Meet the employees of Snack Cactus

State of the Wavetro (October 2024)

Welcome to the October 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As you can see above, we now have a full cast of 3D characters ready to run your local neighborhood convenience store.

…Well, Teddy isn’t a Snack Cactus employee, but you get the idea.

The characters are done!

As stated in my very barebones newsletter last month, I finally got these guys squared away in September. In case you forgot, the characters pictured above from left to right are named Teddy, Ben, Carlos, and Vince.

It was actually a lot faster to make these models than I thought, which is a relief given that there’s going to be many more characters appearing in the comic. The only downside I ran into is that modeling clothes is a miserable experience: it took about a week to make the uniforms these characters are wearing compared to the week it took to make the models themselves. But they’re done!

The only thing I might do at this point is maybe change the colors of the uniform, since I really don’t like how both Ben and Carlos are both red and yellow in near-perfect opposites. I might also tweak Vince’s proportions a bit more, but let’s just move on…

About the comic title “Ben and Teddy”

After re-reading the five stories I wrote to launch this series, I decided to not go with the project name “Ben and Teddy” anymore. Carlos and Vince bring so much to the plotlines (rather than being secondary to Teddy and Ben’s interactions,) that the title of this comic should instead encompass all four characters. I tried to think of different titles, but I ultimately reached for the easiest option:

From now on, this project will just be flat-out called “Snack Cactus.”

It’s a little lazy, but there’s nothing better that I can think of. I nearly went with “Gas Guys” since the convenience store is also a gas station, but still it isn’t as unique and memorable as the store’s literal name. So that’s what I’ll go with.

Progress on the store itself

Speaking of Snack Cactus, let’s talk about how modeling the store itself is going!

This is what I’ve made so far. It’s been excruciatingly difficult!

I had a very hard time starting the store at all at first, since I had to take the five episodes I wrote and create a layout that makes sense for all of them. I pretty much didn’t do anything for most of September and part of October, stressing out over how I was going to tackle this.

Eventually, I came up with the idea to use giant text placeholders to define what will go where in the store’s footprint, from the refrigerators to the alarm panels.

Then I planned to use Blenderkit to furnish the store quickly and easily. Blenderkit is a 3D asset marketplace where you pay a flat monthly fee to use all the pre-made models on the site you want, which I was very happy to try.

However, it quickly became clear that combining various assets from different artists was going to look inconsistent and weird. You can see in the image above that this asset of a stocked shelf of snacks doesn’t look all that American, and the story literally takes place in Texas.

While I still think Blenderkit is a useful service (especially for car models,) I can’t use it here. I need to model Snack Cactus myself so that every background behind the characters looks stylistically consistent. On the bright side, I only need to model this store once, and then I can re-use it as much as I want.

To save on time and sanity, I also decided to define a new rule with the art style: backgrounds will be blank and un-rendered, excluding any items that characters interact with or point out. This is a trick from one of my old RobotUnderscore projects pictured above, from when I tried to get into video essays and/or storytime animation. Past me just couldn’t pick a lane.

So off I went, getting measurements for various all-American products, hand-modelling each one in 3D, and stocking retail shelves full of them. It’s mind-numbing to think about how much work it is to stock an entire convenience store, especially if you happen to be making every item from scratch.

As of right now in late October, I got as far as the checkout counter with the cigarettes and energy shots. I just need to make the cash register, and then I can move on to the refrigerated beverages section.

My entire brain feels like it’s been re-written to focus on this massive undertaking. All I can think about right now is the diameter of a soda can or the footprint of a checkout scanner, and how that will impact my 3D models. Something tells me I’ll need to find another corner-cutting method to reduce the workload on my plate. We’ll see what November wavetro comes up with.

Unconfirmed (but possible) complete pivot??

Speaking of time-saving methods, there has been something on my mind lately that could change everything about Snack Cactus. It wouldn’t change the stories I wrote or the characters I’ve designed so far, but definitely everything else about the series.

I don’t want to give away too much about what this idea is since I don’t want to promise something before it happens, but I am seriously considering doing it. It would let me not think about modeling this damn convenience store anymore. It would completely throw doing a “3D comic series” out the window. It could even make the release date for Snack Cactus as soon as this winter. It could be the best decision I’ve made in a long while.

But it would require me to change my entire creative direction for the 100,000th time instead of sticking with my current plan, and I would love to commit to something even though I recently established my constant switch-ups as the norm. Yet at the same time, I hate modeling the inside of this Snack Cactus so damn much. I think I gotta roll the dice on this one.

Stay tuned for the November newsletter in case I decide to do this crazy idea that would drastically simplify the Snack Cactus project, but in a way that makes everyone (both creator and audience) happier for it…

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George (wavetro)

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