luckbat

If ever there was a need for Marcel's "Vampire" plug-in... http://www.kci-group.com/z/vampire.htm

Interesting. Those black lines around the chest emblem and cape--are they decals, or splines rendered as lines? They can't be regular toon lines... can they? (And what does the 'W' stand for?)

Aw, c'mon. Tell us what you fixed!

"Mrs. GenMan?" Shouldn't it be GenWoman?

Thanks a million, Gene. I was looking for something just like this.

Are you guys just skimming this thread, or what? C-wheeler already confessed and apologized, three posts up.

Sorry, I meant no disrespect. It's just that, you always post these really excellent looking still images, but when you post clips, they're usually accompanied by, "This is a clip from my project, only it was rendered realtime so there's no lighting. And also I removed the background." So it sometimes feels like the clips are "crippled" somehow, as if you're avoiding showing more than the barest glimpse of the project as a whole. Those lush still images always make me feel like I'm missing out when I watch the clips. And sometimes when you post updates, they're accompanied by comments like this: "Between this scene and the last one I showed there's quite a bit of stuff, but they're long scenes which reveal a little too much about the story..." That's all I meant by 'secretive.' Once again, sorry if I offended. I'm a big fan, really!

Only Fellows can edit their thread titles, so... win a contest, and you're set. Anyhow, it's great to see another large-scale project coming along! (But must you be so secretive?)

Based on my experience with this thing, I'd say the "storyboards vs. animatics" debate breaks down as follows: If you're trying to figure out what your characters should do, use paper and pencil. If you know exactly what your characters are going to do, and you just want to figure out how to film it, a stripped-down 3d animatic might be of value. Or it might not--it depends on how you work. The storyboard above was excessively time-consuming, but it still helped clarify a lot about this scene. For one thing, I had drawn (that's right, I did do paper storyboards first) a bunch of "cowboy movie"-style face-off shots--you know the type, where the two characters are in profile on opposite ends of the screen. Well, as you can see, I don't use a single shot like that in the storyboards above. It just doesn't work for this scene. One of the characters is wearing a hood, and the backdrop is a gray tile wall. It's not a visually appealing frame. Once I started playing with the camera I decided that a better approach would be to take advantage of the strong diagonal sunlight shafts, and use a series of intercut over-the-shoulder shots, with longer and longer lenses to create an increasing sense of claustrophobia. As Rodney points out, a studio could never afford to waste time playing around with possibilities like this, but as someone with no animation experience, I think it's fruitful for me. Based on what I've got so far, here's a stab at a possible workflow for beginners working on their first short: 1. Storyboard on paper. I recommend using small index cards, because it's easy to move them around manually and try different sequences, and also because it's easy to throw a particular card away and draw a better one. Don't try to mimic those four-panel storyboards you see in books--they discourage you from discarding bad choices. 2. Do a rough animation of your scene, but don't do any planning of shots. Just use the bird's-eye camera. Why? Because the camera's job is to follow and capture the action. It's not the action's job to play to the camera. 3. Once your rough animation is done, watch it from a bunch of camera positions and compare that to your storyboards. There will probably be differences between the animation and what you drew. Figure out which you like better, adjust your storyboards and move on. 4. Start dropping in your cameras. Now that you know your POVs, you can refine your animation, with gestures and eye movements and all that. There are certainly plenty of other approaches that would work equally well, but I think the key is compartmentalization. Don't start animating while you're still planning. Don't try to refine your animation while you're still figuring out camera placement. It's hard, obviously, because you're excited and you want to jump in and get your hands dirty, but without some sort of assembly-line approach like this, you'll get bogged down and never finish.

Well, this thread brings together a lot of other stuff I've posted on these boards, so bear with me. I'm still working on the full version of my "bathroom" scene, which is complicated enough that it requires storyboarding. Since the characters and set are already built, why not do the storyboards in 3D? Well, it turns out there are a lot of good reasons why not, but suffice it to say, 3D storyboarding is only worth doing for judging your characters' relative positioning, along with the corresponding camerawork. As soon as you start moving arms and heads, you're gonna wish you'd just picked up a pencil. On the plus side, 3d storyboards sure look a lot prettier. I ran a Photoshop: Poster Edges filter on this one to make it look "sketchier." For anyone who's been following my work on this scene, here's where it all comes together: 1. The lipsync test I finished back in January corresponds to the 13th image of this storyboard (though the costume was different back then). 2. The fight scene for which I've been soliciting advice starts at the end of this storyboard. Hmm. Now that I think about it, pretty much every thread I've ever started is related to this storyboard in some way... Anyhow, I figured I should upload it and let people see how the project's coming along. These 20 shots represent roughly the first third of the scene. Comments are welcome, just keep in mind that these are storyboards, not stills of the actual animation, so no polishing was done. My main concern was camerawork. Enjoy!

How come no beard?

I personally believe that recumbents are going to become more and more mainstream in the next few years. http://www.kinetics.org.uk/html/speedmachine.shtml

This guy's looking better and better.

Nice! Very "Doom 3"-esque.

Huh. So that blue strip's not his hair, then?

Hmm. Maybe not quite as willowy, perhaps, but she's definitely got the scowl.

If you have a spare moment, read this: Never Wait A friend sent it to me a few years ago, and it really helped focus my actions.

Remember, unless you're planning to squash-'n-stretch this car, there's no need to connect all the splines together. You can build each section using whatever splining strategy makes sense, and overlap the parts...

No need to blame the animation process, it's just Hollywood. When there's that much money at stake, no one wants to take any risks. Hence the insane belief that 20 writers are better than 1. If no one sticks their neck out, no heads get chopped off. I don't want to sound confrontational, but that's BS. You're in as good a position as you'll ever be. You've got more connections and resources than most people, actually. You wanna do something about it, do something. Your responsibilities will always be there--you can't "out-wait" them. Start writing a script. Start making phone calls. Today.

Thanks. Sure--a picture's worth a thousand words: Yeah. She really doesn't like sunlight.

Well, I foolishly decided to dress up my main character in a cloak, which means a whole lot of cloth animation. No way was I gonna do all that by hand. True, the new v.12 SimCloth is right around the corner, but realistic cloth movement is actually kinda distracting when it comes to cel-style animation. You never see Batman's knees poke around under his cape when he walks, y'know? I needed something real-looking, but simplified. I figured I could get a good side-to-side swing using Dynamic Constraints, and I elected to "cheat" the cloak outward a bit, just far enough so the legs wouldn't pass through it. Rigging the cloak took forever--56 bones arranged in a cylindrical "curtain" of chains--but wha'd'ya know? It worked! Ebon_cloak_walk_480.mov

That is one weird shadow.

Looks nice! But the neck seems a bit short.

There surely is. We'll help you find it. Keep us posted!

Sorry, didn't mean to alarm you like that. As long as you're assigning CPs to the bones in the original pre-rig skeleton, and not to the control bones, you should be okay. Here's an easy trick to do this: On the post-rigged model, in bones mode, whenever you click on a CP that's assigned to an invisible bone, the invisible bone will start blinking. Now you can drag a rectangle or lasso around any CPs and they will be assigned to the blinking bone. That said, you can test your CP/bone assignments before you run the rigger in an Action window--that should save you a little time. Bottom line: as long as you only assign CPs to the original pre-rig bones, you should be okay. You can change these assignments at any time, though as you've learned, it's a little trickier after you've already run the rigger. But not impossible.