ZachBG

Now, give us a flythrough, with a tiny man walking on the branches, jumping from leaf to leaf.

OK... I can so NOT wrap my head around that... what's moving? The egg, the logo, or both? Urrrrgh... me cave man, me not understand higher boolean mathematics...

Hey there-- If you don't want the head/neck bones to affect the spine, you have a couple choices: 1. Lock off the bones (click the lock button while the bone is selected) in each Action and Chor; or 2. Turn "Attached to parent" OFF in the bone's properties. Hope this helps.

Hi: The one thing that stands out to me as false, from an acting standpoint, is the little fist-movement at the end. It just doesn't seem to fit with the voice.

You've done it (are doing it) again, Jim...

There will be tweaking (and re-rendering for video). But it is in the queue for AMFilms; it just got delayed because of Ken's trip to Macworld.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the creator of Garritan Personal Orchestra (which Jeff used to make the music) was so impressed by Soap Opera, he'll be playing it at his booth at NAMM, a music industry trade show, in Anaheim, California. Pretty cool stuff!

That would be fantastique, and very generous of you.

Excellent as usual. (ps: welcome back, Rusty!)

That's awesome! Nice lighting, too.

Oh... never mind... guess I should have looked at the web page, eh? (no skin shader for the Mac, not yet.)

bloody hell. Now that I might buy. Is the skin shader cross-platform? (I know, you're not The Authority, but I haven't seen a definite answer anywhere...)

Heigh-ho. In this thread, Noah Brewer describes a technique for blending two different scales of models into the same scene, so you can create, say, a pull-back from a close-up of a person out to the city which the person is in. I decided to try it out, and this was the result. http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/cameramatch.mov Lady Goodbody is in a separate choreography from Shaggy and the background, and no scaling is done in either choreography. See Noah's post for details. Project file attached (uses characters from the 2005 CD). Lady_G_Runs.prj

That's great! I could see the transition on second viewing, but it looked absolutely seamless the first time I saw it. I assume they'll be on-screen long enough to read each word in isolation?

Hi, Bruce: I like the concept. I presume, though, that you'll have different backgrounds, colors, etc. because it's a little hard to read right now. I don't know why, but I find the letters' turn-around to be very distracting. Almost like I should be trying to read it backwards.

That's the second thing you've ever made with A:M? Or the second thing you've shown to the outside world? Either way, it's a damn good picture!

Thanks! That was purely cheating to blend between the choreography action and the cycled run. I needed an easy way to get the model bone into the proper place for the path constraint. But somehow, it worked okay.

Well, now that we've established that we all think the same way... I actually saw this before your announcement (I was trolling AMFilms when it appeared). Nicely done. I loved the bizarreness of the arm and the female soap's scream was priceless.

Hi, friends and enemas: Let me direct your attention to Door Number 3, where we find: Oscar vs. FBI Warning This is a piece I did as an intro for a client's demo reel a few months ago. Jeff Lee modeled the text and logo for me and the client provided the character, the "story," and a time limit of ten seconds which was promptly shattered. And don't tell anyone, but this is the first time I ever got paid to animate anything. What madness! Getting paid to do something this fun! Anyway, hope it brings a tiny smile to your eye, or possibly a tear to your lips...

Thank you for taking the time to critique a bit, Justin. I really appreciate it!

Thank you! Any specific places in particular? I want to make this near perfect before I do a DV-sized version. As I said above, be as mean as you like...

Actually, that's one of the things that really stuck in my craw. It's not so much the modeling as the rigging; in order to get him to move the way I wanted with all those splines... I still don't get it. It was only about a week ago that I realized I might have been able to accomplish what I wanted with a distortion box, but by that time it was too late. Still, there's time to experiment now. This is something that I probably should have posted on the WIP forum for feedback, but I really wanted it to be anonymous for the contest. Not that it mattered it the end...

The amazing thing about film is that you can pretty much do what you want and the audience will probably buy it. For instance, you could scale the lightswitch up for the close-up shot but have it regular-size for all subsequent shots. If anyone notices, I'll buy you a beer. (Or whatever you like. I hate beer, personally.) In fact, if you had the shot tight enough, I'd bet you could still do the "press" you wanted to do originally. Think about it. How is the audience to know that Shaggy's center-of-gravity is all messed up or his arm is passing through his belly, if all they can see is his hand? (Unless you're doing an interactive Arctic Pigs animation, of course.) Oh, as long as we're on the subject of fingers: have you considered capping Shaggy's finger ends? It wouldn't matter, but you're so close to them...

I'm not sure. I've been listening to that section of Don Giovanni since I was in high school at least, so I know the music (or at least one recording of it) like the back of my hand. So the actual musical synchronization for what I wanted to achieve was fairly quick. It was almost like I had been planning it for fifteen years without knowing it. I modeled the bathroom based almost exactly on my own, so that was reasonably simple. The music-making, Jeff could speak better to. I do know that all I asked him to do originally was give me a version, created with GPO, based on a MIDI file I had found on the 'Net. He wound up volunteering to re-do all the parts himself so it would both sound better and be completely copyright-free, and then sang, modeled various knickknacks, added dirt and grime to my models, and even did the bulk of the rendering. I owe him a HUGE debt. Brainstorming, I don't really remember... but it was probably, like most everything I do, tossed about in my head while I was either trying to get to sleep (in bed) or trying to wake up (in the shower). Most of the jokes in the translation came pretty early, but it took me a long time to actually write it down from beginning to end. I didn't do storyboards for this one. The folks who worked with me on Duck Sauce could tell you my storyboards are useless anyway (there's a reason I came to animation from an acting, not art, background). I did do a layout pass, however, and let me find it... Here it is. I don't know if anyone else will be interested in seeing it, but... http://www.hash.com/users/zachbg/SoapOpLayout.mov (4.6 MB) There are points where the screen goes blank; that's 'cause the camera is behind a wall and I hadn't fixed it yet. Thanks everyone for the kind words and comments.

I flip "standard" switches on with the back of a finger. But there's a difference between a flipping switch and this one, which is a pressing switch. Right now you've got a hybrid motion going on; he's not flipping the switch, he's pressing it (though quickly) but in a way one does not normally apply force to those kinds of switches. What he's doing right now simply would not engage it. (A slap with a knuckle might, now that I think about it. But just a finger movement wouldn't do it.) If you want that quick motion and want to avoid what you mentioned, why not change the switch to a standard one? "Suspenseful" is a better word than "ominous" for the feeling I got. Oh, and my speakers were off the first time I saw it. It makes much more sense with the Voyager theme!