largento

Thanks, Jay! Had a little fun with the Communicator prop... I think I may have Krok's tunic's material working out right, Lee. It does look a little faded, but I think it does look soft like velour. As I get in close, I'm seeing some weirdness with the rig. I don't think the forearm isn't twisting with the wrist like it should... and there's some issues with the fingers, too. Maybe I'll figure out what I did wrong while I'm rigging Spott.

Decided to work on another prop before I rigged Spott... didn't know I was going to stay up all night working on it, though... I'm going to hate myself tomorrow. :-) Made a Communicator! Here's a JPEG and a quick turnaround and showing the flipping open action. commturn.mov

I spent a little time messing with the materials per your suggestions, Lee. Spott's tunic came out great! The color is right and it looks like velour. Krok's tunic... not so much. I'll have to work on it. But on both, the decal for the insignia is alterred by the material. Is there a way to keep that from happening?

Thanks! Yeah, Spott has that hunched over, knees slightly bent posture that I alwas associate with Jack Davis' illustrations in Mad. You remind me of something that I used to always get a laugh at. I'll have to re-watch it when I reach the point of animating and see if I can capture some of it. In the episode "Balance of Terror," there's a scene where Spock has to turn around and run back down a hall to rescue a bigoted officer. Nimoy trying to run in those heeled boots is really awkward. :-) Not very final at all. I do have a little bit of roughness on the shirts to try to capture that velour look, but probably not as much as I should. I don't even know what "gradient edge" is. :-) Once I got to the body, it went pretty fast, but that's mostly due to being able to Frankenstein the arm and leg from the Krok model. I was happy to find that worked as well as it did. Now I'm not feeling so bad about having to create some background characters. I haven't made any decisions about the voices yet. There are six speaking characters. Half of those are female, so I don't think I'll be able to do them all myself. A year or so ago, I used a small recording studio out here in Dallas to do some voice-over work for a project I did at work. The guy we used was an actor and taught voice-over classes for other actors. I had thought briefly that I might explore that avenue. He could do a professional recording session and would have a base of voice actors. I don't know. That still seems like a pretty long ways away right now. :-) Scotty isn't in this episode, Logrus. Unless I get ambitious and change things, the only speaking roles are: Captain Krok (Kirk), Mr. Spott (Spock), Dr. McGruff (McCoy), Nurse Temple (Chapel), T'Poodle (T'Pau) and T'Pomeranian (T'Pring). I do have a scene with a red shirt and a monster in the comic (a conceit, since there was no such scene in the episode, but you gotta' kill off a red shirt if you beam down somewhere!) :-) He doesn't have any lines though... except maybe a quick scream when he gets killed. :-)

Mr. Spott is coming together! (Although I don't think Captain Krok likes the idea of giving up the limelight.) :-)

Both versions are on the same disc.

Thanks, Bill! I really appreciate it and I look forward to messing with them. And that is *very* gruesome. :-)

Hey thanks, guys! The positive feedback is really helping to motivate me to keep at this. Not sure I'm seeing what you're seeing with the arms, Dennis, but I'll go back and take a look. I am shooting for more cartoony than realistic, but I don't want things to look wrong. I guess the balance is sort of my own sensibility (and/or inadequacy.) :-) The comic is the thing I think I'll have the most fun with, Rodney. Don't get me wrong, I want to see this animated, but having all of the characters, props and sets in 3D offers so many possibilities with how the book can be set up and the story told. I'm really looking forward to when I have all of my "toys" finished and can start playing with them. :-)

Cool, Bill! My Krok ear is a fake! It's got a flat panel in it with a bump map. :-) Yes, please do post it! Thanks!

Thanks, Tacku! I hate to say it, since it makes me sound like I'm doing a commercial, but I bought Barry Zundel's training DVDs and just followed along with how he created the character in them. I've found that the basic technique seems to work for modeling anything: you make a spline for the outline of the side view and a spline for the outline of the front view and then work on creating the splines that go inbetween. The only thing I've done different from Barry's DVD is do the head first and then the body. (He does the body first.) I really am just a beginner at this 3D stuff and there are plenty of folks out there who are way more experienced than I who should be the ones to go to for advice. I'm still figuring it out. :-)

Thanks, Logrus! The plan's to create both an animated short (6 or so minutes) and a "photo" comic. I've done some on and off work on the bridge, but lately have been focused on getting the models, set and props finished for one scene, just as a test to get my feet wet with animating. This scene takes place down on Vulcanine. I've got six main characters to model and then a variety of background characters. I figure I'll work on the sets and props in-between them and then finish them up after the character modeling is done. I'm definitely still in the very early stages of this. :-)

The audio in the rendered clip is sped up. You can tell that it's higher pitched. On the other version, it's normal. Don't know what would cause that to happen, though.

Thanks, guys! Your encouragement is really appreciated! LOL@ "Spott On," Bill. And I did find your Orc Ear on the Extras DVD and looked at it when I went to start to model the ear. It's really well done, but like you point out, *too* well done for something cartoony like this. Something that never occured to me to even try in the drawings is to actually give them the ability to turn like dog ears. With this being animated, I could show the movement and it would be pretty funny. There's the scene on Vulcananine where Spott hears the Marriage Party approaching. I just had him cup his ear in the comic, but I could have his ears turn forward and have him cock his head to the side like a dog. :-) I've got to go back and fix some of the definition in the eyes, Lee. When I applied the Porcelain material, they lost a lot of detail. Spott's expression stays pretty much the same all of the time, so he's always squinting. I like the idea that it makes him even more alien and weird that you can't see his eyes. (His eyeballs are entirely black.) It also makes him look perpetually annoyed. I'm definitely in this for the long haul. A little bit each day and eventually I'll get there!

Still chipping away at this... Captain Krok is pretty much done. He's all rigged and has all his facial poses and mouth shapes. I'm finding that by mixing pose sliders, I can get some really cool range with his eyebrows and expressions. Now, I'm working on Mr. Spott. Here's where I'm at with the head. I've got my work cut out for me with the ears. I've also got to work out his hair. The drawings I did always put some gaps in the hair hanging over the forehead and I want to accomplish the same with this version. I also want to try to mess with a specularity map to see if I can get that "highlight ring" around the hair. It's gonna' be really cool when I can get the two characters together in a scene!

You can get paid to do that? Hmm.... -vern Let's just hope it's not by the pound...

I have absolutely no idea if this would work, but I wonder if you could get away with a loop that just moved everything from the current position to one position over... Like on a gear... if you you can do just enough movement to get one sprocket to move to the position of the next sprocket, in a loop, it looks like the whole gear is completely revolving... Like I said, I have no idea if this would work, but if it did... :-)

Thanks for the tip! I'll give that a try next time.

That's awesome, Al. I love how the fusion core lights up.

Wow! Just noticed that there's a MirrorBones plug-in in A:M 14 and it works on my Intel Mac!

Wow, Lee! That's a fantastic job! The model was cool-looking to begin with, but now it's just amazing! Dark Jedi, I'd totally go with the metal around the face. Makes it look like there's a face shield that goes with the armor that he's choosing not to wear. With all of the armor he's got on, it would make sense that there would have been something to protect the face and this guy is just too badass to wear it. Again... Wow!

Thanks, Andy! I found blueprints for it online and was able to use them for my rotoscopes. I haven't done any animation yet. I've been waiting until I got a character fully modeled and rigged. I haven't started watching the 3rd Training DVD on animation yet, but I think it's going to be the part that's the most fun and rewarding. The modeling aspect of it is very appealing, but being able to bring the characters to life is the real end goal. Hopefully after I have a few characters under my belt, I won't lose so much time just looking at 'em. :-) Got to buckle down this weekend!

Thanks for the links to the tutorials, Chris & David! I really appreciate the help! I'll check them out tonight when I get home. Unfortunately, I'm out of luck on the MirrorBones plugin since I'm on an Intel Mac and it says it only works on PPC Macs. Although, I suppose I could load it onto my old computer and just bring it in there when I need to do it... it wasn't a huge production to do it the manual way, but I did some things wrong and ended up having to copy and paste in my relationships and for some reason I ended up with like 20 copies of each relationship and had to spend a bunch of time deleting all of those extras. I wouldn't want to have to go through that again!

Thanks! Assume I have a handle on nothing. :-) I haven't done any CP weighting with this rig, although I did mess with it a little with the 2001 rig. That was all stab-in-the-dark stuff, though. This is another thing that I think I'm going to have to spend some more time with to really understand it. I'm fairly certain I'm in good shape with the bones being the same, since the tutorial walked me through completing one side, then saving it out, flipping it, renaming all the left bones to right bones and then importing it back in. The CPs are only mostly the same. I've since gone back and changed some things, though. I had a couple of 5-point patches in the armpits that were placed badly, so I went in and re-did those to get them into a better spot. I did the same thing to both sides, but I did it individually, so they aren't exactly the same. I also had to re-do his abdomen to make it work better with the legs and did that the same way. I wasn't sure if I could use mirror-mode to delete CPs and re-attach things and didn't experiment to see if I could. But, all of the other areas and joints should still be the same. Any of the adjustments I've made where I was just moving CPs around, I've used mirror-mode. The only really bad joint I'm getting is the legs connecting to the hips. Especially if I pose him sitting down. With CP weighting, I'll need to do the geometry bones (since they actually have CPs attached to them), but can I (should I) do the smartskinning with the control bones? I'm hoping I can finish out this model this weekend, so that I can move on to the next one.

Thanks for the link, Chris! I've been looking for a smartskinning tutorial. I bit the bullet last week and went along with Barry's rigging tutorial DVD. Although there was a lot to it, it *did* start to make sense after awhile and the rig works pretty well! I think one of the missing pieces for me was finally "getting" the connection between the CPs and the bones. I guess I had it in my head that I was going to have to work to get the CPs to work with the rig, but it's actually getting the rig to work with the CPs. I haven't done any smartskinning yet and I still have to do facial poses, but I've been playing around, posing the character and most of the joints seem to deform fairly well. What was good, too, was that where I was having problems, I now had more of an idea of how to go back and re-do the mesh to fix it. I'm certain this will help me when I start on the next model. I've gotten over a lot of the sense of terror I was feeling at the prospect of rigging. :-) I've been having a lot of fun just putting him into poses. I think I'm tapping into memories of setting up my action figures when I was a kid. :-) Here's the one I was playing with this morning. The background is just something I grabbed off of the web. I was finally able to show him holding the phaser I made...

That's awesome! And I don't think it's making fun of him at all. 'Sides he did that song with Bob & Doug Mackenzie all those years ago which means he probably has a good sense of humor.