Wildsided

Wow Spleen that's a sweet lookin' video. I especially liked the spotlights at around 1:28.

Thanks Rodney! Gwen is actually my wife Nicole. Since Simon became increasingly more......let's say absent (Hence his cardboard stand in). I felt the team really needed a consistent 3rd member, because there's limitations to what you can do with one guy and a puppet. So Nik offered to voice the 3D character. I do currently script the show and animated this one around the live footage. But for future I'll have to start more advanced planning and storyboarding especially for the 'skits'. The show's tag line is 'More than just a game' and that's something I really want to expand on. The plan is to have 'Dan' working on the time machine from episode 7 and it screw up and hurl the team through time and space into various videogames and we interact with the characters and be involved in the plot of the game. For instance early on in Final Fantasy VII, the bad guys blow up a support structure and drop a whole sector of a city onto the slums below. At the time the main cast of the game are at the top of the support tower trying to prevent this from happening. In epic gamin' we'd arrive at that point at the base of the tower and hold of re-inforcements. The thought process being that we can't change events that took place. But in the game the characters aren't bothered by enemy re-inforcments and the viewers would see that the E.G team were the reason for this. Obviously that'd be a fairly complicated scene to put together so i'd definitely have to storyboard it.

Hi guys! E.G Episode 14 is now up if anyone wants to watch. Dissidia Final Fantasy - Epic Gamin' Episode 14 This episode features the official introduction of Gwen as a main character in the show and is also the first episode to include 3D animation. Hope you all like it. I'll hopefully update again shortly with some stuff for the next episode. Dan

Fair play Rodney, nothing stopping me deleting the folder with the stills in it once I'm done I spose. Is the saving the image sequence in A:M after it's rendered and imported a pretty quick process? If not it's no big deal I'll just have to factor that time into the production schedule. Lol I'm sure we'd all get a lot more done if we didn't have to wait for rendering. Ah well them's the breaks

Quick question for anyone in the know. I tried using Net Render yesterday and was all excited to halve the render time by using the 2 cores on my PC. The problem is when I got to picking the format i wanted to save the output file as. I didn't have any video options. I could only pick Targa, PNG, JPEG, Open EXR (never heard of that) or BMP. I'm sure there is software available that could stitch the seperate image together into a video, but I don't really want a folder with 2000 plus images in it. I might be missing something completely obvious (I'm good at that). But does anyone know how to make .mov or .avi available as selectable file formats? Dan

Rodney - I just re-read the thread and saw you liked the show! Thank you so much, Without too much of a sob story, I lost my job (Bakery manager of all things) last year due to severe depression and decided that as I've done jobs I hated all my working life I wanted to do something that i enjoy for once. Luckily my wife has been very supportive of me doing the web show and as it's (besides my family) all I've really got to keep me sane it's really encouraging to hear people say they like it. Thumperness - Once I've got it all rigged up (it'll be one of my own rigs, but shouldn't be hard to work with) I'll send it over to you. knowing some good is coming of something I've done would mean the world to me.

Yeah I like PNG's because of the transparency. I use Toon Boom Studio for when I dabble in 2d animation, but I draw the characters in photoshop and then import them into TB. PNG's were the only files I could get TB to recognize that the background of the image was transparent and I wasn't trying to import a big white block.

Forgive me if this is an obvious question that everyone knows the answer to. But Rodney why do you prefer .PNG's? Aside from the obvious that they're decent quality but relatively small.

Just got through with my Sonic model for Episode 15 of Epic Gamin'. He still needs rigging but figured I'd post a few pics of the model.

Thanks for the replies and advice guys. That's what I love about this community, everyone is supportive and the more experienced folks don't mind sharing their knowledge and experiences with the software. Instead of just pointing out flaws and saying their stuff is so much better. The weird fact is that I read some really negative stuff about the hash forums before I joined, but god knows where the posters opinions came from.

Here's a quick render of Gwen in her ship and reporting her status to the squadron leader. This is just a lip sync test so no camera movement or even a background at the minute. It's also just her voice audio, i'll add ambient noise and music during post. Dan eg3.mov

Quick update on the Arwings. I remembered that as part of the scene the Epic Gamin' team would be visible sitting in the ships. And that meant I needed a cockpit. So i built one this afternoon and installed it into the model. It's not super detailed but for its purpose it doesn't need to be. This is a view through the ships canopy These 2 are just the Cockpit model. The spaces below the console are for the pilots legs. In a real plane there would probably be pedals there. But as they'll never be see I didn't see the point in making them.

I haven't to be honest Rob, I'd like to if there's time but the Skits are usually only 20 secs to a minute. They're more to set up the joke than anything else. i have big plans (lol perhaps too big, I'm good at biting off more than I can chew) for the Christmas episode though so I'll take special care then. There's a lighting rig on the forums somewhere that I've got my eye on.

Hi guys, Didn't know exactly where to post this but as it's stuff I'm working on I guess this'll be as good a place as any First up is a squadron of Arwing's from the game series Starfox that will be used in the opening skit of episode 14. ships_for_forum.mov You can also check out Gwen our soon to be new co-host by visiting Epic Gamin say hi to Gwen