kikiriki

Really?!? That's GREAT! :-) Please tell me what do you think and about the reaction of the audience! I'm specially interested if it will be hard to follow the story because of the (strange) language and Subtitles. I have been told that big nations are not used to read subtitles- that subtitles could seriously interrupt the viewers experience. So based on your opinion (and observation) I will consider if I need to make an English version of the film. Yes I know... I will have to be more active promoting the film in the future (nowadays it's not an art to make a good movie, it's an art to sell it!) Yes- about a year. But while I was uploading the trailer on the YouTube I noticed an option "Private Screening". If I understand it right I could make a list of (up to) 25 people and invite them on private screening. I will probably do that soon (since this is not against the Festival regulation).

Thank you guys! You are the best :-) Unfortunately- It's a little to far for me :-( And a little too expensive. Festivals from US of A doesn't cover any expenses for the authors, so I would need to pay for plane and hotel from my own pocket. Which is a little to much for me at the moment. The store for the customers from Slovenia is already open (see the Slovenian part of the webpage). But it's way too complicated to sell T-shirts to outside of Slovenia. So I set up a store on Cafepres. I ordered couple my own product- just to check out the quality and I was shocked. The quality of T-shirts from the Cafepres cannot match to those I got from my local supplier. See the comparison: http://bugbrain.no-ip.org/ftp/bbguest/cafepres.jpg I was using the same image for both T-shirts. I cannot sell such T-shirts, so I closed my store at the Cafepres and I'm looking for another solution. (Of course Ken, since you are a part of the team, I will send you one for free :-) ) I doubt :-) But I'm planning to publish a DVD someday which will include small booklet about "making of".

Just a little update, to keep your guys informed :-) Today will be the world premiere of Chicory at the Cinequest festival in San Jose (CA). I won't be there personally so If some of you will be at the screening I would really appreciate if you could tell me your opinion and the reaction of the audience! In March Chicory will be shown on 3 festivals (Atlanta USA, and two festivals in Spain). I finally manage to collect enough courage to present the film at the CGtalk: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php...54&t=734766. There you will also find a link to the HD version of the trailer on the YouTube. In the portfolio section you will also find a HD version of good old Perk animation. (HD versions are allwas fine for animators since they can see many errors and mistakes :-) ) As always! Your comments and support will be very appreciated! :-)

I'm considering to attend The Cinequest to give a better start to Chicory:-) (Though I'm a little concerned. I haven't been more than 500km from my home town, and San Jose is exactly on the opposite side of the world- as far from home as possible. :-( ) Anybody from the list from that area? (San Francisco, San Jose?) Anybody planning to attend the festival?

Hi Guys! After a long time, another small update of this topic :-) "Chicory 'n' Coffee" has received very warm acceptance here in Slovenia. I even won an award on the National Film Festival! "Chicory" will now start an "International Festival Cycle". The world premiere will be at the Cinequest festival (www.cinequest.org) in San Jose, Califoria. So if you live near by, maybe you will be interested to see how the animation looks on a big screen, rendered in Hi-resolution with Dolby Digital Sound! For the Information on which festivals you could see „Chicory“ after that, please check my webpage from time to time: www.bugbrain.com/ck , The web page has been just updated and you could find a lot of new materials (specially in the Blog section). I would like to use this opportunity and once again express a big "thanks!" to all A:M supporters from this list and specially to Cory Collins and Ken Heslip for their help with animation and Yves Poissant and Steffen Gross for the technical help. And of course to Martin Hash! :-)

Thank you very much for your kind comments! I forgot to mention that sword-fighting and roster walking in the background was animated by Ken Heslip :-) Thank you again. I also got a lot of help from another member of this Forum: Cory Collins (though his work is not visible in those particular scenes) Unfortunately, it's not a playback :-( This pop happens between two actions. I was strugling with this error for quite a while, but I didn't find a solution in a reasonable time so I had to move on... Re-rendering is not an option since "Chicory" is already on 35mm film. I'm not sure what you mean? Now that is a DivX error (I should put keyframe on every frame, but then the file would be much larger). Try to use a VNC player instead. It plays literary everything (even broken or only partly-loaded files). VNC Or GOM player which is also good and very user friendly.

Thank you for advices... but QT doesn't work as I expected. Files are still more than twice as big than DivX file and also quality is not as good. For now I only have an AVI version (DivX 6.1) It's quite a huge download (36mb) so be patient... So here it is... looking forward for your comments! http://www.bugbrain.com/zbrisi/C&K_trailer.avi

Hi Guys! I just made a short trailer from the "Chicory 'n' Coffee". I would like to use Quick Time, but I'm not very familiar with it. I tried with several codecs, but the file was allways much larger with lower quality than DivX (avi) codec. Could someone give me an advice which codec to use and what settings?

Thank you all for your kind words and good wishes! I can't imagine better compliments than If my work is inspiration to someone. I will post a list of Festivals which will accept the Film on my webpage. I will also post a couple of movie fragments from the animation (not the whole movie- though I would like to...) Check the webpage by the end of September (I don't believe I could manage to do this sooner)... About the Environment Shader- if it is not included in v 15 (I'm still using v 13) then maybe Yves (the author) will be so kind to donate it to the community. It is really very useful shader. I didn't use any reflections in the whole movie (actually I did- only in one scene)- I faked all glass and eye reflections via this Shader. It renders much, much faster than real reflection.

Thank you for interest! Yes, the animation is finished. I'm in a final stage of the post production. We were just finished Dolby Stereo Mix, and next week I'm going to Hungary for a couple of days to make a digital to 35mm film transfer. And right after that - I will go to a VACATIONS (I haven't been on proper vacations for the last two years). When I will return, I promise that I will finally make an update of the Chicory web page (www.bugbrain.com/ck) and make a short teaser (unfortunately I won't be able to show the whole 8 minutes of animation on-line, because of the regulations of the big Animation Festivals. So for the first year or two you will be only able to see it on the animation festivals. Sorry for that... In a meantime- here are a couple of images from the movie. P.S. Almost forgot- a BIG thank you to members of this forum: Cory Collins, Ken Heslip, Yves Poissant and Steffen Gross for helping me on this project.

Long time no post :-) I made a little animation from the sequence of my movie as a new year congratulation for the Hashers. The animation is coming along quite nicely- though painfully slowly. All the characters and models are finished and about 2 minutes of animations is rendered. I'm planning to make an update to the Chicory website first thing next year, where you could read (and see) more about the progress.

Yipeee! The guest-book is no longer empty and sad :-) Also thank you for the tips. I will remove the script, storyboard and the animatic in the next update. I will return them online when the movie will be finished. Thank you all for your kind words and support :-) (I will try to make an update soon- so check the site from time to time...)

Click on the flags at the front page to change the language to English.

Ken has already made an announcement about our new "Chicory & Coffee" website: Www.bugbrain.com/ck The site still needs a little tweaking and bug fixing before we could promote it more widely. So I would like to ask you Hashers for a favour. I'm a little unsure if I should keep the Animatic (and storyboard) on the website (under "About the project" menu. A lot of "beta-viewers" were puzzled and thought that this Animatic is the final product). -Please watch the Animatic and then think very carefully! Now that you know the story; are you any less interested to see the final result? (or maybe you are interested even more?) -about the subtitles: as far as I know folks from the USA (or other large countries like France, Italy...) are not accustomed to read the subtitles. Is that very annoying to you? Can you follow the story despite the subtitles? First I was planning to make an English version right after we'll finish the Slovenian version. But, to be honest, I'm already a little tired of this project and I would rather move to something new instead of working for additional couple of months on English version. So what is your opinion: subtitles or English synchronisation? Thank you all in advance! :-) P.S. The Guest-book is still almost empty ;-)

Great work! Looking forward to see the progress... :-)

Huh... tips... I don't know... just tweak the lights, materials etc... for hours, days... weeks... until they look as you imagine them in your head. :-) Open EXR and A:M composite could help a lot! I don't know how to work without them anymore. If you are not yet familiar with them, then I suggest you to start reading Yves tutorials in the forum.

Grainy look is because of low AO sampling rate (10%). I like that- it gives a real "film-look" :-) Yes- it is entirely done in A:M. But with a little help of EXR images and A:M composite (exosure adjustments, bloom post-effect...)

I don't know if it is part of the A:M yet, but I'm beta testing it for almost a year. Please look at the Models Surface properties- under the Ambiance Shader you should have a Environment option. This Environment Shader works similar as Environment material, except it shows over the decals and doesn't fade out with transparency (which means it could be usefull for faking reflections in glass).

You guys are the greatest! Really! :-) Thank you for offering me your help- specially to you Ethan for services of your renderfarm! I really appreciate that! And I might really use it! :-) I got the similar offer from the Martin a while ago to use Hash renderfarm. But I'm not sure if this is technicaly possible, since I'm kind of a control-freak and I like to constantly inspect the progress of every image :-) I'm very often stopping the rendering process in the middle, and change a small detail and start rendering all over again... I think I would drive you nuts if I will ask you to re-render the whole scene because of some minor thing that you won't even noticed (after a weeks of rendering) :-) About a Hi-res images. This film is intended for film festivals and I'm planning to transfer it to 35mm film. In next week or two I will make couple of tests on 35mm film with different resolutions. Then I will go to the local cinema and ask the operator to project them on the big screen so that I could see if there is actually a visible difference between 1600x900pix or 1200x675pix (which is exactly 50% smaller). Or maybe I can go even lower than that! (Perk was transferred to 35mm and it didn't look bad on a big screen even though it was only 720x576 pix. Far from Pixar quality, but still decent). At the same time I will also test the difference between the COLORS on my LCD monitor and on the big screen. If someone is interested I will post my findings here. (I strongly believe that TWO movie should be rendered in a bigger resolution than NTSC. If the movie will become a hit it could be easily transferred to film). About the story- I believe that we have a very strong story. Otherwise I wouldn't even start the whole project! And we also have a great music. (You will see the animatik on our webpage). I'm not so sure about my animation skills (last couple of years I was mostly playing a role of director and organiser in our studio- others were doing the fun things like animating. So I hope I'm not to rusty... :-)) Thank you all again- I is a great feeling to inspire someone who also inspire me! I have just finished one more test. I think I'm pretty close to the lighting mood I want in the movie... (credits: modeling: Uros Hohkraut, texturing: Uros, Dusan, Lighting: Dusan)

Thank you very much for all that nice compliments! I really needed that to give me a little push to continue. All those renderings are just for test and I'm aware that there are still quite a few problems. So it is official- it is an error! The chair in this image is lifted off the ground and this was not a common for a Slovenian chair at the beginning of 20th century :-) But none of those pictures won't be on the final movie anyway. Last couple of weeks I'm mostly testing lights (Which is something I really don't like to do). I would like to get a specific “mood”, which is actually relatively easy if you are using Ambient Occlusion and IBL! But rendertimes are just to high! For the image above it took almost 4 hours to render (1600x900pix)! And there are still a lot of props and characters missing (and the exterior with a cat is for now just a photo of some barnyard I found on the Internet. So Vern- yes the cat has a real fur :-)). Means that the whole 7 minutes of movie would render almost 5 years on my computer. OK- I'm planning to get a small render-farm, but I will still have to make a lot of compromises to render the film in a couple of months (I will probably use AO only for the characters and not for the static objects in the scene). So (unfortunately) the final images probably won't look as good as this one :-(

I received couple of E-mails if the “Chicory&Coffee” website is ready yet. Unfortunately it is not yet finished. And will probably take a week or two (or three- I simply don't have the time to work on it). Until then here are couple of renderings from the project. Just to keep up your interest! :-)

Hi Richard. I have just installed XNview and I cannot find an option to import EXR files (only HDRI). Are you sure it works or did I missed something?

Thank you Mike! :-) Here is a wireframe.

Don't worry- background photo is just for test! :-)

Hi Guys! Thank you very much for your interest! :-) I was planning to post something in the forum a long time ago. But I planned to finish the “Chicory & Coffee” WIP web-pages first- to make a good impression. Unfortunately I just cannot find the time to finish those darn pages, since there are always something more urgent to do. I hope the website will be ready by the end of the month (95% of work is already done). You will be the first to know! Until then I'm sending you couple of pictures... The modeling part of the job is about 85% done. We didn't do any real animation yet (besides couple of tests), but we will probably start within a month. Thank you all for your kind offers, but I think I won't need more help, since recently we were hired another full-time animator, so I hope this will be enough. But if won't- I have you on my list Muff! :-) But I would use this opportunity to thank everybody that helping me with this project: -First, of course to Hash team and specially to Martin for this great piece of software! We are working at least 10 hours a day for more than 6 months with this software and it runs very smoothly. Though I have expressed my concerns about stability of the software in the past (v8 and v9), I could honestly say that A:M has made a great progress in those last couple of years and v13 is one of more stable applications on my computer! I practicaly didn't lost any work because of crashes in all this time! -Uros Hohkraut: he is responsible for all the props and scenees and as you will see he's doing a magnificent job -Cory Collins, who helped me to build a great character rig -Ken Heslip who helps me with character modeling and who proved to be a very enthusiastic, fast and reliable co-worker -Yves Poissant, for great advices and specially for the “Environment Shader”. I'm testing it for couple of months now and it works like charm! It will significantly cut down render times! -Steffen Gross, who has programmed a little plug-in called “Merge and Purge Decals” literary over night and this plug-in really helped me a lot! Of course, the list of credits will extend in the future! You will learn more about the project on the website! Stay tunned!