Excellent answer. And I couldn't agree with you more. What I tend to hate is someone throwing down a bunch of toys in the back yard on a "WAY-WAY TOO SUNNY DAY" and just showing a firefight instead of a story.

I know what you mean about starting somewhere. My first attempt at a Dio was "Fallout" and it violated a lot of my own rules. I hated it and worked on finding out what was wrong and corrected it.

( http://www.geocities.com/ender098/FALLOUT1.htm )

But a lot of people never learn and keep making the same mistakes.

No kidding! But my reason for this wasn't to start a bashing session, but to get some of us to come out and criticise our own work and let each other know what WE like and don't like to see in Dios. What is it we look for, and as "Artists" in this hobby, what we have learned and how others see our work.






Agreed! Even although this is a rarity. I, for examply have like 2,000 figures, but I rarely use more than 10 total. And using 10 is hard enough to keep track of. I admire the hell out of ViolentFx for his last chapter with the 30+ night Watch guys. And every frame he moved each one at least a little. I definitely DON'T have the patience for that!








Ouch! I violate this rule a LOT! Not on purpose, though. It's just when I take the pics, I forget to leave room for the word ballons or the ballons end up shorter than I expected so I have to change the size of the font. Anyone out there have some tips on how to ensure your font size can be kept consistant in Comic Book Creator? And sometimes I use CBC for the ballons and others I use Paint Shop Pro, causing the fonts (even though the same size and font according to the two different softwares) to look different!







Excellent point. Again, one I RARELY see, but I have to see Arctic Ranger Stalker in the desert!





You and I are a lot alike on these points.





Yeah, you and I are a LOT alike on this! I build huge sets (ok, maybe not ViolentFx Huge, but huge for most!) and put in loads of time and detail, but some of the newjacks on here use minimal stuff and it looks WAY better than mine! I kinda feel embarrassed and like I got my @ss kicked by a bunch of noobies, but truth be told, I'm learning. And Loving it. I love the Level of creativity shown lately!

FifthConspiracy, Haradrel, Sephron13 and Tracker have come up with some doozies of how-to's! I love some of the unique and creative ideas shown here as of late!








True...and remember, as long as you're having fun and trying to learn from your mistakes, it's all good!









True dat! Wanna see some crappy dio stuff? Look at my "Fallout" dio. (If Geocities doesn't die from bandwidth over-utilization!).

http://www.geocities.com/ender098/FALLOUT1.htm

Wow, I got kudos again

I am in the midst of making preparations for a dio - and all this has been a good read, what to try to do and what to avoid.

Truth be told I have avoided reading any dios thus far, because I'd like to have my own go at it before getting my mind set on someone else's idea (I'm very wierd, most have probably noticed ) I have glanced over a few just because I liked the puretty pictures

My first dio is going to be done using normal photography some light photoshopping and whatnot - second and probably shorter one will be using photoshop to make it more "cartoony", I am not sure how well this will go over with the community, but it might be fun to do something totally different.

I hope more of you guys add Hates and Loves here so that I can go over my "script" and see if I am doing something terribly wrong.

After this discussion here has gone for a while, someone should post a "how-to" on making dios! I think that would be appreciated by the majority.
call it a "do's" and "don'ts" list

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Arguing on the internet is like competing in the special Olympics - You may win, but you are still retarded

This is another 'WIP' that I'm in the middle of..........

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Non illigitamus carborundum~Vos mos non effrego mihi

Coming soon: 'JoeSpecialOps'

One thing I do is pick a few members here that I trust their judgement and "leak" the story before it's 100% finished.





I did this at one time, but it was more geared towards the photography in the dios and not so much the storyline/content. Maybe I can get off my keister and write something about this.....hmmmmm

here is the one I did on the photo's side of the house;

http://www.joedios.com/forums/showthread.php?t=447

after you pointed this out i saw how much i did this. i also know why this happened and how to not let it happen again. for me i would have the pic finished, then realize that i could put more focus on a characters actions if i took some of the unneeded background out. this made everything appear closer, thus the words were larger.

and i am not bashing anyones work. i have read tons of dios that i love and i know i have miles to go before im a violentfix or hawk, or the guy at tims corner. even if i were great, bashing someone will most often not be helpful to make them better, instead them may just think it not worth their time if no one has anything good to say about their work. just offer little helpful hints.

I'm also guilty of the Font size thing that was mentioned here but I never really think someone's reading it and getting upset by it. Example, a close of pic of one character who says a short sentence. If my font stays at 15pt then the word bubble and words the character are saying look REALLY wimpy and strange. So I enlarge them.

The only other time is when there's a long speech. There are only so many shots you can fit in a Dio before it really starts to feel way too long and sometimes you need to get a lot of information across in a certain amount of pics. This never bothered me in reading Dios but maybe that's because I make them and I'm impartial to it. I hope people aren't urked every time I change my font.

As for what I don't like about Dios. I can only really think of one thing that truly bothers me and it's something I used to do as well but only because I couldn't figure out a way to get the idea across without doing it. It's when a Dio uses drawn lines to represent bullets flying. Lately I've been using bullet ricochet to get the same point across. Hope it's working, it looks good to me.

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Cobra: The Inner Sanctum

I had a 50+ page dio... And that was thru the CBC so you KNOW there were a million shots!

like i said, i do the font thing. it doesnt bother me at all, but i guess it does some, so im going to try and keep an eye on this in the future. me, im to inot the story and whatnot to even notice.
the bullet thing, i do this, and i do it badly. i have been known to put in a lot of flying bullets and making them to thick at first. then i tried making the lines break, like one long shot repeating. now i make the line smaller, and i am also thinking of making them white and more see through.

Would you like me to send you a PSD file of my bullet ricochet? You might like using them, like in the pic below.

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Cobra: The Inner Sanctum