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well, I finished the movie clip. But mother nature conspired against me and I couldn't get the screen up to show it outside. Winds were gusting up to 30 mph all Christmas day, and I wasn't about to put up a $175 rear projection screen only to have it blow away. Here's the youtube link https://youtu.be/FKtQwLk3YV4 A lot of issues became apparent after I had rendered out the bulk of the video. One thing I truly hate is seeing "floaty" movements, and this clip had a lot of that. But, all in all, it's in the can, which for me is a milestone, so I'm taking it.

The problem of courting local advertisers is that you need to be local yourself. And yes building up an inventory of content is the toughest but to crack. For,this to be a viable business model you couldn't restrict to just am users. This would have to be an independent filmmakers distribution channel to get enough content. Or, go it alone and spend the next two years producing a dozen shorts and keep it all in house. Take the long view.

A fun subject to be sure. I thought about starting a topic related to just that thing although from a slightly different vantage point than many. My take on that is the question of reliably monetizing content made in A:M, very generally speaking, is that content made in A:M can be monetized in the same way another other content is monetized. That may seem to be something of a question dodge but I think it rings true. A:M is the all important conduit through which we, as A:M users, create that content. Specifically speaking to the software, there is a certain efficiency gained through use of A:M just as there would be with other software. A:M's strengths are well pretty well known and those should fact into the 'reliabilty+monetization' equation. Spline patch modeling can't be done anyplace else like it can in A:M and that is why we all hang out here. I can't speak too deeply from experience with regard to monetizing creative content so... reliably doing that is even more of a stretch. My questions related to that relate mostly to supply and demand elements such as: If I needed a model created and rigged from a set of drawing... 1. Where would I contact a modeler/rigger in order to get that process started? 2. How much (on average) would a basic (humanoid) model cost to model and rig? I'm talking of modeling and rigging with A:M of course. Having the model converted for use in Blender or Maya is another consideration and one that others would reasonably pay money for in derivative product. And a bit back on topic... When Is Robert scheduled to release his Animation:Master Masterclass? Rodney, i think you and talked about this very subject when I was working in springfield. Yes A:M merely creates the content to be monetized, but we as a community should be able to find a way to improve on, automate, facilitate the workflow of projects so that a) the cost of producing content goes down and more quality content can be produced faster. I think all of the pieces of that puzzle are currently available to us, we simply need to put them together. I had a wild idea the other day when going to the local movie theater. It is a local privately owned second run theater. Popular, showing movies every night. Why not create G,PG, PG-13 grade shorts and distribute to these sort of venues? Charge on a subscription basis, and provide content that can be shown to any audience a la Disney in the golden age of animation. Currently our local theater runs locally produced commercials and regional "color" shorts of local history etc. so I'd think the door would be open, even if by a small crack, to such an idea. The trick is to have a relatively large volume of shorts (say of no more than 3-5 minutes in length) that would support several months of content. The production of new content would have to be shortened so that new shorts are always in the pipeline.

Almost there. Rendering off the last bit (3 minutes worth of Santa snoozing in a chair in front of the fire). This segment is more of a filler to stretch out the overall video. Might just get it set up outside on Christmas eve, which is what the (modified) goal is.

Now we just need to find the formula to reliably monetize our content made in A:M!

so Nicole was a bit ambivalent about the class. I suspect that that is her autism speaking and not the class itself. I will, however, provide some of my observations. First off, the idea sounds great. Get a near virtual one on one lecture series from on of the greats. I bought into it, and got Nicole as a christmas gift the course on movie scoring. Easy enough process to do, they even offered to send a gift card. It never came. The course itself was scheduled to begin in January. It wasn't available until March, and I only found out about that because I badgered them via email almost on a weekly basis. I'm sure that could be chalked up to growing pains, but still. For the price of two of the classes, getting a years access to all of them seems like a good deal though. Hopefully they are passed the growing pains and have wrinkled out their admin issues.

Rodney, thanks for the offer, might take you up on it but I am going to try a few things first. I took off the collisions on sprites for the snowflakes and it did speed things up bit. I was able to get another 700 frames rendered today. Working on another 160 frames now, then we will see about the last 900. We'll see what the morning brings.

I gifted the movie scoring (music) to my day daughter Nicole for Christmas last year. Don't know what she thinks of it but I'll ask her and give you some feedback.

Ok, well when it rains it snows....spent the weekend doing a final render (to an avi) yeah I know don't say "always render to an image file!". Averaging just over nine minutes per frame and was at just about 98% done when windows decided to reboot and through the whole damn thing out the window. Now I am back to square one. I think part of the long renders is my usage (heavy in this section) of Sprite snow flakes. Is there a way to render just the snowflakes off, then reapply that render to the animation for a final pass? The goal is to show this Christmas Eve so time is running out.

Rodney, for the Halloween screen I used a white bed sheet. For this one I splurged and bought a formal back projection screen. One last detail I have to work out is the projector. I have two, one is a small led projector. It has a small image size, so I need to experiment with bouncing it off of a mirror to increase the final image size.

One more piece of the puzzle. All I need now is to finish the final few seconds, render it all off then presto, a Christmas short is born. scene_one.mpg

found it! The problem was with a bone. Some background..when I wanted to create a candy cane pillar, I modeled a tube, then grouped alternating rings and set the surface color to red for the stripe. Then I distorted the mesh to create a simulated swirl. I then added bones that I used in the chor to bend the model to form the cane The main bone somehow got set to boolean cutter = on. Mystery solved...onto rendering the first clip!

Rodney, the issue isn't that the candy cane pillars aren't there. They are, but only the tops are rendering.

So here's a conundrum I have. When I render this scene part of it (the candy cane pillars) disappears .... an I can't figure it out. the chor window the render

In watching a clip of Rudolph the rednosed reindeer, I realized that the storm scene has snow of course, but also they simply scent what I think of as smoke in puffs across the screen. I'm thinking that I may cut this out and take it in a different direction. It's already time to start layering Christmas unto the house and I don't have all of the pieces of the,puzzle built yet. I spent all week stealing minutes from work to build an elf, and not liking the results. So last night I made the director's decision to fire the elf, and hire shaggy. He will do for what I have in mind.

So I've come up with a basic plan . I want to break this up into four small clips, each building on each other. Play one each week until the whole story is told on Christmas Eve. The first is a simple outdoors scene of the north pole, with a blizzard brewing. A couple of challenges already encountered; 1) the look I'm going for is the big storm scenes from Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. With gusts of wind making swirls of snow. I've got a sprite snow storm, with a force making a wind, which works to a point. But I'm lacking those gusts and swirls that I am looking for. 2) Also, in the clip below the workshop has two candy cane pillars. I wanted to decal them to have the swirling stripe like the north pole, but every time I add the same decal to them the stripes end up being horizontal. Annoying to say the least! blizzard_test.mov

John, Thanks! The house was built in 1902, and shows every year of its age, But it's home. I need to come up with a story line before I find this project spiraling out of control and never getting done. I have to keep reminding myself that the reason why the halloween one worked is that it was composed specifically to be viewed through a window, adding a sense of "realism" . So the challenge is to do something that looks like it belongs on a porch. Mark: thanks for the link, I'll check them out for future reference, but I really really want this to be an A:M project.

Trying to find some stock models. At one,point I thought there was a Santa and sleigh kicking around, but can't seem to pin them down. If I can bang Out two or three couple minute animations it ought to make a good show. I'd really love to synchronize a couple of projectors and screens, but I don't have a show controller so maybe next year.

This past halloween I on a whim did a display in my office window using a back projection screen (I never do anything for halloween, but this was fun!). We had crowds of people stopping on the sidewalk to watch a series of 4 videos (purchased from amazon). It got me to thinking that Christmas. My front porch wraps around the side, and would be the perfect place to do this, with the screen between the pillars Instead of shelling out hard earned dollars for someone else's animations, I thought I'd put A:M to work and do my own. This is a first pass of a christmas tree being unveiled by a flying spark. My goal is to match the opening from DIsney of Tinker Bell flying. test_A.avi

I ran into the same issue when working on my entry into the summer contest. Had to clean up the sprite image then tweak the emitter settings. I'd have to go back and check the project file (in sitting in an airport right now) to remember exactly what I had to change though.

Try using an action. Don't know if it will work but worth experimenting. I assemble a lot of my complex props this way.

A slow week for work, plus some boring nights in hotel rooms Got me over the finish line. I even learned a few things along the way, so i am already a winner!

You'll have a tough go against mine!

I think that's a good explanation! Forced perspective. That's how most (not all) buildings in the Magic Kingdom were built (Town Hall was not built that way because it needed to be full size in order to avoid visitors from seeing the Contemporary resort from Main Street.

Here's a character that is so new that the paint is still wet on it! I pulled this guy out of my hat in a few nights of random splining. He even sports a very basic rig and pose sliders for eyes and eyebrows.