Dixie Puzzle

[Jeff]

I tried out the new jigsaw featuring Whistling Dixe, and this one took me a while (and I did the art!). Hopefully this is what the members who wanted more challenging puzzles are looking for. Hope you like it!

-Jeff
ICQ - 139841542
Yahoo Messenger (Voice Chat/Webcam) - tempusfugit9
_________________
There are no stupid questions - only stupid people.


JusticeBabes.com Support Staff

[Phaderus]

Yes, this is what us puzzle nuts are looking for. Good job, and keep them coming. Even though there were a lot of pieces with only one solid color, this puzzle was still easier than the one with all the columns and fountains.

[hollow]

I may have just had too much coffee last night - I finished it in about half an hour. Even so, excellent composition. For a while I was wondering if the pieces were flippable, since it looked like two different pictures.

Meanwhile, I have come to the conclusion that I don't like her top. The cutouts of the blue suit are too busy IMHO. And it's a bit too shiny. Who wears rubber any more? You'd show up too well on radar. I would go for either a cloth (a la Superior Girl's original white painted-on top) or metallic (Silver Stalker) (yeah, you can see me, I don't care, I'll still kick your ass) texture. I also liked Dixie's original costume.

The belt and hat look really good, though. Maybe a vest? Mmm, matching vest.

[Jeff]

The original concept for Dixie was painted in Photoshop, and when it came time to re-produce her in 3D, I had to come up with a model for the costume. A painted version would take forever to reproduce in comic panels, and look a little different every time. Some of the initial character designs we did were for gathering ideas for the site, but hopefully in the future I'll be able to match them a little better.

Still working on the new south-western colors for Spreading Eagle, trying to get them to look right.

Hope everybody likes the Halloween splash featuring Shanghai. Pumpkin Pie anyone?

-Jeff
_________________
There are no stupid questions - only stupid people.


JusticeBabes.com Support Staff

[hollow]

Yeah, I remember you talking about the painted costumes several months ago. It's really too bad you can't easily make 3D models of them. I like every single one of the paint-on outfits for the seven girls in the banner at the top. Especially Suzy Homewrecker, in fact - the hair, the choker, and the bandeau just click.

How is Dixie's current blue suit modeled? Is it a texture laid on top of the body? That can't be right. It sticks out a bit. Seems to hug contour points, but hover slightly "above" them. The cutout pattern looks arbitrary. If so, I'd think that's a good thing, since it means Dixie's original uniform would be easy to model by trimming a tight "skin" to create the desired look. Possibly even adding the yellow fringe around it. The red swatch on the waist would be harder, but maybe the dynamic cloth feature would make it tractable.

Meanwhile, the original costume has this nice soft shading that makes it look like cloth.

It should be clear that I'm talking out of my arse, of course, since I don't have access to Poser. Most of what I know comes from look around renderosity.com and reading what I can find (that is, when the site's not completely traffic-clogged). I get the impression that it can take a lot of work to get clothing to fit a model. And then there's being able to pose the model without that clothing dropping below the skin surface and becoming hidden.

One of these days I'll be able to afford a nice beefy machine, and I'll buy a copy and see just how hard all of this stuff is.

Great new front page. Great pose, great background, great lettering... Can't wait to see what you've done with Eagle.

[rangler]

I just want to say "thanks", talk about ask and you shall receive, what other web site offers that?

[Jeff]

Dixie's suit is a 3D model conformed to her body. The problem with creating outfits and characters from scratch is that it takes a great deal of time, and no new art gets done, which means no updates for the site. I'm trying to walk a fine line between quality work and still pump out a decent amount of quantity, so I'll often use outfits and props I've got in stock. Working with 3D is sort of like making a movie. You start with a story and a budget, with which you can hire actors and create sets and wardrobe. Sometimes elements will have to be utilized with economics in mind to get the finished work onto the screen. As the site does better and better, the budget increases, and eventually we'd like to be able to have models and costumes custom built from sketches, so they're exactly what we envision from the start.

We're still growing and learning what you guys want to see. From the recent polls, it looks like about 75% would like to see more hardcore material, but we know that readers still want comics with plots, action and humor, and not just a continuous orgy scene over and over. We've got a good idea of which characters you like, and what parts of the site you'd like to see updated more frequently, so it's slowly but surely evolving into the site the members want it to be, and the plan is to keep getting better.

Suzy Homewrecker is one of my favorites from the initial batch also, and I want to try to stay true to the sketch, so she's waiting for the right time to enter the comics...

Thanks for watching!

-Jeff
ICQ - 139841542
Yahoo Messenger (Voice Chat/Webcam) - tempusfugit9
_________________
There are no stupid questions - only stupid people.


JusticeBabes.com Support Staff

[hollow]

rangler: Word.

It's pretty easy to see that making the models is time-consuming, from looking at how much is charged for various props on the net. The cheapest props I've seen go for $5, and tend to look like so many geometric shapes. There's actually some fairly good-looking stuff around the $30 range, but one could quickly go bankrupt buying enough of these props to build one scene, much less an entire series.

Then there's the costumes. This has got to be the toughest part of this site, I sometimes think. It's the same old dilemma - you can have original, good-looking, or fast; choose two. It'd be really cool if you had two full-time artists, one working on props, the other working on content based on that. Ah well. Tea and biscuits. Someday I'm hoping this site will have the budget for more bodies.

In the meantime, the art is cool, and I don't mind waiting. Speaking of which, it's almost November... Superior Girl seems to be in the lead. Heh-heh.