Rastered - 15 years later

15 years ago, I set out to draw a weekly “webcomic” for a year. Doing something at a regular cadence is difficult but this was an intense undertaking for several reasons. Each week, I needed to come up a decent joke, I needed to draw it and I needed to push it up to the web. I wasn’t concerned with readership as the topic I chose was very niche; my aim was purely to accomplish something, to do what I set out to do. In the end, I did and it felt very rewarding.

The comics have been unavailable for a bit (though some can be found in the Internet Archive). So to celebrate its existence, I’m putting them up here. I’m also adding some extra commentary; most of the original captions are lost so new words will have to do.

1: Intro

The intro was just the comic’s logo and not an actual comic strip. It also had a caption saying something like “updated every Monday” if I recall correctly.

So why the name Rastered? It was unique for one. Searches at the time yielded no competing products. Also it’s a take on rasterization i.e. to raster, converting an image into pixels on a screen. But really, it just rhymes with bastard. I’m lowkey obsessed with this word.

2: Parenting problem

The first issue and I had no idea what journey I was about to undertake.

Original Caption: Used mainly in character rigs, bi-directional constraints allow two linked objects to swap control of each other.

3: Bump maps

The second issue ramps up with a lewd gag about breasts and bump/displacement/normal maps. Clearly I was a very //mature// 25 year old. But you already figured that from the title of the webcomic!

4: Floating point 007

This is a weird celebration of James Blinn, specifically his improvement on Phong shading. Since the gag is “James Blinn as James Bond,” there are callbacks to Goldeneye 64 and Thunderball’s poster. It’s nerdstuffed. Also the only strip to have color.

Original Caption: “There are about a dozen great computer graphics people, and Jim Blinn is six of them.”-Sutherland

5: The Reyes Escape

A colorful interpretation of REYES rendering in RenderMan. REYES stands for either “Render Everything Your Eyes See” or “Render Everything You Ever Saw” - not sure which but the process had phases that sounded like bloody murder.

6: Feeding frenzy

Feeding Frenzy was an Xbox Live Arcade game but the joke here is that Autodesk was just buying up all these software companies. Disgusting corporation.

7: Date weight

I think this was inspired by a real life story.

8: The Protector?

Softimage XSI had a bunch of preset models you could add to a scene. One of them was a beloved elephant mesh which they removed during a version upgrade. I don’t know why the devs did this but it became the basis of this strip where Tony Jaa is looking for his elephants like in the hit martial-arts movie, The Protector.

9: Broke-Ass Flash

There was a trade event in SoCal where a vendor gifted me a superhero movie, Lightspeed, which he called a “broke-ass Flash” and it was something. Anyway, his words inspired this strip.

10: Parrot Humor

Polly here, Polly gone!

11: That’s Deep

Once at Siggraph, a veteran animator was talking about the symbolism of doves in John Woo’s movies and my lady coworker was like “Wow…that’s so deep…” but sarcastically. Impression denied! But hey, I got this joke out of it.

12: Betrayal

Low effort gag on two-sided or double-sided shaders but I’m guessing I had a busy weekend and had to crank something out. Commitments need to be met.

13: Bad Zituation

Rendering in Maya (and I think mentalray) was a horrible experience because quite often you’d get black pixels due to Not-A-Number shader errors. Random but “zit” is one of the first puns I ever learned. It was from an ad in a DC comic.

14: Make me a movie

Another joke inspired by a real human’s words; I do see where they were coming from . . . if we’re using computers, shouldn’t we be making things faster? Technically, movies do get made faster with computers but animation is still a difficult process that takes up so much time.

15: Animghtmare

This is a gimbal lock joke. Except gimbal locks are not funny. I believe as a society, we’ve solved this problem with Quaternions but back then, I ran into this issue a few times in Maya.

16: Reference!

When is it pornography and when is it artistic study material? That inspired me to come up with a caricature of a digital artist who studied nudes, studied video game models, cosplayed and did everything except actually work on his project.

17: Node-based Workflow

ICYMI this is a riff on Houdini. Of course, this is an exaggeration but isn’t that humor?

18: The Raise

Passionate workers are ready to be exploited in your area!

19: Seasons Greetings!

This was around Christmas time so a Santa screw-up felt just right.

20: Resolution

And a Happy New Year? You may have questions about computer mice having display resolutions. Don’t think too hard about it :)

21: Exited with Status

User-facing errors in most computer software do nothing to help the user understand what went wrong. Maya was so bad with its errors that one of its QA experts made a website about Maya bugs that would never get fixed and potential workarounds for them.

22: The Master

I think most self-help products are rarely used. At Digital-Tutors where we once made training DVDs, I always imagined that most customers would buy training materials, feel hopeful or happy … like they made a difference in their lives, that things were going to change and they would get better or even become experts … and then not even open the product.

23: Forte

RIB stands for RenderMan Interface ByteStream.

24: Modeling

The word “model” has so many meanings and that makes it rife for jargon-based gags!

25: Kabuki Clash

People come up with new terms for the same things. It’s just how we roll. Fighting over it is pointless theatrics.

26: Valentine Gifts

Not proud of this one’s punchline. Younger-me probably thought it was funny but all I can do is shake my head now. As they say, the folly of youth…

27: Ong Back!

This one is another Tony Jaa movie reference. Happy Buddha is a common render-test model for many reasons so I thought that an incomplete render could be a good setup. The issue here is that renders start from top to bottom, never bottom to top. Liberties have been taken.

28: Blendermaniac

Another one inspired by a real person at a real event. Writing jokes is hard but ranting is easy. Here, I’m mocking an unnamed gentleman who thought Blender was awesome and how you could do anything and everything with it. Talk is cheap and being a forthcoming fanboy of anything is just annoying.

29: Masi Effect

Critizing fanboys and then fanboy-ing over Masi Oka – a “genius” digital effects artist AND a popular TV/Movie star . . . whom I’ve not seen in anything noteworthy since 2010. Hollywood really is a fickle thing.

30: Projection Matrix

It’s a “The Matrix” joke and damned good one, if I do say so myself.

31: O LOD!

O GOD! What a stupid joke.

32: The Boner

Adding bones to a model for animation purposes is sometimes called bone-ing. Character riggers are glorified boners. This joke is also a boner.

33: C4D Kid

Are you feeling the degradation yet?

34: Leverage

I think this strip was inspired by Twilight’s success. I’m not sure but I feel like this kinda-sorta became a reality a couple of years later. I’m no Nostradamus . . . this is just the M.O. of any big business operation.

35: Smooth Dreams

Heh.

36: Nothingness

This is more of a poem than a gag. It’s about how most scenes are blank. It takes a spark of imagination to un-blank the canvas.

37: Ultimate Battle

Ugly art made by a programmer is immediately apparent but awful code from an artist is often not. This is because it will typically work and this hides the fact that it is capable of doing awful things. In this case, it’s not as harmful but the artist could have greatly benefitted from using a loop.

Anyway, I drew the programmer art with my non-dominant hand. I’m so proud of myself!

38: Played Your Eyes

This actually happened.

39: 3D MMA

Tool proficiency is badass, right? This guy over here knows so many things, isn’t he smart? Then I thought what if each step of the process needed a whole new software. And thus this strip was born.

40: An Unlikely Scenario

I’ve fallen for this a few times. New tools mean new headaches. There’s no guarantee that a fancy plugin/asset that you just bought will actually solve the problem you have. You have to make it work.

41: Cost of Efficiency

The punchline is sadness ha ha ha

42: Scale object

Also inspired by real life, when I moved to Orange County.

43: Hot Love

Jos Stam bring all the boys to the yard

44: Software 20XX

I have no proof but I think this is why nearly every form of software moved to titles with yearly suffixes. By dating a product, you give it an automatic expiry.

45: Phoney Stuff

The irony of this strip is that some smartphones today are beefier than workstations of the past. However, I still stand by that the form factor matters. A touchscreen on a tiny phone cannot compare to input/output devices available on workstations.

46: Curve Types

Air Mite is Hermite.

47: The Poser

Always claim your identity on social media. Or a friend might do it for you.

48: Primitives

Primitives in CG software often refer to cubes, spheres, cones, y’know basic geometric shapes. So, what if . . . a primitive person was a basic geometric shape. Here we go!

49: POW

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, right? That’s what Reality is to a Dream Idea. What we do upon receiving said punch is what defines us; it is our true test.

50: Siggraph

Exhibitors at Siggraph often gave out cool items at their booth. I loved the RenderMan wind-up kettles from Pixar’s booth. What did I do with all the ones I collected?

51: The Professional

Alcohol. Causing trouble since 7000 BCE.

52: Career Paths in CG

There’s a few more paths than this, of course. For example, making education material like training DVDs! Wait … no… don’t do that.

53: Finale

This is the finale. This is the essence of this webcomic and this activity. Not everything is going to be perfect. Mistakes will get made and failure is part of the process. Just keep at it. Get up, lick any wounds, move forward. Never give up.

54: The End

That’s me! What a Rastered!!

I drew everything using Inkscape on a crappy HP Tablet PC that was always burning hot. It’s all SVG (and I still have the originals backed up somewhere!) but wait doesn’t that mean . . . all this content was vector data ……. that is actually «shock» rasterized O_O