.php

Wow, that app. looks impressive! But I don't think Joe would want to spend $500 just to get a good Jill!  ;)

Thanks Scout. I already have it around somewhere on a machine. With my MacBookPro I'm up to 10 machines (11 if you count the Mac 512Ke that I occasionally start just to make sure it still works). 6 Macs, 4 Windows. Like most of the software I have I use it for specific things, MM not being one of them.
But thanks for the thought!!!

Joe B

As I said I use DAZ a lot. Here a pic by me ( an idea for Search for Jack) demonstarting what it's capable of.

---

Wow, Joe - that is amazing.

Wingy, Compared to most of the graphics applications I use for work, $500.00 is not at all expensive. It has quite a learning curve, though. Thought I'd post my first attempt - can you guess who it is supposed to be? (Bearing in mind that I haven't learned how to create hair yet. Or hats :o)

---

Here is another suggestion. Jill should be older then Jack, his aunt or something, with glasses and handbag, like miss Marple! She is a smart lady!

Scout, that looks like Patrick Stewart. :P

joeb wrote on 26.02.2007 at 22:48:57:

As I said I use DAZ a lot. Here a pic by me ( an idea for Search for Jack) demonstarting what it's capable of.

Did she just whack a dinosaur with her hovercraft??? She's an ecological disaster! Ban her from the adventurer's board!

Pretty nice-lookin' picture, by the way.

Psychotronic,

See... Violent minds! If you look closely you'll see the dino on the ground has a tranquilizer dart in him, not a big hole. And she's holding a dart gun. The rudders on the hovercraft also have TS on them for Time Search. She just thought she saw some human tracks and wanted to investigate.

Wingy
I have a software circuit simulator that I paid almost $5,000 for when I was doing micro-controller design. National instruments LabView was around $3,400. But of course that's when I was doing pure consultation and could write it off at the end of the year. Our company car was an NSX. But that was many years and an open heart surgery ago.


I also immediately thought Patrick Stewart. Guess not....

Joe B

Oops. My bad. Mama dino still seems upset about it.

And that is clearly a bald Harrison Ford.

LOL. Thank you, Psychotronic. Like I said, I haven't yet learned how to do hair or hats(!) in Zbrush. Anyway, didn't mean to hijack the thread. And I appreciate the feedback, either way.

AHA, I sense the method to your hijacking the thread. Your trying to get me to come up with a bald Harrison Ford looking Jack.
I get it now.

Scout,

No worries, just fun, but now I've got ask. Who is it?

Joe B

Scout,

AND...

if you haven't taken a look at DAZ I'd suggest you do.
www.daz3d.com

Hair is pretty easy to do and the facial meshes can be manipulated pretty easily. Oh yeah, best part is the software is free and it's cross platform. There are also some VERY cool tools you can get for it. Like Mimic which allows you to either type text in a plain or phoenetic format, tell it what character you're using and it will manipulate the character's facial mesh to look like it actually speaking the words. You can also tie expressions to the text stream, so you can get raised eye brows, creased forehead, etc.  There are also plug-ins that let you do some basic particle animation. And you can't beat the price of the base software! When I get home tonight I'll post some other examples.

Joe B

Wow you'd all spend all that money... you probably have a bigger income then me... only $31 per week here!  :-[ Anyways... I've only used Photoshop and Color It!™ 2.3 mostly for my art. For my music, I used abit of Garage Band and mostly soundtrack loops. And the screens I drew with my dad's nifty mouse-pen pad.  ::) For my older works, like my movies, I used Color it! 2.3 and movie player. (Movie Player is a older version of Quicktime) I've grown into Color it, if that's the right words to say it with.  :)

Your trying to get me to come up with a bald Harrison Ford looking Jack.

Er...no, I'm not. I wouldn't want you to use my model for anything, since it is an ongoing project for me, in order to continue learning ZBrush. I shouldn't have posted it. (And yes, it is Harrison Ford. I've explained the bald part several times now).

We were discussing graphics software and I thought that ZBrush should be included in the conversation. I guess posting a screen clip doesn't show that it is a 3D program, and that models can be viewed at all angles.

Sorry if my post confused things.

No no no no no. Your post was totally appropriate. Joe was just kidding about the bald Harrison Ford thing, and the hijacking thing, too. We're all good. And the fact that I knew it was Harrison Ford almost immediately should tell you that the modeling job was right on. To everybody else: the mouth, guys. Look at the mouth.

Scout,

Psychotronic is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT!!!!!

I was ONLY joking. I appreciate your input to the thread. I been involved in the computer industry for longer than I can almost remember and during that time when I was a dealer and consultant I got an absolute TON of free software, most of it graphics stuff because I was teaching digital video,so there is a lot I've already seen but as time goes on there's some I haven't.

Wow I guess I should wrap my joking posts in a
<sarcastic humor>
yada yada yada, blah, blah, blah
</sarcastic humor>

PLEASE post any sort of graphics in my posts that'd you like. The idea of a forum is to be a place to present ideas to others interested in similar things. I didn't recognize it as Harrison Ford because I thought he had a scar from a car accident and didn't see any scar. DUHHH, it was Mark Hamil who banged up his corvette before Empire Strikes Back which was the reason for the scene with the abominable snowman or whatever it was.

I will say this though; the earlier post by Rose got me to thinking, hmmmmm, a little old lady running around nasty little dogs, scratchy fat cats and doing Mary Poppins jumps with an umbrella. And paying tribute to Wingy in advance, flat unshaded cartoon graphics. THAT could be fun. And maybe I could sneak it in when Matt's not watching, hee,hee,hee.....

Joe B

Hey Scout,

(or anyone else interested in digital animatronics)

Here's a quick and dirty look at what you can do with DAZ and Mimic.
DANGER DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!!!
I only had an Australian female voice loaded. This is in no way ANY TYPE OF STATEMENT about the gentler sex. I just threw this together quickly and did no editing of the sound file so the voice is a little choppy. But I think you can get a general idea of what the software is capable of. Mimic costs around $40 and as I mentioned DAZ is free. The most expensive thing was the AT&T voice that I used. I think the package with 2 or 3 voices was around $250.

Joe B

---

joeb wrote on 27.02.2007 at 10:01:23:

...scratchy fat cats...

Actually I have been secretly referring to the snakes as "Cassiopee", which is the name of my cat. Her main activity is just sitting around or sleeping  ;)

But she's not scratchy. For cat standards, at least, maybe ::).

Hey Joe,

Thanks so much for the DAZ info. Am hoping to get the time to have a good look at that.

Here's a fun animation link:

www.puzzledust.com

Click on "Pete1" animation for a chuckle.

Here's one of the background screens from Search For Jack.

The castle will be the contest mansion (Jack Malone Ghosthunter) that Jack gets lost in. Have the whole Ghosthunter mansion ready for whatever Vern will supply. New critters, old critters, whatever. As long as the transparencies are there I can work with it.

@aquaMat, see what I meant about the snow?

Joe B

---

Jesus, Joe....that looks absolutely breathtaking !!

(It doesn't look anywhere as good in my mansion.....   ;)).

So, you are really already preparing your contest mansion ?! (Maybe I should start too!!)
Even if you don't have the expansion pack yet....and don't know what new & interesting things might be possible with it ?
(That was my excuse why I hadn't startet yet to even think about my contest mansion. I remember -when building TMF 1- I kept thinking how much better it could be, if -say- the elevator feature was already available etc...... and I shortly thought about whether I should postpone TMF until the expansion pack arrives.....  but as its release-date is still so uncertain at this point of time I decided to do it as it is!)

But I guess you're right.... it can only help to start thinking about it, and maybe designing the basic room structure or something sooner rather than later !!

Quote:

it can only help to start thinking about it, and maybe designing the basic room structure or something sooner rather than later

My point exactly. When  I said "whatever" it becomes easier to do if you're just replacing rather than starting from scratch. Plus this mansion (and hopefully future ones) will be using a new design which I sort of tested with HS. If you look at the picture closely you'll see a path up to the castle. That'll be implemented with the stuff I sent you, modified of course, so players don't go snow blind (although that's an interesting idea too maybe for a future mansion). Plus you can map out the play beforehand so all you're really doing is working on the graphics and since the structure id done you have more time to get the details right.

Just my "new" philosophy. Thanks for the comment though and I'm still waiting to see what you came up with.

Joe B

How many rooms have you completed, Joe? I've done ... about 30 rooms of Castle Basano. It's in the perfect shape of a castle, with two towers on each side, and a keep in the middle. It seems that just the castle isn't enough... so I made a underground place to get across the moat.  :) I've already build an outline of the castle with bricks, and added the bricks inside the castle, ladders and badguys. Working on backgrounds and other stuff now.

Which one?

JMG - 72 rooms, waiting for 1.08 graphics

SFJ - 126 rooms about half done with custom graphics, waiting for expansion pack/critters. I did finally find a Jill I like, sort of powderpuff with the big hair but Jack like body. Doing the animations will be a little challenge and I'll probably get in some trouble with the idle animation, you know how JAC does the robot, she'll be doing something different.

DOM II - ~60 rooms done on paper - structure about halfway done on those, Matt is still putting the design together

HS2 - ideas on paper

Unnamed Super Maze - 75 rooms, structure is done but won't go any further until the expansion pack because I WILL need the multi-room platforms.

Suggestion Wingy; just about all castles have an underground section with dungeons for enemies of the owners of the castle. That should be good for 20 - 30 rooms.

Joe B

Er... incase you haven't seen the screenshot of the Castle Basano starting room, YOU START IN THE DUNGEON!!  :o ;) The dungeon 10 rooms, castles about 20 - 30 rooms. Then after you beat the castle, you find yourself outside the main gate with the draw-bridge closed. So Jack must go underground and under the lava moat to escape! Then still, he must go through the guardtower and over the wall...  :P

I'd change the dungeon entrance to an secret underground cave entrance and then ADD a dungeon under the castle. Again it's your mansion but if I was looking to add rooms that's how I'd do it.
FWIW

Joe B

I'm making the mansion, I don't need your opinion. But that would be a good idea... I'll look into it. But you start infront of a open dugeon cell, like Jack just opened it INSIDE the castle's dungeon! I'm pretty sure I'll just add a underground zone under the lava moat...

Joe- I'm going to work on the custom graphics for my next mansion, the haunted music house, but... When are you going to realease the 2nd tutorial? I need that to make custom sprites unless there's an easy way to do it...

Quote:

I'm making the mansion, I don't need your opinion.

Quote:

It seems that just the castle isn't enough

Wasn't an opinion just a suggestion based on the second comment above about not having enough rooms. And I did say


Quote:

Again it's your mansion

Hmmm, but I did think this was a SFJ thread.

@sam skelton,

What do you need help with? You can PM or email me and I'll do what I can to help you but at this point I hadn't planned on doing another tutorial because I don't know exactly what the new MM is going to look like and why write something that has nothing to do with the new software.

Depending on what you want to do there's a certain level of difficulty so none of it is "easy", but there are some things which are REALLY difficult, like replacing Jack. Even there you can do it the simpler way by just copying the positions of Jack's body and putting another character on top of the same positions or you can do a full reanimate of your own character like I did in Dominator with JAC. And even there I had to use some of the Jack "standard" poses. It really depends on:

1. How far do you want to go with your changes
2. What software tools you have
3. How much time you have
4. Your level of skill and artistic talent

That doesn't mean you can't come up with some outstanding creations if you don't have all of the above. Although I have come up with what I think are some neat things my actual artistic talent is very low. I often don't have enough time to do what I want and as I am finding out there are times when my skills with the tools are lacking. To overcome these things I look at commercial artwork and see what makes it stand out to me. The time issue is addressed by letting Matt do a lot of the mansion content and he's starting to not get frustrated working by himself on the computers. And finally although I do have WAY too much software I have found that getting on forums is a terrific way to find easier, faster and better ways to do things which in the end produces MUCH better results.

I have to be gone for a couple of hours but if you send me something I'll try to get back as soon as I can.
Does that work for you?

joeb

@Sam:
I can tell you this: Making the Ted character was not easy. I had to make my own grid with black lines, and make sure ALL the "teds" in the picture where in the same place. Then they don't move back and forth and up and down abit when Ted is climbing a ladder, or doing push-ups. If its off by a pixel, I'll to go all the way back into ResEdit, get the image, copy it to Color It! 2.3 and change it. It takes awhile, but I think its really worth it.  ;)

Good point Wingy. Keeping characters aligned from frame to frame is VERY important. I might have to get a copy of Color It and see if I can give some pointers with that application. I am VERY Photoshop centric and have used it from PS 1.0 But it is VERY pricey and may be out of the range of a lot of people. I also do a lot of my animation in Toon Boom Studio because they I can overlay multiple images and onion skin them to make sure they align.

Joe B

Color it! 2.3 is freeware! Here is a .zip file of it. :p My dad is a photographer so I have photoshop. I just installed it on my computer with his serial stuff and CD.  ::) Anyways.... I never used Toon Boom Studio... better look at it...

BTW: !!! THIS IS MY 500th POST! Celebration! In 1 post I'm an expodition leader!  :) [smiley=birthdays.gif][smiley=birthdays.gif][smiley=birthdays.gif]

---

OK. When I looked on the ColorIt site their latest version was 4.5 and they charge for it.

????????

Joe B

Wingy, You use it on macos 9 right? or is there a version for macos x?

rose,

the 4.5 version is for OSX. It's 59.95 I think.....

Joe B

Sadly, you do need classic. But I'm sure you can find another app. that does the same work. But I don't think the OS X version trail is available.... you have to buy it! But if you have OS 9, go ahead and use this!  :) BTW: Toon Boom Studio looks abit complicated... and it costs money I don't have...  :-[ :-/ :'(

Gimp is free! I have not used it but you could try.

And here is a gift for Wingy. The word gift has other meanings in swedish; poison or married. Here it is meant in the english way!

---

Color it! 3.0!!! :exclamation :exclamation  :o I've seached for this version but never found it! Thanks!!!!
[smiley=tekst-toppie.gif] [smiley=vrolijk_26.gif] [smiley=vrolijk_1.gif] [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]  [smiley=dankk2.gif]

You're wellcome! HAven't time to use it, playing MM instead ;)

This is way more features! Like hold down shift and click somewhere and click somewhere els, it makes a line between them! It's more like PhotoShop!  :)

As I have no classic environment installed on my G5, I couldn't use the ColorIt 2.x that Wingy had supplied....
...so I dared to look into the GIFT (even if it wasn't for me, ha ha).

Do you need to have an earlier version installed, to be able to use ColorIt 3 ('cause it says ColorIt Updater) ??

And is ColorIt 3 for Mac OS X at all ??

Color it 4.x is for mac os X. But it costs $49.99 USD! I didn't have classic on this computer until I copyed the System Folder from my dad's G5 to here. (System is os X, System Folder is OS 9) If you have Classic on your G5, copy it over to your System Folder onto your other computer! But you can't restart in OS 9, (like the computer is COMPLETELY os 9) You'd need two hard drives in my computer, which most computer's don't. (you'd have to buy another)  :P

No. you need 4.5! But there is Gimp, or demo of Easy Draw. I dont know if they'll do what you want. I have them but haven't used them yet.

Can I have another gift of those apps?  :P ::)