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Well here is the follow up to the previous animation Simple Pleasures For those having issues here is the Youtube link: MP4 version: Simplepleasures2.mp4

[Mod note: Don't miss the many excellent WIP images above this post!] Okay, it took me a while...I think I worked the kinks out. Here is a test render that I'll probably watch a thousand times and second guess most of what I did (1920x1080 MP4 H.264). It's a quick pan around the room....it looked correct on a few players like VLC and Windows Media Player, but one it was washed out (I'm assuming it was the color correction in that one...it's more geared to viewing EXR sequences). If it looks washed out to anyone, let me know. BreakRoomFlyThrough_04_10_2025.mp4

The Oakville Waterfront Festival poster design for 1999. Reusing the models from the previous year made things quicker but looking back wish I took more time to clean things up, making the models a little less lumpy. Was a fun project nonetheless,

My first bouncing ball for classwork at Animation Mentor, 20 years ago this week. Now with sound effects! The assignment was to animate a rigid bouncing ball for at least four bounces. It was OK to have it just bounce in place. I had never really done a rigorously accurate bouncing ball before and I wanted to get this as right as I could. Looking at the time stamps of my PRJs, I see that I spent more than 30 hours on this.

My animation for the second assignment at Animation Mentor, 20 years ago this week. Now with sound! The "boings" are done on my cello, the impact on the cube is a whack on a cardboard box and the grinding sound is two bricks scraped against each other.

Hey.., great bone structure, RobCat! For some reason I couldn't conserve the feet targets. This other bone hiearchy shows a lot better. I was forgotten to give the umbrella a good outlook. So I exctracted it to the new mesh and it works a lot better. Thanks for the hint!

Some progress renders of the creepy Swamp Demon guy. 😱

The Hash Image contests were always exciting events to witness and partake in. I submitted to my fair share around the 2000's and was a runner up in the April 1999 Horror theme with my Swamp Demon character. (totally inspired by Meg Mucklebones from the movie Legend) Shortly after the contest I received an email from Jeff Paries asking if he could use my model for one of his tutorials. It then appeared in his next book The Animation:Master 2000 handbook. Seriously what an honor!

Thanks for sharing, Michael! I love your work and remember seeing some of your art as inspiration to get me into 3D. I share your enthusiasm for those illustrators, I’ve still got dozens of trading cards painted by the Hildebrandt brothers. It’s amazing how much of a difference even a little bit of art and illustration training comes through in 3D quality, and the quality really shows in your work!

I remember Martin telling us that A:M WAS being used professionally, it just wasn't getting credit for it!

One of the places I used to frequent most on the Hash website, besides the gallery sections was the "A:M Users" area. They did a great job making it feel like a community of 3D artists. In 1999, I connected with Paul Sterling through A:M Users after seeing he was based in Oakville where I was living at the time. We chatted via email and when we decided to meet for coffee realized we lived literally five minutes away each other! We were both graduates of the Illustration program at Sheridan College and like many college grads continued to live in the city. Paul was working on pitching an animated series based on a script his friend had written and asked if I was interested in helping out. It was called "Guardian Force" unfortunately it never got off the ground partly because Paul started a web design company with his roommate, where I ended up working for the next few years. With the help of the Wayback Machine, I was able to look back to when Paul and I had our websites linked to the A:M Users pages.

A new render of my third assignment for AnimationMentor, 20 years ago this week. Now with my own trombone sound effects! The assignment was that the ball had to do an anticipation into its first leap, then bounce around the obstacles.

You continue to be my savior Robcat!! I had made those poses to help with decaling, especially the AngleFrame pose. It was hard to map one side at a time so I stood all those angled struts up vertically in a pose and did a cylindrical projection. But I was under the mistaken notion that you had to keep those pose sliders at 100% to maintain the texture position. And wouldn't ya know it-it was those frame struts that were at odd angles (30-45deg.) that were causing the problem but they were ok just by turning the pose sliders back to zero. I made those "mapping" poses long ago and haven't even given any thought to poses at all until you mentioned it. But when I looked there were 7 or 8 poses that I didn't create at all! Don't you have to make a pose? Can you create them by accident? And they certainly don't make themselves (or DO THEY?!!) Anyway thanks again.

Great work Steve, Look forward to seeing more.

Apparently I just imagined this whole thing. I had a group folder named WIRES where I had 2 grps. "Front" and "Back" and they were NOT rendering as lines no matter WHAT I did, but when I copied and pasted the groups into a new model and then pasted them back into the original they just magically rendered correctly and I saved the model out so I could send it to you. Now I cannot reproduce the problem AT ALL as if it never happened. So, thanks robcat! Not sure how you did it but it seems to be fixed. (Honestly, this really happened - I'm NOT making this up)

having fun finding old models anothermon7.prj

Thank you to everyone who commented and watch the animation. More to come!

Here is the project file, Made probably using A:M 98 or 99 so some textures don't look 100 percent when opened in V19.5 feel free to pick apart and use the models as you like. swamp_demon.zip

Hi Tim, I'll look through my old stuff to see if I still have the model for this guy. If I find anything I'll share it here.

A couple of toon line experiments. This one composites renders with four different line widths and biases The next one takes a render with a thick line/very low bias like this... and then a "levels adjustment" to force out the gray.

Good job, Steve! I really like that character design.

found this older model guy115.prj

I did not know you could single frame Youtube videos! That will be very useful. You're right, it shows some space there! The ball is keyframed to contact the ground plane (see below) but... adding motion blur causes that moment of contact to be only 1/16 of the time captured in the blur as the ball heads back up. 20 years ago, motion blur wasn't an issue, we just handed in the most basic renders. I'm not sure how this problem is addressed in big-time animation studios today, however. Thanks!

Thanks Tim!

Thanks, Tom and Michae! Here's another test aimed at eliciting tapered lines This shows the layers being added together.

Very creepy character, love it!

I am working hard on getting my 3D Editor that support only vertex and tri ! 😁 But warning it is unstable thought There is a screenshot here : Have a nice day !

Thank you Lee, nice to hear my work is appreciated I had that collection of Hildebrandt cards decorating my cubical when I was taking Illustration!

Hello- I saw a product at Comic Con last year and it was intriguing. This new app allows animators to tell stories that are sort of hybrids between animated storyboards and full animation. They also pay for content on a sliding basis. https://www.storiaverse.com/for-animators For any storytellers on the Forum, check them out.. Tom

Here is a posing tip I had not encountered before. It may work better for puppets who can never shift eye direction, but it is important that your character appear to have purpose in where he looks.

@Rodney It occurs to me that even if we can find a way to run those three sort programs in week 3... we never get their answer as to which was which.

Not sure about that codec. I used it because the original becomes quiet large.

@Rodney For our C++ use, the "main" line of the Caesar's Cypher program needs to define argv[] as char *, not "string" (which was shown in the lecture)... int main(int argc, char* argv[]) after that, you can treat any element of the argv[] array as you would a string, such as cout<<"Argument: "<< argv[1] <<endl; I presume this will be true for future programs that use command line arguments. I don't know why string doesn't work since it worked for them in C in the lecture.

Here is another one. Inspired by the illustration of Lois Carrel's cover of Alice In Wonderland's Catterpillar. I'm beginning to get intrigued by a way to change the mesh of the model into another shape.

robcat2075, everything worked out. You were right, we needed a spline in the middle.

I have been working on getting ready to move. As a part of that I was looking at computers. I pulled up Cindy from Cupid Sick day. I modeled her 15 years ago. It is hard to believe. In 2012 I re rigged her and the rig holds up nicely.

The Knights Tail story has me thinking its time to get started again. All the rigs are half done. More than likely I will redo the rigs into the TSM2 with some of Roberts add ons. Here is a picture of the team and the only thing missing is Lilly, the damsel in distress.

I added a dishwasher to the break room.

It's finally been released! The most recent vignette from Project: Potemkin. This features an alien creature which I had to build, rig, animate and composite into the already shot footage. Many thanks to Robert, Rodney, Mark and a few others for helping out with advice on this one!! [vimeo]98791336[/vimeo] http://vimeo.com/98791336