Bruce Del Porte

File size is always an issue. Can you view a WMV file?

A worthy first effort. He should enter it in Pixelmech's Mini Movie Contest.

As always, something wonderful to dissect and learn from. Thanks

Paul Will the Rodney and Vern action figures be on the next CD?

The hair material has to be applied to a model or a group in a model and the hair button turned on. If you see hair on the model the the grooming button should light up and you will see splines among the hairs.

I think you are right, now that you mention it.

Playing with Wegg's skin material and Yves' skin shader is giving pretty good results so far. This is with the standard chor lighting which I will play with next. The render times and memory usage is still a concern (52 minutes/frame) if I want to use this combination for an animation but it looks much better than my attempts at skin materials. Yes, I know, she has no hair. This is a skin experiment.

A couple of constraints made the gag hard to pull off. Spacing is tight because there are so many letters in "Animation" and the dance doesn't have them walking toward the back of the stage for very many frames. It actually turned out to be better on a TV. About the same resolution but the picture is much bigger so the hook is more visible. I may just leave the whole gag out, I've rendered it out both ways. On TV it doesn't add much but it isn't really a negative either. Restaging the dance to give me more time to make it noticeable would definitely be more work. I can add steps but it would delay the "Festival" entrance. I added the gag in rather than planning for it. A lesson learned! I like the overshoot idea if I have room, I'll probably give that a try. Thanks everyone.

I think I am nearing the close of this project. I made an ending to go along with the intro and spliced them together for one last post. Once you fade the colors out, they look pretty good on TV. Making a DVD out of AM cartoons is harder than it would seem. Maybe I'll piece together a tutorial. Intro & Ending (10MB)

Great solution Vern. Maybe break up the light green ring on the left side a little. Have you tried animating it to slosh? At the risk of being the strait man here, what is the goop supposed to be?

This is all of it, now comes the tweaking. The odd-letter-out bit didn't turn out as effective as I would have liked (maybe even a distraction) but it's placement and time window may never allow it to be what I thought. Sorry about the size (12MB), flashing colors don't compress easily. Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated. Rough Cut Bruce

Can you post a wireframe, are there splines running along those shadows?

I'm make slow but steady progress. I still want to add the "n"as the odd man out bit and maybe the finger snap to the "Animation" line. Then lots of tweaking. Help with some crits please. Further Progress

Looks good, you might want to run a spell check to it. More than a few typos.

Thanks guys. The nine letters of "Animation weren't really mage to line up with the nine rows of lights, really just a coincidence. A gel is an image or film clip that a light projects through. This then adds a projected image on the objects the light is shining on. If you use a single image as a gel, you get a static projection of that image. In his case I used the rendered clip of the flashing light (glows, not really lights) background. I rendered it out as a TGA sequence but a QT .mov would work as well. The colors of the gel tint the light. To make it a gel, load the image/clip like any other rotoscope and drag it from the images folder and drop it on a kleig light in the chor. Adding some volumetric to the light (options folder) adds to the effect. You have to render to see the effect. This is the first frame of the animation and the first frame of the gel. If you look at the top edge of the projected lights, in reverse order, you see the colors line up with the bottom row on the gel. Probably way too much information. You can index from the gap. BTW The lights looks funky because of the tga to jpg conversion in order to post. I think it is because jpg can't show color with a non-zero or 255 alpha value. It's just the lights frame from the movie.

Nancy, The colored lights are a gel tga sequence, dropped on a rim light, placed behind the letters. I shot the background flashing lights as a separate layer and used it as the gel. I added some volumetric to the rim with the gel. Zach, Yes, the entire piece will be about 20 seconds. The letters will turn again, back to "animatio" and I think I will have "Festival" line dance in from the right. The "n" will scramble back into it's position. There is enough music I can make it longer if need be.

As the dog was walking me this morning I thought about the morph and it turned out to be easier than I had first thought. I just had the extra letter disappear here but I think I may have the "N" follow the letters back and get the show biz hook. animation to festival transition Great ideas guys, thanks

I thought about having the letters morph into festival but I'm not quite sure how I would pull it off without an ugly transition. Any clever suggestions?

Thanks for the input. I added a little more and played with a lighting idea, still pretty crude. The "Animation" will eventually complete the turn and dance in place. The "Festival" will dance facing the camera the whole time. I just did a short action to get timing. After the "Animation" completes the turn, I'll Have "Bruce's" drop from above. I haven't really thought about coloring the letters. It still needs a lot of work and of course will be about 20 sconds long. second sample Let me know your thoughts Thanks

I'm making a DVD of old shorts and very shorts and am experimenting with opening title ideas. This is a three second experiment as as part of a 15-20 second introduction title scene. This idea is to have "Animation Festival" spelled out doing a dance number. I know the animation is crude, I'm looking ideas on how to make the whole concept work or maybe a better idea. sample mov

Got it, thanks!

The contest is a great idea. I'm number........hmmmm. wait till I post, it will be on the side. Oh, my question..Does AM have a "Make Dragon" button like Maya has?

Sorenson 3 is fine for this clip, you need to compress the sound to reach your goal. Qualcomm Purevoice would work nicely here.

The bottom looks like the sprite to me, just on a smaller scale. What does the bottom image look like against a dark background in Avid/FC.

What a fun project! The DC turned out great.