largento

LOL! I'm gonna' have to seek legal counsel. :-) Thanks, Ken. I tried out SSS on Flemm awhile back and didn't have much success. I don't really know exactly what I'm doing with the SSS settings and most times it just rendered out solid black. :-) I don't think I've tried it in v15 yet. Maybe, for fun, I'll do a test...

Got a start on Flemm's sidekick Mr. Sneeze. I had thought he was going to be the easiest, but I'm still struggling with him. Sneeze's design has changed some from the original. My friend didn't like his nose and this is going more from how he's being drawn in the comic strip. I just got the art for the 10th strip. McCrary wants to have a stockpile of 20 before it starts and it looks like he'll make it. The plan is still to start the strip at the beginning of February.

Thanks, Paul! This one was more experimental. I didn't start with rotos, but instead just started by drawing the profile with CPs and going from there. Thanks, Tunames! I'll try to keep that in mind.

Just something to keep the ball rolling. I've been working on drawing the plans for Flemm's pirate ship, but felt the bug to do a quick bit of modeling this morning and so I started on the monkey. Monkeys are almost like little aliens in our world. They are intelligent, overly serious and mostly removed from the humans. They are annoyed by Flemm who thinks they are cute little monkeys and keeps wrecking their stuff. Lighting is screwy in this render, but I'm too lazy to go back in and fix it right now. :-)

If you're in a hurry, you might consider making the background 2D. Otherwise, I would think that a science lab could be conveyed by having black-topped tables and various beakers and test tubes filled with color liquids and some microscopes or the like.

Thanks! That's high praise! I've been side-tracked as of late with other aspects of this project. I finished the first draft of the screenplay (which came in at a whopping 24 pages, yikes!) and getting things going on the webcomic side. Having an ongoing website will be a cool thing to drive me, hopefully. It's fun, too, since it lets us expand the world and the characters.

Beautiful! Really well done!

Great job, Gerry! Looks really good!

Nothing wrong that I can see. Looking forward to seeing the finished model. It can be disappointing when people don't offer up much feedback, but what I keep telling myself when I post something and it doesn't get a comment is "they must've not found anything wrong with it." :-) No post is a good post. I may be fooling myself, but it works for me. :-) I would highly recommend getting Will Sutton's decaling CD. It'll show you how to do it from first step to last.

Moving Forward! McCrary is out of town, so I'm having to wait until he gets back so we can both sign off on Henrietta before I can complete her rigging. Not wanting to stand still, I started on Cutthroat's head. He's the villain. Originally he was called Cutthroat Mac, but now we're considering giving him a French accent and changing his name to Cutthroat Jacques...

Whew! This has been a productive week. Over the last couple of weeks, McCrary and I have been coming up with some plans to really build up this project and I flew out to Kentucky at the beginning of the week and we hammered out the script and a lot of back story for the characters. We're going to be launching a website sometime early next year that's going to feature a webcomic drawn by McCrary that will start with the origin story of Captain Flemm and work through the story from the first movie McCrary made. The idea being that we can establish the characters with an audience before the short film is released. If all goes well, we're going to continue both for as long as it's still fun for us to work on them. One of the things that came out of the trip was a thought to stop being slavish to the movie (since no one will really ever see it) and start thinking of these as more of original characters. To that end, we're currently adapting the original designs to make them less of my interpretation of the costumes the people put together for the movie and more of what we think suits the characters. It's certainly not a complete re-design, to be sure, but there'll be more to them. We want to work out a way to make them work in both mediums. Here's the updated Captain Flemm. Not major changes, just some added details... Here's a turnaround... flemmturn.mov

Perfectly incredible! Wow!

I think if you had his body move up and down with the legs bending and straightening, you'd lose the floating feeling with the coat hem.

Haha, that's awesome, Gerry! Can't wait to see the finished piece. I love the mis-direct with the snail's light's coming on one and then the other.

Here is where you can get the Squetchy Sam model... And here's where you can get the mirror bones plug-in.

Haha, that's a little more reasonable of a file size. :-) Good work, Lee! I love Batman TAS and you've really captured the look of it in 3D! Wow, time is really flying by. Just a week and a half left, eh? I'm sure your mission will be something that you never forget and give you a wealth of experiences. All of these things will still be here when you get back (and will probably work great in v17!)

Jeff, I've been using CP weights on most of my CPs, too. It's really not that difficult and what I do is start off with just assigning things to bones and then I go in and kind of layer in the weights as they're needed. Use the Edit CP Weights dialogue box to inspect the CPs on David's Squetchy Sam model to get an idea of what geometry bones to use in the Squetch rig. I'm trying out a new screen capture app, so I tried making a very simple example of how to weight CPs. I've bumped down the size and lowered the frame rate to make the video small and I'm having trouble making myself go slow and even with my movements, but I think it comes across... weighting_s.mov

Others can speak better to this, but Animation Master doesn't use polygons. The models are all spline-based with patches. The patches are resolution independent, so you can have a completely smooth model with very few patches. I've read some posts where people have used third party apps to create models that they've brought into A:M, but they've created them with the knowledge of what would work best for importing them.

Thanks, Lee. McCrary's been telling me about the looks he gets when he tells people at his church who have seen the movie that the "next one is going to be computer animated." :-) I loved this monkey sequence and have pushed for there to be a bunch of stuff with monkeys in the cartoon. You can never go wrong with monkeys... :-) Thanks, Gerry! I feel like it's kind of been slow going, so your comment is encouraging. I'm anxious to get all of the modelling finished so that I can move on to animating it.

This is an interesting idea. Not sure that I'd ever make use of it, but wonder how it would work. Can you import the prop into the model window? Would it be something that you'd always have to keep locked?

Here's about a minute or so long clip from McCrary's original movie! I feel the need to point out this was never a serious sort of enterprise and it was just my friend and people who go to his church having some fun with a camcorder and iMovie. This encounter between Flemm and the monkey has always made me laugh, though. I've tried to compress this to a reasonable file size. Here's the real people that these cartoon characters are based on... monkey_s.mov

I can say without hesitation that rigging was the most intimidating element of creating a character for me. I just couldn't wrap my head around it at the beginning and it's the only part of this process that almost made me throw up my hands and give up. Luckily, I received some encouragement from David Simmons and went back and tried to find out what the parts of the process were that I wasn't getting. I found my answers watching his Squetch tutorial videos and then got to see the real implementation and art of CP weighting in Will's CD. As surprising as it may sound to the veterans, I had encountered nothing early on that told me there was a way to manually weight the CPs. I was completely baffled. Once I found out how it was done and what the process was actually about, the mystery went away and it finally made sense to me. I wouldn't say it's my favorite part, but I'm certainly not intimidated by it anymore and there's actually a level of enjoyment I get out of the process of weighting the CPs and then watching the results of the changes in the action window. And it's another one of those things that I notice that I improve at every time I do it. I'm a loooong ways away from being really good at it, but I can see the path to getting there.

Haha, that's great! I love the "Rudolph" lights! Actually, he's more useful that Rudolph, since he can not only light the way, but signal when Santa wants to change lanes. :-)

Mechadelphia just recently put up part one of his tutorials on rigging a character. I think it may be just what you're looking for... Rigging Tutorial

Thanks, Lee! I may very well end up doing this in color. McCrary (the friend I'm doing this with, both our first name's are Mark, so we call each other by our last names) and I have been talking about making this more of a one-in-a-series type cartoon, rather than a direct sequel to the movie. With the sort of formula storyline that plays out again and again. This is not to say that we'd definitely make any more of them, but this would be made like there were. Henrietta is pretty tough. She's really a pirate. Flemm's just a wannabe pirate. The villain, Cutthroat Mac is a real pirate and hates Flemm (if this were a Popeye cartoon, he'd be Bluto). Henrietta tolerates Flemm, but she usually has to come in at the end and save him from himself... making her sort of the Popeye and Flemm the Olive Oyl. :-) I'm not sure if the analogy carries through all of the way. Flemm is obvlivious to all of this and thinks Henrietta keeps showing up because she's got the hots for him. :-) McCrary's movie is a full hour long, so I'm not sure anyone would really be up for sitting though it, but I'll try to make a short clip and stick it up here.