ZachBG

Awesome, Mike!

Awwww, just makes me wanna HUG him! Or hit him over a volleyball net. I often have trouble distinguishing those two.

Hello. I thought my entry in today's Animation Showdown (digitalrendering.com) turned out pretty well this time, so why not share it? The topic was: This was four hours of work from start to finish, and everything, including rendering, was done in AM for Mac OS X rev 1. Comments and crits welcome. Quicktime 6 required. DoorShowdown.mov

Hey, I'm a Mac-hed myself (you'll notice that the computer in the background is running OS X--though on a Wintel box--maybe it's that secret version that Jobs has in his office). But somehow Command-Option-Escape didn't seem as funny.

Thanks! The soundtrack was a Soundtrack soundtrack. No, that's not a tautology.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that a revised, large-screen version of my animation <ESC> is up on AMFilms. This is the one that won the IRTC for October 2003. I cleaned up some of the animation and fixed a bunch of textures. http://amfilms.hash.com/search/Entry.php?entry=786 Interestingly enough, I got an email from a guy who had independently come up with the same concept of an escape key escaping. He was kind enough to say that he had enjoyed my film. Although he's doing it in another application, I thought I'd post his proof of concept render. Zach

Rubber Ducks Unite! I was thinking of this when we made ours.

Nice work. Some of the characters seemed 2D-based--were they? And were they integrated with A:M, or After Effects? The integration was excellent either way.

It's not so much a contest as a film festival--more details can be found on their web site, at http://48hourfilm.com/, but in brief, the Project comes to a bunch of cities worldwide, the films are made during a specified weekend for each city, all completed films are screened at a local theater, and one film is chosen as "Best of City" and it goes on to compete as "Best 48-Hour Film of the Year." It started as a local festival in Washington, D.C. in 2001. As for places to view the films, that's left to each individual filmmaker, but the Project does sell a best-of DVD for each year, IIRC. We finished our film past the deadline, so we're not eligible to win anything except the Audience Award (essentially a popularity contest, taken from surveys filled out at each screening). AFAIK, that won't be announced until the Best of D.C. screening on June 11.

As I used to say, I've been a newbie since 2000. Not sure about everyone else.

Thank you to everyone for the kind comments! Well, I'm not sure; except to say that it was very easy to create an FTP server with Mac OS X, a router, and a DNS alias service. For some reason I have three Macs now; two of them were running A:M in OS 9.2, and the third, which can only boot into OS X, ran the FTP server and my editing software. Jeff Lee whipped together a neat utility for the PC which monitored a local directory (where A:M was saving Targa files he rendered) and sent them directly to the FTP site as soon as they were created. In most cases, it was faster to render and send from his PC than to render locally on my Macs. Only one team member couldn't access my FTP site (still not sure why), so we also used the blog as a holding area for projects, models, storyboards, etc. And it's possible that we didn't make the deadline because of travel time, in a sense; we did the writing and sound recording in one place and the animation work at another (my house). They were about fifteen minutes apart, and I was particularly ticked when I forgot the AC adapter for my laptop (the FTP machine) and had to waste a half-hour driving to the recording house and back to pick it up...

Well, at long last--well, only two days, but that's as long as it took to make the darn thing--our animated entry in the 48 Hour Film Project for Washington, D.C. is available on AMFilms: http://amfilms.hash.com/search/entry.php?entry=744 A larger version (640x480, 33MB) is also available: http://www.shipbrook.com/mpegs/DuckSauce.html Just to remind everyone, this was created from start to finish--writing, acting, modeling, animation, rendering, editing, and music--in about 53 straight hours by a team of ten: six people local to D.C. and four others scattered throughout the Internet. We were given a series of elements we had to incorporate (the genre was ours alone, but the rest were given to every team): Genre: mystery Prop: rubber duck Character: S. Baxter, professional photographer Line of dialogue: "You know I love the _____." It was screened at the American Film Institute's Silver Theater (Silver Spring, Maryland) on Wednesday May 11 to thunderous laughter and applause. Although it was handed in past deadline, and is therefore not eligible to go on to the Best of City or Best of Year competitions, it is eligible for an Audience Award (the audience's favorite among the films shown at that particular screening--about ten films, I believe). Interestingly, one of the other teams' leaders came up to me afterward and said he knew none other than Martin Hash himself, from way back in San Francisco. The world is not small, it's microscopic. A fuller account of the screening, for those who are interested, is here. We'll be polishing up some of the rougher spots and releasing a Director's Cut later in the year (hopefully before SIGGRAPH). Hope y'all enjoy it!

How do you light the fur separately? (Sorry if this is a simple question; I don't have v11 yet.)

Unless it's giving away trade secrets I'd love to see a wireframe. I'm trying to figure out what makes a good toon model and this seems like a great Teachable Moment, as they say.

That's an amazing character and an amazing piece of work. Well done.

That's pretty funny! I'd love to see how you modeled and rigged the eyes. Works really well. Zach

Biggest problem: When you want to write "it is" as a contraction, it's spelled "it's", but when you're speaking of possession, it's "its" without an apostrophe. Other than that, it's brilliant.

Thank you! No disrespect, but are you sure you haven't got me mixed up with robcat? I've only done a few of these... This is a generic character that I modeled myself for a different project. He's very low-patch, which is what I needed at the time. Zach

Well, it's showdown time again, and this time 'round the topic was Walking a Tightrope. Yow! Here's what I came up with: http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/tightrope_sor3.mov 800K, Sorenson 3, 13 seconds. For those not in the know, the deadline for these showdowns (found at digitalrendering.com's forums, reg. required) is four hours, from finding out the topic to handing in the completed animation. My time spent on this was probably three and a half hours, because I had to pick my son up from nursery school halfway through. I wonder if that's a problem on feature films. Comments and crits welcome. As a further interesting point, the modeling of the rope and all the animation (and most of the rendering) was done in the Mac OS X Beta. Trust me, this is a big deal. Zach edit: wrong URL, fixed it...

Ha! I can finally answer a question! It's because you're using Z-Buffered shadows. IIRC from another thread, Z-buffered shadows need to hit TWO surfaces before they cast a shadow; since in the real world, everything has thickness, this usually isn't a problem. However, it looks like your cape is only one surface, not two, hence... I found the appropriate link: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...indpost&p=18572 Try using raytraced shadows and see if they work. I love the look of your characters. Fay (v2)'s face seems different than the first design, and I like the first version better. I think it's a question of eye proportion... but that's just my opinion.

As someone who has had that damn Lego theme song (the one about the Lego-Maniac) follow him since eighth grade, I nonetheless think this is the coolest idea since... well, Legos. I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this! Zach (and yes, I was a Lego-Maniac back in the day...)

Dope sheets aren't worth the time it takes to fix them. My lip sync contest entry from last year was entirely done in the method you wound up with, Graham. (still meaning to do a tutorial...)

I actually thought yours was by far the best of the bunch. The timing and weight was virtually perfect. Great job.

Precisely.

Nice! Good acting. If I had to nitpick, I would want another vibration after he stops suddenly. Very cool though. The eyes have it! Zach