largento

A bit more progress! Put the rig into the Storyteller: That just leaves Henrietta. Then I'll go back and start building all the facial poses. For fun, I played around with the characters yesterday:

I don't think it's so much the learning as just the sheer size of the job. Since I've been doing a lot of it lately, I've started to find some shortcuts, but it's still a pretty big task in front of you when you start going at it. It is a pretty satisfying feeling, though, when you get it done.

I'm just a customer like you are. Barry's the one to ask these questions to.

I don't know. The DVDs used a different codec. There's a link to contact Barry on the Lulu store page, you might ask him if there's something specific you need.

Some progress... I've installed the rigs into Poco Boco... and Cutthroat Jacques... Doing some polishing up on the CP weighting for Cutthroat and still haven't given him an inside of his mouth yet. Once I've finished installing all of the rigs, I'll move to the facial poses. Not moving along as quickly as I'd hoped...

TSM2 is the one I bought and I was able to get it to work without a problem. I am using it in Windows XP running in Parallels on my iMac. (Using v 15 of A:M) I am going back and forth between the Windows version of A:M and the Mac version of A:M and it is working fine. Actually better than I expected. The only reference I used was the information that came with the software on the CD.

I bought all 3 DVDs. The first one covers the interface and modeling a character. I think it's broken up into several individual movies to download if you go through his Lulu store.

Thanks, Gerry & Howitzer! Basically that, Gerry. Everyone seemed to recommend it highly. I more or less ordered it just to see if it would be easier to install. I wasn't able to try it in the beginning (with the Mac version being so out-of-date), but since I've put Windows XP on my iMac, I could. The TSM install does seem to be much simpler right now and I'm in a hurry to get things moving along.

Thanks! The key for me was Barry Zundel's training disks. Do a search for his animation training disks. Now he has them available as individual movies that you can download. I basically do it exactly the same way he shows in the modeling tutorials. They made a big difference for me.

Thanks, Paul. She's been ill for some time, so there is at least the relief that her suffering has ended.

Thanks, Nuba! Well, a little bit of a shaky start to my working sabbatical. After some discussions in another thread about the fact that The Setup Machine still worked in A:M, I decided to order it and got it in and up and running on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, that meant abandoning the work that I'd done on Monday-Wednesday, but I think it's worth it. I think in the end, it'll still go faster and there's no question that it's a nicer rig than the one I was creating. Here's the first character rigged with it, Mr. Sneeze: I started working on Poco Boco last night and was very impressed that it was able to handle his stooping posture with no apparent problems. Unfortunately, everything's going on hold today. My grandmother passed away late last night and I'm driving with my sister and her family home tomorrow morning and won't be back until late Tuesday. Hopefully, I'll be able to jump right back into this and finally get them all finished!

Not sure if this is the same on Windows, but open up the Quicktime Player, go to Quicktime Preferences, click on the Advanced tab and check the box next to "Show legacy encoders." Sorenson 3 will then return as an option in A:M.

Thanks, Eric! I haven't done any of the full uv-decaling for the characters yet. Flemm, Storyteller and Cutthroat all have a five o'clock shadow (see the original 2D versions on page 1 of this thread.) Cutthroat's is very distinctive and a big part of his look. That's something I've been putting off until after all the rigging and CP-weighting is completed, though. I haven't made any decisions on the second ship yet. It plays such a minor part, that I'm not sure I want to invest in a full model. What I do know about it is that it is very stylized (and as you say cartoony), so it probably wouldn't be what you are looking to do. It's not a traditional pirate ship at all. I've got a mental picture of sort of how it looks, but I haven't sat down to do the design yet. My goal is to move into storyboarding after I finish this rigging and that will give me a solid idea of how much (or little) of the 2nd ship I'll actually need (as well as the other props and sets.)

Thanks! Right now the plan is to use the people who played the characters in my friend's movie for the voices. Most of them are in Kentucky, so I'm thinking I'm going to end up flying out there at some point and renting studio time to record them.

Thanks for the kind words, Stian & Nancy!

There are different ways to do this. One is to select the groups you want to merge, you'll see that a new untitled group will appear on the PWS. Rename that group and delete the others. Alternately (and the way I'd do it if you're wanting to merge the groups to have the same surface properties), select the groups you want to merge, hit "h" to hide everything else. Click on the group in the PWS that you want the other groups to be part of, hold down the shift button and select everything. Then delete the other groups.

To mark the event, here's a group shot!

And here's Poco Boco! Tomorrow's the first day of my month-long sabbatical and I plan to start off by rigging all of the people characters (Henrietta, Cutthroat, Sneeze, Storyteller & Poco). I have high hopes that working on nothing else, I'll be able to finish doing that in the first week. I am bigtime jazzed about having that chore finished! :-) After that there are still a couple of more non-people characters to model and rig ...and of course, more locations and props. This will feel like a huge accomplishment, though. I'm hoping to get all of the storyboarding done in week 2, but that's getting ahead of myself.

Egads, old boy! :-) Looks fun. I think the eyebrows and mustache look great made with hair.

I think it looks great, Al! Nicely done!

Looking forward to this! Although I was taken aback by Quebec City being the oldest city in North America. Turns out Quebec City has to put some caveats on their claim. Wikipedia says it is "considered to be the first European-built city in non-Spanish North America." In other words, if you pretend Spain isn't part of Europe. :-) St. Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565 and is the oldest in the continental US. Mexico has even older cities.

Modeled the Storyteller's body. (He's always sitting in the movie, so I modeled him in a sitting position complete with his chair (means less work when I get to the rigging). :-) I should be finishing a lot of things in this coming month. Last Friday was Leap Day and I decided to take a leap, so I went into work and arranged it so that I could take a month-long sabbatical to work on this. I work through Friday and then I don't go back to work until April 9th! I'm really excited about it and can't wait to see how much I can get done working on it full time for the month!

You might could get away with just doing surface properties. Here's a sort of quick stab at it. With some playing around, you might find something that works for what you're doing.

I actually did something similar to this with the rig for Flemm. I changed the color of all the geometry bones to be a red color, all the cosmetic bones are a light blue and all of the control bones are green. Not an ideal situation, but it made sense to me and I was able to visually tell what type of bone I was looking at just by the color.

It looks like typing a period deselects the points you have selected and selects all of the other points in the object. So when you type a period the second time, it deselects all the other points and reselects the points you originally selected. I didn't know this trick, either. Very useful!