Runaway to the Stars: Page 98

Guards!! Arrest her!! She's assisting a criminal!!!

Transcript

Cheevwut: I’m clocking out.
Talita: Seeya, Cheev.

Talita is sitting in her dark apartment on her tablet with a keyboard attached, looking at the automated cycle command input in the employee portal. After a pause thinking about it, she types in a custom command.

Talita: (looking behind herself warily) …Bip?

Bip's avatar appears on the tablet screen, making her mane stand on end.

Bip: Yeah?
Talita: I’ll repair your power connection tomorrow. No guarantees on anything else.

Minor Store Update and 3D Talita

Some miniprints and assorted stickers are now available in the shop. I am sold out of the Shyam and Talita character sticker, sadly, but lots of new ones are available as one-offs.

I have also gotten down to last handful of my Talita pins, some of which have some enamel fill errors and resin dents that prevent me from selling them at full price. If you’re looking for a discount and don’t mind some superficial defects, check out the B and C-grade pins. They’re charmingly flawed, just like the lady herself.

In other news, as birthday present for myself this year I commissioned a low-poly Talita 3d model from incredibly talented artist Lazer-T (Tumblr, Twitter, Bluesky), who really went above and beyond with rigging her silly over-complicated design. Look at these turnarounds he did, they’re great:

There is also a Barbie doll nude version of her, since I wanted one for generic posing reference (and also, she looks cool with the stripes out).

This model has among other things: 8 total eyelids, adjustable pupil sizes, an antler slider with velvet stages, nostrils that open and close, and mane and face feathers that can puff out. Here’s an example of expressive animation, also done by Lazer-T!

[Silent animation of Talita looking away, then jolting in shock, blushing in embarrassment, and waving bashfully at the viewer.]

I’m not very experienced with manipulating armature in Blender myself (I’ve barely got a handle on hardscape modelling) but I’ve been having fun moving the model around and learning how to pose different parts and use shape keys. Below: me messing around with the file.

Ok, that’s all. I hope the turnaround gifs don’t make my homepage run like ass, if they do I’ll replace them with the still renders.

Shiny New Webcomic Site

Hello everyone. If you got here from social media, you probably know about this comic already. I’ve been posting it to Patreon for quite a while, but it has always been my dream to contribute to the ecosystem of free-to-read webcomics that I spent the majority of my childhood voraciously reading while hunched over the computer past my bedtime. I had initially started working on the Official Book after signing it to publisher, though, and originally was only allowed to post a third of it online. But a couple years into working on it, I got permission to fling it out onto the internet in its entirety. So voila! Runaway to the Stars: Book 1, out in public, updating 3 times a week!

If you hadn’t heard about this comic, welcome! Runaway to the Stars is a worldbuilding project that I’ve been working on for over a decade. It started as an excuse to design some aliens and throw all my science fiction thoughts in the same vat, and eventually a book started to grow out of it like a fungus. If this comic intrigues you, there’s tons of additional artwork, writing, and short comics that can be found on my perpetual work-in-progress Neocities website and my ancient tumblr blog. There is quite a rabbit hole to go down, if you don’t mind some bespoke coding jank.

I’ve decided to not run sponsored banner ads because in recent years, internet advertising has become so aggressive and hostile to adblockers that frankly I’d rather not contribute. The random banner in the sidebar is a selection of projects I like and stuff I want to promote. If you hate looking at it, download uBlock origin and use the element zapper on it. It is your right.

That being said, to be pragmatic, the only reason the comic gets made as fast as it does is because I currently make enough income through my Patreon and store to not need a second job. If you like what you see and you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket, consider tossing me a buck. Patreon supporters get the perk of reading the pages before they go public. As of posting there is a massive backlog of over one hundred twenty finished pages uploaded there, so if you want some instant gratification it’s a great time for it.

But regardless of anything, thank you so much for reading! I’m excited to share this comic with you, and I hope you’ll stick around for the ride. See you on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays!