largento

Very nice, Paul. Although that version of the Penguin had the "flipper" hands forced on him from "Batman Returns." The middle-ring-pinky fingers were fused into one finger. Too late to change it probably. I'm pretty sure they abandoned that when the characters were re-designed later on in the series.

I love that album! I didn't know they were doing this. Don't know what I think about them making a cgi film out of it, though. It's always better in your head. Still, could be neat.

You know, I vaguely remember having that problem. Luckily I'd saved to another file, so I went back and dragged them in from the previous file. I also remember running into a problem afterwards, where one of the sides (don't remember which) would suddenly have dozens of copies of each constraint. Took awhile to go through deleting all of them.

Bless ya', Rodney! I'd heard the term "stitching" bandied about, but had no idea what it meant. I still didn't after reading what you said about the old method being outdated, but last night I played around with the "shift-click" adding points and was startled to discover what it did! I've been doing it the hard way!

We've all asked this question in the beginning, but the truth is there is no easy answer. Making a model isn't one question, but hundreds (if not thousands) of questions. And there are more than one answer to each of those questions. The trick is to learn the basics first. Learn how to make very simple basic shapes and objects. Find out how CPs, splines and patches work together. Your movie is extremely ambitious, so you're going to need to learn all the basic building blocks. And then, when you've learned all of that and have modeled your character... you have to learn how to rig it! :-)

Thanks, Lee! I am beginning to feel like more of what I'm doing is on purpose rather than guessing. (Although, there's still a lot of that.) :-) A lot of that is coming from having done things before and remembering how I solved the problem the first time. So maybe by the time I do my 10,000th model, I'll have figured everything out. :-) I'd love to do a tutorial sometime. Maybe a simple one on spline continuity. That was really the key that unlocked everything for me.

Hopefully that will come with more experience. I think this is only the third character I've fully modeled so far. What was great for me this time was that I felt more like I knew what I was doing. :-)

Smarter folks than me might know different, but my understanding is that you can't copyright names. Names can be registered as trademarks, though. If you go here, you can follow the links from "Trademarks" to do a search of registered trademarks and see if the name is already registered. This isn't a complete list, though, since like copyrights, you do not have to register your trademark. (Non-registered trademarks are identified with the "TM" symbol, while registered trademarks are identified with the "®" circle-r.)

http://bzundel.googlepages.com/animation%3...ter2005training They've been an invaluable resource for me!

Thanks, guys! Nimble, I like his little feet! :-) The mascot has already appeared on several of their products, so I don't have much wiggle room here. My only doubt about the client okaying the 3D version would be if they think it doesn't look enough like the 2D version. I've got it pretty close, though. (At least as close as I can manage.) I think they will like it, though. As it stands now, he's got 2,065 patches. I don't know if that's good or bad. I do know that the wings have a bunch of patches.

Thanks! I haven't gotten the go ahead from the client yet, but I couldn't resist going for it! He's not rigged yet. I'm going to do just a simple one, mostly just so I can put his wings into positions and turn his head. I'd kind of like to put some more detail into his overalls, but that's something I'll put off until I know for sure I'm going to get to use him. Here's a turnaround: roosterwhole.mov

Nice job!

Thanks for the comments, guys! I did a little tweaking, nothing too major. Thanks for the suggestion about thinning out the crest on the top, Matt. Not only did it restore the shape of the head, but I think the crest looks better that way. I messed with the beak some, but mostly just trying to even things out. In the end, I put porcelain on both the crest and the beak. I tweaked the brow some, but I need to add some more splines to really get it right. I don't know that any of my tweaking helped make him look more like the 2D drawing, though. :-) I was out visiting friends most of yesterday or I probably would have gone hogwild re-doing things. I'll see what the salesman says today and see if he wants me to get it closer before we send it to the client. Here's a turn around with the tweaked head: roosterturn2.mov

I was a bit surprised that my assembly line graphic didn't generate much interest at work, but undaunted, I'm trying again. :-) There's a mascot for one our client's that gets used fairly often. Often enough, I thought, that it would be worth making him over in 3D. It's a rooster character and I've had trouble getting his beak right from different angles. To sell them on it, I said I'd just do the head first and see if the client liked the idea. This way, even if they didn't, I'd have a 3D model of the head that I could use as reference for different angles. Here's what I came up with: And here's a little turnaround of it: roosterturn.mov Not an exact replica of my 2D version, but pretty close. The beak was an interesting challenge and could probably be refined, but I was just pleased that I figured out a way to do it at all. :-) There was definitely that moment where I looked at the rotoscope and thought "How the heck am I going to model that?" :-)

That's a really cool Boba, dude! You should really give the posable installer for the squetch rig a try next time. Even a noob like me was able to figure it out. :-)

Haha, very valid points all of them, Daniel... and stuff that I was completely oblivious to. I don't think you're crazy (I have no proof that you aren't, mind you, but I don't think you are.) And thanks for the great link. I will soak all of this up when I get home tonight. I'm still taking baby steps with this, but I feel like I'm on the verge of getting to the beginning. :-)

Ben, I don't have that disk, but I tried some of the Tech Talk videos that use the codec and they work fine. (I did this after running the 10.4.10 update.) Did Jason's suggestion fix it for you?

Has it been a year yet? Life got in the way the last week and a half and slowed me down, but I'm trying to get back into the groove. Spent some time today playing around with creating a walk cycle for Mr. Spott. It needs some work, but considering it's the first one I've done, it's not terrible. :-) I stuck him into the current version of the Vulcanine set to let him walk some laps and thought I would share. I looped it a bunch of times and sent it over to my AppleTV at 720 and got a kick seeing it on my HDTV. It's gonna' be really cool to have actual scenes to watch. The music over this is something I'm playing with. It's actually what I thought the Spock music was when I was a little kid. I had a little guitar and I would pluck out this over and over. Kinda' cool that now I'm going to have an excuse to use it. If I'd gotten it right back then, I wouldn't be able to! :-) I rendered this out in three pieces. The centerpiece by itself, Spott's walk around, and then the rest. That way I only had to render one frame of the background (and the centerpiece.) I missed something, though and because I went for this really wide angle, there's a part of the set that should be in front of Spott (over on the left), but isn't and his hand goes in front of it before he gets in front of it. Oops. I think I'm going to have to limit the camera moves I do, since this set takes awhile to render. walkinthedog.mov

I've just been starting to play around with animating and noticed some things. In a choreography, using lowest shaded view, when I hit the play button (on 30 frames of animation): In choreography mode (with nothing selected): about 60fps In choreography mode (with the character selected): about 35fps In skeletal mode: about 10fps In wireframe view, it adds around 10fps to each of those, but the pattern remains. So, the fix might be to switch back to choreography mode and de-select the character to check your animation. (The shortcut for choreography mode is F9, but since I'm using that for the OS, I changed it in the customize panel. I made skeletal mode the "/" on the keypad and choreography mode the "*" on the keypad. Easy to switch between them.) (I'm using a Core2Duo iMac with 2.16GHz with v14beta5 of A:M).

Can you point to a specific video? I've got Barry Zundel's training disks and they use that codec and they work fine on my iMac (I haven't done the .10 upgrade yet, but I do have the latest Quicktime and am using the same version of the codec.)

Switching to wireframe will help even more.

I'm pretty much ignoring the remastered version. I did look at their idea of what a long shot would be and it's neat that they tried to tie it in to the animated series and Star Trek III, but it doesn't match any of the shots from the episode (which are still in the remastered version.) Call me a purist, but I love the original... warts and all.

Tan, look back at the splines Ken drew. See the horizontal one that needs to be added?

Thanks, Lee. Yeah, I'm thinking some kind of backdrop for the far off background. It's a circular set, so I'm thinking of doing a cylinder. There weren't any clouds in the TV show, but they did have some smoke rising up behind the set. I've thought about doing that. I've still got a ton more detail to put into it. The most of my time has been spent trying to figure out how to get the rocky texture and work out the colors on the decals. I think I'm committed to this version of them. There's some funny stuff I've noticed by watching and re-watching the footage from Amok Time. One is that during some of the fight scenes, the actors are wearing fake boots that kind of look like socks. :-) Another is this: Here the landing party begins to approach the ceremonial arena: Now they enter it... And the camera angle turns around and suddenly there's this brick wall behind them! :-) I've been mulling over the idea of doing some kind of gag about this in my film. Might be too obscure, though. I've seen this episode a bunch of times over the years, but it wasn't until I started going through it frame-by-frame to try to see the details of the set that I noticed it.

Still working on my Vulcanine set. It's coming along pretty well. I cheated some of the set to make it a little more impressive (the actual set was kind of cramped.) I'm fairly certain they used forced perspective on the far end of the set. I want to interact with that area, so I kept it full-sized. Most of what I have left is either background stuff or little details that need to be added. Over half of the film takes place on this set, so it's worth putting in all the effort (plus, it's fun.)