Rodney

In other news... I've been debating putting in a feature request to update the icon format to base64 but I'm not sure that is the ideal solution. The plus would be that base64 images display very nicely in browsers and it's fairly straightforward to code programs to take advantage of accessing that image data. There are lots of base64 encoders/decoders out there. The primary downside remains that more data results in larger files which would counter one of the benefits of A:M's file format; small file sizes. Files with minimal preview data can be very tiny. The other side of the coin is that a full solution should likely incorporate preview/proxy data for external images (decals, textures, etc) and incorporation of such might constitute a step backward. Example of proxy usage: An A:M model might use an external decal of high resolution but the image data stored in base32/64 can be included in the file. As such if the external file is misplaced/lost at least A:M might grab that proxy to supply the decal. The resolution would be lower but in many cases would be more than adequate, at least until the full rez image is supplied. As mentioned, addtional benefits can be derived from the image data. For instance, a mobile platform/app could leverage the preview images so that an A:M user could sort through various resources in preparation for production outside of A:M. Then upon launching A:M... bam. Keekat's your uncle. So, the answer to the question of how can we get A:M onto mobile platforms is simply to leverage A:M data. We wouldn't have all the bells and whistles of A:M but in most cases we don't need those, especially during initial planning. Okay, enough of that dreamin' stuff. Back to our scheduled show already in progress...

It's the internal image stored with A:M files that allows applications (specifically A:M) to show a preview of the contents of the file. It's best known as the image that displays when grabbing (dragging and dropping) resources from A:M's Libraries. To create the preview image simply place what you want to appear as a preview in the window, then Right Click and select Create Icon. As the preview will be saved as part of the file make sure you save your file. All the various resources of A:M (with a few exceptions) have a preview image. Those that don't get one specifically assigned get a default icon that identifies the type of resource; model, action, chor, material, etc.

I was just about to launch a bug report because every time I tried to create a preview icon in A:M I was being shown the desktop. I then thought perhaps it best to post to the forum to see if others were seeing the same thing. Then I thought about how unstable my entire system has been of late (I haven't restarted my computer in a long time) Then I thought that resetting A:M should be tried before anything else (yes, and especially before reformatting my harddrive!) And it worked. Now I can create preview icons. Note to self. Here's what I think contributed to the problem AND what might also relate to some other problems, especially when working with older files. I had run across an old model online and thought as an exercise I would fix some spline issues and see what I could do to update the file. As A:M was working with that older file format (that has a different preview icon format BTW) it might have run afoul of trying to update that incompatible formatting. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps not. Whatever it was, resetting A:M cleaned out the cobwebs and things are again working as designed. So, when things start looking bad don't forget to reset, restart A:M and try again.

That was the next thing I wanted to check as the only variable left seemed to be that we hadn't confirmed Serg's file as the one we need. Marcel's site had the robots entry in his website so the site isn't backed up on archive.org. We'll have to wait to someone locates the v15 and later plugin.

Unfortunately, no modern release of A:M appears to run the plugin. (tested v15 and v18) Regarding usage. The instructions are in an html file in the Zevel disto. Chrome refused to download Serg's zip file. IE downloaded. (reasons: warnings of potential viruses/hazards) According to the instructions we need to select -the control point- which will in turn select the spline although selecting the spline with the comma key appears to work the same as selecting just the CP. I don't recall Zevel being free. Perhaps it was. Is it possible that failure to run might be due to activation requirement of the plugin? The only other plugin that immediately comes to mind is the splitpatch plugin which is going to zap the entire mesh. A poor workaround to use on (preferrably simple meshes: (make a copy of our mesh to work with so not using original) Run SplitPatch and then delete all of the unwanted splines. The rest of the model should pop back into the shape.of the original model.

Thanks for the great info and insight into your work WIlliam. Much appreciated. You appear to be blessed with a significant budget of motivation and talent my friend. And that makes it all the more impressive. I confess that I was caught up so much with the imagery that I didn't even think to consider the audio and for me that is very telling. The audo very obviously worked well because it fit in perfectly... to where I didn't even consider its contribution to the story... which is considerable. Now you've got me wanting to watch the video all over again! Sound is an area I am so lacking in and yet one that I know is so very important in animation. I've even been considering taking a few classes at the local college to exercise some of those artistic muscles for future endeavors. I'm mostly interested in the basic-basics, those that clue us in to better ways to approach the pacing/beat of audio*. I'm really interested in that but not sure if I have that in me. You however, have got it going on in your productions. Color me impressed. I will now go back and view your show with a focus on the audio's contribution. *I wish I'd stuck with those piano lessons my Mom thought to put me in as a kid.

I just did a more thorough... even frame by frame... review of this one and you've got some great detail throughout that very subtly works to enhance the whole show. Nice. From the little details in the background, to textures in just the right places, subtle blurring and on and on and on. I feel I need to mention the tank treads and their individual colors too. That may be obvious to most people but it really sells the fact that those treads are moving as well at the camera angle itself (and cropping) that allows for those treads to continue to move (and be seen moving) as the story progresses. How many of these subtle master strokes were intentional and how many were happy accidents??? That's what I'd love to know! For instance, the sliver of tank tread down at the very bottom of the screen getting smaller and smaller and (basically) disappearing just in time for our attention to fully move to the big tank. I love the 'hand off' that you accomplish from story element to story element. It's that premise of having things continuously perform an action until something causes a change in action/motivation that you've really nailed with this one. Part of what helped me enjoy the detail of reviewing at a closer level was trying to explore what I thought might be room for improvement in color correction (I'm trying to learn more about color correction these days!). The two areas that seemed to suggest themselves were to apply a color LUT that pushed the contrast a little more (in my test I used a film_1963 LUT) as well as an application of Vignette that darkened the outer edges of the shot while keeping the focal center of the frame lighter. This color correction seemed to automatically enhance the focus as new objects were introduced as well as generally enhancing the characters skin color against similar colors elsewhere in the scene. Examples of the bigger enhancements included when the big tank is first revealed, the colors popped a little more. Another example: the red buttons that Larry pulls up into view and then pushes (they seemed to read just a little brighter/better). Of course a lot of color correction is just 'eye of the beholder' stuff and the primary shift appears to have been a slight move more from yellow to red and the Larry element itself probably suggests the yellow hue you have now works just as well. At any rate, I'm glad I did the test because it makes me appreciate all the detail you put into the scene even more! Keep up the great work William!

Great stuff! Makes me want to drive around in a tiny tank. (But not get shot/crushed by a bigger tank)

I didn't realize what was going on with their campaign but apparently Indigogo has a feature 'in demand' that allows campaigns to continue on past the deadline of the campaign. What does that mean? I guess it means that folks can still contribute and receive rewards related to the campaign. Interesting. It sounds like the folks behind Indigogo themselves had a hand in getting Don and Gary over to their platform. Much to learn about those crowd sourcing thingies.

For those that don't have a good grasp of the background of Don Bluth and how he has impacted animation this video gives a lot of background. It's of an interview/visit Don had with AnimationNation about two years ago. xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYExFX3X19g Set aside some time if you want to view this. It runs about 1 hour 30 minutes. Get some great tips on drawing, work ethic, lighting, composition, color/music scales, business and more. One of my favorite quotes: "Stay in preproduction as long as you can."

Hand drawn features are a hard sell these days but someone backing Don Bluth stands to be involved in a 'new renaissance' of hand drawn animation... not unlike when Don spurred something similar back when he departed Disney in 1979. I recall that timeframe (somewhat after the fact as Don was being interviewed about his projects) as a suggestion that other people besides those at Disney could produce animated films. And of course I distinctly recall when the Dragon's Lair video game hit the arcades. I wanted to play it to see the animation but didn't waste a lot of my money because I couldn't get past the first few stages!!! It wasn't too long after that the Disney started hitting their stride again and with 'The Little Mermaid' they were back in the biz again. The 10 years between Don departing Disney and the release of TLM were inspirational years for me as I was bound and determined to get into comics and animation. I didn't know enough about animation and information was sparse in those days so my focus was on comics and I collected almost everything I could get my hands on (mostly Marvel... I was heavily inspired by John Byrne's style of of illustration. I even taught a few classes at the local extension center to kids; the first was 'Basic Cartooning' and the second 'Beginning Animation'. Ah, those were the days. (I had no clue back then what I was doing either) But... the point... The biggest win (in a para-perfect world) would be if Disney convinced Don Bluth to rejoin the fold and fully backed him on some feature films. This would heal all wounds, turn back the clock and set everything up for the next golden age of animation. This is not likely to happen because A ) Disney wouldn't likely do it B ) Don wouldn't likely do it either. But Bob Iger... if'n you are listening, it'd be a wise decision. Not lucrative like buying IP of Pixar, Marvel or Lucas but from a historical view it'd be worth a reasonable investment. The underlying issue (as far as I can guess) would be intellectual property rights. Disney requires them to be signed over to them... Don has spent most of his career producing films that he doesn't have any rights to leverage. The exception to this appears to be... Dragon's Lair. Okay, enough blather from me. I'm not a big Dragon's Lair fan but I'm a very big animation fan and given a good script/story I might even become of DL fan. As such I hope Don and Gary can get some serious backing for a new round of classically drawn animation. If I calculate right, Don will be 78 this year. This is the prime time to get Don fully back into the spotlight of animation. I think the pitch reel is up to 4 or 5 minutes *of animation* now (by hitting the various stretch goals that added additional work to the reel) They've already got an impressive list of talent joining in just for the pitch and/or that have committed to join a feature film production. Some of those include: John Pomeroy - He was with Don and Gary when they departed Disney in 79. He's was back at Disney in '95 and moved mostly to story artist as feature films moved to CG. John has also been working with Tom and Tony Bancroft (and others) teaching animation through 'Taught by a Pro' - most of their video lessons are around $10 each. Kathleen Quaife - well known effects animator - you should check out her website - lots of great examples there. Michael Cedeno - I am embarrassed to say I don't know much about Michael's work... I'll try to remedy that! He's been in the biz for over 25 years and teaches animation at Otis College of Art and Design Dominic Carola - owner/animator of Premise Entertainment - has found a excellent way to pair with the major studios and yet keep a freelance/small biz approach in animation Vera Pacheco - left Disney with Don, Gary and John back in '79 and has been animating on many of the major animated features since Sandro Cluezo - I was a little surprised to see Sandro listed as he's been busy of late creating a new short (and rumor has it... animated feature) 'Klaus'. If my memory serves correctly Sandro left South America for Ireland as a teenager with the goal of working for Don and Gary and after traveling to Ireland... made that goal a reality. James Lopez - another surprise listing - He's an independent filmmaker who lately has been deeply involved with the crowdfunded 'Hullabaloo' Carmen Oliver - yet another talent that left with the crew back in '79? I need to find out more about Carmen and her craft as well... Character Color Stylist! Christopher Stone - Score Composer - created the original Dragon's Lair score! (with apologies to anyone I left out!) WIth the number of talented 2D animators out there there shouldn't be a lack of artists available to produce a Dragon's Lair film.

Looks like they moved over the half-million mark just prior to the campaign end. $518,781 raised. It'll be interesting to see where they go with the project from here. Don and Gary have been involved in a lot of videos related to this campaign. Here's one with 'the rotoscopers' that is well worth watching to get some background and insight: xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMnRKij0PTU Don gets into 'the heart' of the matter about 3/4 of the way into the video.

I figure I should post an update as this thing is now into it's last day of funding, has hit all of the stretch goals thus far and looks to easily hit the next one as well. They are almost funded at 1/2 million dollars which is pretty impressive considering all things (such as the initial kickstarter not getting off to a great start at the very beginning). 5337 people contributing....20 hours left as of this post... $442,206 raised... I can't see them adding another stretch goal with so few hours remaining but it could happen and might be well worth watching in case they drop something well worth the last minute submission. Also, keep in mind that many of the stretch goals apply to the $5 level. Linkage

Yes, but the issue at that point is that we can't adjust any of those distances individually (via Sweeper). With Sweepers setting it's an all or nothing approach. Resampling the spline allows for the creation of same distances with the option to tweak any of those sections as needed for final placement of copies/extrusions by Sweeper. With the basic shape (and placement of sections) preplanned and then created via Sweeper additional adjustment of the CPs can refine the mesh further although we were dealing with a lot fewer CPs. This can be especially useful in areas where we know we will need additional deformation. Both approaches will work but the resampling of the spline allows for greater refinement of the initial results (as produced Sweeper). It can only produce what we tell it to. In the case of a rope think in terms of squash and stretch between certain lengths of the rope and that's a primary advantage of the resampling approach. And... besides all that... I'm plugging the ResampleSpline wizard because it's good practice to create patches that are roughly the same size throughout a model as that will be useful in other cases besides this one. The ResampleSpline plugin helps us do that.

...and they both have a neat 'coals on the fire' look. (More as stills than animated of course)

Nicely done! It looks like you've already got the feel for use of Sweeper plugin. I'm impressed. It doesn't look like you needed it but I should have mentioned that after creating the path it can be advantageous to use the ResampleSpline plugin to get a path with Control Points evenly spaced. This helps also if telling Sweeper to create a repeated shape/extrusion at each CP. As I say... doesn't look like you needed that.

I know you are after a material here but just in case it's an option... You could model the rope using the Sweeper plugin. Then you can basically create any path and have the rope follow that pattern (to include real knots etc.)

I have been thinking of reasons why I liked Digicel Flipbook and why I still on occasion still think it would be useful. As for why I don't still have it installed... a bit of a long story... I once purchased the lite version and after moving to another computer needed to contact the folks at Digicel to get the authorization code to get the program working again. Long story short, I never got that code. But the value to me was (and remains) that of being a tool to aid in establishment of timing. Jason Ryan (and others) get through the initial stage of blocking (pose to pose or straight ahead) very quickly and then simply adjust their timing. THIS above and beyond the other useful features of the program is where the value resides and some of this can translate well directly into workflow in A:M (for those that wish to forego the act of drawing). I've downloaded and installed Pencil2D several times and am glad to see it is still being developed (with 20 branches even). I must confess that I haven't used it much for a variety of reasons, the primary one being that I never got it shoehorned into my workflow. Looks like its time to take a look at Pencil2D again. Edit: In reinstalling Pencil2D several things come flooding back to mind on what I had previously hoped to use in the software. The primary one (exporting an xsheet) isn't yet implemented. Another would be the ease of grabbing a set of keyframes and adjusting them in time. Perhaps someone can educate me but I'm only able to adjust one keyframe at a time. Thanks all for the recommendations. I'm still searching for the optimum drawing program for animation. I believe that in time... many years here... perhaps 10 or more? that program will very likely be A:M. So still need an interim solution. Many companies and individuals are closing in on that presently. I'd try to list them all but it'd be a very long list! (perhaps that'd be the makings of yet another top 10 list) As the topic is about Digicel Flipbook it should be worth noting that very little has changed with the program in years. It found its niche and appears to be satisfied there. (I have heard rumors of an update but not more than that)

Thanks for the heads up Roger. I've used Digicel before but found the lite version a bit too restrictive. I don't think I would recommend anything below the Studio release except for basic usage and/or trial purpose. (The lite version Is currently only $20 so well worth that however) For those that want to get good at using Digicel Flipbook, Jason Ryan;s video tutorials (many of which are free) do an excellent job of running through operation of the software and as workflow that assists with creation of CG animation. Jason has a lot of useful previews related to his paid tutorials also.

I don't know much about this but saw it and didn't want anyone to miss out if interested. Apparently there is a free online animation course from Futurelearn. Here's the write up: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/explore-animation I don't have specifics but according to the article I gleaned this from the course is free for the next month only. It appears to be part of a bid to get more interest going in online classes after a $200K investment from Creative Skillset.

I'm not sure what your setting on Multipass is but I find that cranking that up a little will also help to blend the shadows. Not quite related and it may not apply in this case but an additional blending trick I've been using is to turn up the transparency just slightly on the ground plane so that the camera's background color bleeds through to ground (as seen by the camera). Of course you have to turn off the Alpha Channel in order to get that to work BUT if using the alpa channel (in the case of comp'ing ) you can then easily change/tint the sky and ground to any color you want just by switching out your background. And this will of course work best with a background that is either a solid color or blurred considerable.

And have we noticed that some folks love that stuff... even prefer it over highly detailed (read: more realistic) movement.

Strangely interesting... xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XahbqLdCVhE

This topic is certainly timely. Last week I downloaded a trial copy of Toon Boom's Storyboard Pro. I'd post the initial storyboard I created with it but... um... er... it's pretty lame. I'm tempted to post it just to encourage folks to post work of their own. Not that the forum is setup for it (outside of posting in the WIP forum) but I love the idea of reviewing dailies. It keeps us plugging away at our stories. I doubt I'll purchase the software but it's nice to know it's available if I need to go that route. I'm leaning more toward drawing splines in A:M and (as you suggest) scanning in drawings to rough out the story. One of the projects I'm currently working on has a lot of input from kids and I'm having a blast developing characters and a story with them. I set up the basic framework but am trying to let them drive the main story. I pay the kids 25 cents a design for their drawings (if they are selected for use in the story) and they are currently making me poor! I'll be posting some of that related work in my Tuckertown topic or perhaps in a topic of its own. If I submit a mascot this year it will very likely be a character created for use in that project; one that was initially sketched directly in A:M (I think I referred to that character above). As a collaborative project with kids that don't have access to A:M and would probably struggle to use any similar software, drawings on paper is the perfect route. I just jumped into A:M a few minutes ago and modeled an R2D2 wannabe from one of the kid's other drawings. We'll probably have to adjust that design quite a bit more in order to be able to call it our own. But it went from drawing to textured model in very short order. Creativity is fun no matter what the approach.

I just experienced one of the reasons I'm not yet ready to jump right into the animatic stage (it's hard for me to call it previz because everything before the images are there is pre-viz; story sketches, layout roughs, etc.). I thought I had a good continuation of the scenes outlined above with villain launching into air from top of building, then shooting a blast of energy down toward the building. Somewhere in the process though my attempt to (simply!) translate and scale a sphere (the proxy for the blast of energy), something went wrong and that sphere refused to work the way I intended. While a few frames from the entire sequence would be useful as representative stills, after some 30 minutes I still don't have that shot roughed out and I find myself at the point of wanting to scrap the whole setup and start again. This when I know that in just a few short minutes I could have drawn the scene out in rough animation. (It's certainly not hard to draw an expanding circle) Grrrr... It's enough to turn a mild mannered wannabe animat.... storyboar...previ....WHATEVER THE HECK I CURRENTLY AM... into a nefarious villain!!! But... good may still triumph over evil and win the day. I watched the video Tore linked to and think I may be up to giving it a go again.