Among my other wastes of time these days, I've gotten bitten by the Persistence of Vision bug again. I've been playing with POV since version 0.5 in 1992 and it's been a fun ride. Unlike most 3D software POV is basically a ray-tracing engine controlled by scripts. In other words, it's like programming. There are GUI modellers that support POV, but I've only used one once, for the beads in the Mardi Gras flyer on zycha.com.
Anyhow, I've been wanting to do Bender for a long time, because besides being one of the best characters from the late lamented Futurama, he's also very simple, geometrically.
I'm still mad at Fox for cancelling Futurama, which by Season 3 was consistently better than The Simpsons, which has been good, but not great, for the last 3 or 4 years. (The 16th season in particular has been very spotty (some it has been very good, but there are more lame episodes than usual), and from the looks of it, it's going to be the shortest season ever. And is it just me, or has the quality of the artwork gone down a bit?). Among their line-up of about 4 really good shows and another couple dozen that are mostly stupid and/or horrible, can't they have room for a show that is smart, funny and creative? They brought back Family Guy, fer cryin' out loud, and the only thing even remotely funny about that show is the Dad, and he's a complete rip-off of Homer Simpson. Meanwhile, American Idol, the show about mostly ugly people who mostly can't sing, gets an audience in the tens of millions.
Life's unjust, I tells ya...
Um, I'm rambling. Here are some Bender pics. I want to add some props like a beer bottle and cigar, but to do that, I'll have to change his pose. I found quite a few 3D Benders on-line, but in every case, even though some of the artwork was very good, the proportions were usually way off, or the details were all wrong. I tried to get the details as close as possible, although you will notice the lines on his arms and legs aren't there. As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I will.
I also recently viewed the "How to Draw Bender" on one of the Futurama DVDs and discovered that Bender, like all of Matt Groening's characters, is supposed to have an overbite. Shock and dismay! I haven't made a change to reflect this, but if you are interested, here's the source code for Bender so you can stick him in your own scene.
2 comments:
It's a shame we couldn't get more out of you at Battlefield for the Warlords Battlecry Series. You've obviously got tons of talent, my friend!
BookofJ
St. Povis:
Well, here's why:
1. I could never get an answer from anyone as to how I could get the latest source. I only have the original source release before it was modded.
2. The editing, etc, for the graphical resources seems overly complex and I haven't been willing to attack it, given the sparse documentation I could find.
3. Basically, modding Warlords is still something I could be interested in. I spend some time studying the code and think it's not bad. However, there seems to be exactly zero activity with respect to WBC modding, and I don't see it as being a one-man job. I've posted several times to the forums and have gotten no responses whatsoever.
If any of the these things can be fixed, I'd love to hear differently.
Rick
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