largento

Thanks, Daniel! The lighting and rendering does make a big difference, doesn't it? Yet another huge subject I'm going to have to learn about before this is all said and done! :-) Of course, I didn't have the settings optimized (since I don't really know what I'm doing), but it took 5 hours to render that image. That would mean it would take over SIX YEARS for my computer to render a 6 minute film, so I'm not seeing this render-style animating, either. :-) I did experiment a little bit with texturing the skin, but I didn't like how it was coming out. SSS interests me, but my limited experimenting with it hasn't been so great. I've been aiming for a sort of plastic, action figure look. (Even if Lee did lead me astray with the suggestion of how to do the velour for the tunics.) :-) You've made me curious about the pose-slider solution to the wardrobe change. It's a completely different shirt (different collar, different material). Would it work?

Well, I think I've gotten most of the tweaking done to Dr. McGruff's head. He's looking a whole lot like my drawings now. Most noticeable things are probably changing the eye decals, changing the nose shape and lowering the mouth. The rest of the tweaking was mostly just getting everything to look smoother and simpler. It's funny to me that it takes so much work to make it look more simple. I played with AO with this render and really love how it makes their "velour" tunics look. I probably should've lowered the intensity, though. (Live and learn.) Onto making the body. McGruff is the only character with a wardrobe change, but I'm going to see if I can make that change to a copy of the finished, rigged version. (On the ship, McGruff is wearing a short-sleeved shirt.) I put a decal on Krok's face, but it ended up just being eye make-up. (I'll do the same for Spott and McGruff later.) After McGruff, it's onto modeling the three main female characters.

Do we have many DFW area A:M users? I'm not in a position where I could host any sort of gathering, but I'd probably show up for one.

Well, it looks like it may be time to use your Freehand license to jump ship: http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2007/05/...ersions-of.html Adobe has now made it official that there will be no more new versions of Freehand (nor any updates, patches or attempts to make it compatible with Intel Macs or Vista PCs.) This is hardly surprising. I'm sure they thought they were killing Freehand back in the 90s when they bought out Aldus. As a consolation prize, Freehand owners qualify to get a cross upgrade to AI CS3 for $199. I was a Freehand user for many years and only switched to Illustrator because the industry demanded it. As much as I fought it, though, after a short time I found Illustrator to be more powerful and never looked back.

I'm an Illustrator guy myself, so I haven't really had the motivation to dig too deep into Inkscape. I have a friend who switched to an Intel Mac about a year ago and could no longer run his Classic apps. (He had an ancient version of Freehand.) I looked for some free/low-cost apps for him and saw Inkscape. Since I had also bought an MacBook and Adobe wasn't going to be coming out with Universal Binary versions of their apps anytime soon, I installed Inkscape and The Gimp on it. My experience was that they were too limited and I was okay with getting slow performance on the Adobe apps compared to giving up features. (I also didn't/don't really use my laptop for work.) I did do a quick search about exporting to ai files from Inkscape and one page I saw indicated that you needed to install something called "ghostscript." Have no clue what that is and if it's available for the Mac.

I installed inkscape once last year, but didn't make much use of it. I do remember it seeming difficult to get it to install and run. According to their download page: http://inkscape.org/download/ There is a stable version (0.45.1) and then a development version (which is what I'm guessing you have.) It does say that the development version isn't stable. I didn't look around too much, but my impression is that the app uses the SVG format for its compatibility with Illustrator. That would work to get it into Illustrator, but you'd need to be able to save it as an Illustrator file to get the AI Wizard plug-in to work with it... wouldn't you?

Thanks, Tacku. I think the Secondprize will look pretty much like the Enterprise, but a little cartoonier... and it's also going to have strings holding it up... so that it looks like it's a model and that the special effects aren't so great. :-) It's something I look forward to making, but it will probably be one of the last things I model. Partly because it will only be needed for a few insert shots, but mostly because I want it to come out great, so I figure I'll be pretty experienced at modeling by then. Whew... everytime I think "look how far I've gotten," I realize how much further there is to go! :-)

I found these (might be helpful):

Starting to look pretty cool! The main part of this ship isn't quite right, though. The real model comes to a pretty sharp edge around it... I did a quick search around and found this image... Not the best for seeing the whole thing, but to give you an idea of what I'm seeing: Might help to find a roto of the top or bottom view to see that outline.

Thanks, Darkwing! Wow, been awhile since I've had anything new to show. I'm feeling better with rigging. The posable install for the Squetch rig is a really amazing thing! I've started modeling Dr. McGruff. He's actually been kind of hard to do. Here's the sort of first version. Not really ready for Prime Time, but a start...

Does the Gimp have any vector capabilities? (I've never used it.) You'd need an application that creates vector art and can export an Illustrator file.

Wow! Especially in the video grab, it looks exactly right and even better than what the TV show was able to do. This is going to be VERY cool!

Mark, any chance we could get a downloadable version of JD that is fully-rigged with all the CPs assigned, just so we can see which bones get CPs assigned to them?

I got this trick from Barry's tutorials: Select the 5 CPs, hit the hide button, so that now you only have those 5 CPs. Now drag select all 5 of them and the 5-point button should activate. There does seem to be instances where having hooks on nearby patches can interfere with it.

Excellent start! Your models are really fantastic.

I did and it went really well! It really is an amazing system! I'm still not entirely sure that I did everything exactly right, but I guess I'll find that out down the road. :-) I did have a little trouble getting the InstallRig to run (I posted about it in one of the other threads), but that was the only hitch and I was able to figure it out after a few tries. I'm working on trying to assign CPs to the face bones now (in between playing around with posing.) Haven't done any smart-skinning yet. Mr. Spott really digs that he can finally do that hand salute thing. :-)

Thanks, Mark!

I'm still working on assigning all of the CPs and figuring out how things work with the Squetch rig. So far, so good. The hand controls are really great. The only downside is that I'm realizing that all the rigging I did on my first character is going to have been for nothing, since I'll want to re-rig him with this! One thing, though... I've looked around and did a quick search on the forums, but haven't found a way to hide the FACE controls and they are showing up in renders. Can I translate the whole thing back up out of view (when I'm not using it) or is there something right in front of my face (that hides all that stuff right in front of my character's face) I'm just not seeing? :-)

This is really an amazing thing! After messing with the JD model a couple of times, I decided to give this a try with the updated rig on my Mr. Spott model. Everything went fine until I got to the last step: running the InstallRig plug-in. I was trying it in 14b3 and it crashed A:M the first two times I tried. Thinking it might be the version of the plug-in (I was just using the one that was pre-installed), I moved the pre-installed one to my desktop and downloaded the latest one from the wiki. When I launched A:M, it told me that it couldn't load the plug-in. So, I went to 13s and tried it. Same thing. It crashed and swapping out the plug-in would just result in a can't load plug-in message. I also noticed that the exported model would not have some of the final step changes saved. So, I went back into 14, re-deleted the installation poses and relationships, set the one FACE control slider to not set, option-dragged the FACE control bone down to the face and saved the model. I put the original, pre-installed plug-in back and this time when I opened it up, the InstallRig plug-in worked! So, I'm thinking that was the missing bit. Saving those last couple of changes into the model first. I started playing with assigning CPs this morning before I had to get ready for work and I think it's going to be a neat thing.

You import the rig as a model into the model. So right click and select Import->Model and then go to the posable rig in the Rig Along With Me/Models folder (that you download from the "Getting Started" thread.)

There is someone on the boards who is doing this, Ian Harrowell. He's in Australia. He's worked as an animator/director/supervisor for Disney, so obviously he's not an average joe. He's making a series of half hour episodes that mix bible stories with contemporary life lessons. I can't remember where I found the address for the production's website or I'd pass it on. It's really impressive and can give you an very good idea of what is possible with A:M. Even with a small staff and all of the talent and experience Ian has (here's Ian's IMDB listing: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0366032 ), it's a tremendous amount of work. My advice would be to think of the simplest way that your goal can be achieved. Make the character designs very simple and easy to achieve. And LOVE doing it. You're looking at a big investment in your time first learning all the steps in the process and then actually doing them... all with no monetary reward. I'm working on what I think is going to be a 6 minute film and I'm fully expecting it to take over a year. (Working on it in my free time.) Having never done one before, I'm hoping I'm wrong and it takes less than that, but I'm prepared for it to be even longer. Which is to say, WANT to do this and be willing to invest the TIME it takes to do it and you'll succeed.

I think I've figured out what I did wrong. I was scaling the "head install" bone to the top of his head, rather than going by the top of the base bone. Now the numbers are going right.

This is very cool that you're doing this! And already I have a question! :-) Following along in Step 2, I max out the "Translate_white_leg_install_bones_Y_axis" at 1200%, but they don't reach as high as your example. Shouldn't my numbers match up nearly exactly? I'm using 14b3 on a Mac.

Thanks, Lee. I'm fairly certain I am lacking too much coolness to be part of an "internet phenomenon." :-) I've been sidetracked this week and haven't gotten much done. I started rigging Spott, but have been thinking that I might ditch the custom rig and use the Squetch rig after doing the "rig along with me" stuff. I did play around today with making a teaser card for it. I just got my Creative Suite 3 upgrades from Adobe and wanted to play with the new software. After putting the title together in Illustrator, I brought it into A:M to convert it to 3D. Ended up being more work than I thought, since some of the letters were pinching in places. Of course, with my luck the one letter that I used the most (there are 5 of them), the "T" was one of the letters that was messed up. Still, when all was said and done, I thought it came out pretty cool. I wanted to test Photoshop Extended's ability to bring in 3D files as layers. It's not so great. It does allow you to move it around, which could be helpful if you are not sure how you are going to use something, but that's about it. You still get a much better result from rendering it with an alpha channel and then bringing that image in. Which is what I'll do the next time I do something with the logo. Oh well. :-) I think it's a law that all computer animated films have to put out an image of one of the characters leaning up against the title, so I decided not to risk being jailed and did that. :-) Basically aped the James Bond pose with Krok. The tagline was something I used back in '96, when I did this as a web comic. I guess some younger folks won't recognize the reference. (For those who are too young, the Ridley Scott movie "Alien" had the tag line "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream.") Oh well, I better get back to doing something that'll actually give me a chance of finishing it in 2008... But at least I've got a spiffy new desktop picture. :-)

This sounds like an excellent opportunity. Count me in!