largento
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Posts posted by largento
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Looks like a cross between Bill the Cat and Opus! Coolness.
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I'm still jumping around. I've been working on creating the Vulcanine Set. This is the centerpiece of it. The set is circular with some pillars encircling one half and two entranceways with a stone wall in between them on the other half. It's funny, they clearly didn't build the stone wall between the two entrances for the show. There isn't a single shot going in that direction. So, I'm just guessing that it's a stone wall. :-)
Of course, since this is VulCANINE, there's a lot of dog stuff. The symbol that's repeated around the coal pit is the chinese character for dog. :-)
I couldn't find any blueprints or plans for this set (although I thought one of the books I did had a rough overview of it), so I'm just having to guess.
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Cool, T-Dogg! This is the first time I've seen this. It was fun being able to see the progress through the whole WIP. And who doesn't love the old Batmobile?
It does look like to me that the wheels are smaller than they should be, so I took the liberty of superimposing the original roto image from your first post over your latest version to check.
Can't wait to see the finished piece!
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I'm really sorry to hear this.
It's an inspiring piece of work. Sets the bar really high.
I hope you do the short, though.
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I'll have to think about that, Mark. The way they are now looks like my drawings. I may change my mind, though and play with them. So you can say "I told you so" then. :-)
I'm uploading a 2nd transporter test. I think this one works better. I was getting a "matte" line on the other one, so I used openEXR frames this time and got a better alpha channel. I also adjusted the timing of the beam a little... and I thought having him remaining frozen at the end detracted from getting the full effect, so I animated Spott a little after he materializes.
I haven't really done any animation before, so be kind while ripping it to pieces. :-) The movement is only 20 frames long, so there's not a whole lot of it. My thinking was just that I wanted to create a contrast to the freeze frame of the transporter effect. It at least succeeds in that regard. Since it's the first time I've ever made one of my characters move, I'm pretty excited about it. :-)
For some reason the frames rendered with a black spot on Spott's tunic. It's not shown up before, so I think it's just a fluke.
*EDIT*
I've replaced this one with yet another version. I'm probably putting too much thought into this, but I do want it to look good. This new one is basically the same as it was, except that I've given the sparkles a glow and then duplicated the sparkle layer and offset it by one frame, which fills out the space a little more. I also adjusted the brightness on the "frozen" frame so that there's a more dramatic switch at the end of the effect. I may have gone too far, but I think it's okay to make it look a little better than the original, as long as it still "feels" the same.
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I like it! The movie version of the Enterprise is my favorite ship of them all.
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That looks great Mark. I love the characters so far, though Spotts ears look a little thick around the top.
Thanks, Mark!
You're right about Spott's eartips. How's this?
I'm still working on rigging him. I used your posable install for the Squetch Rig and have most of the body CP's weighted. (I felt like a dope when I found out there was an easy way to edit the weights... I was trying to do it with the "Has Falloff" properties... d'oh!)
I've been using David's Squetchy Sam as my go-by to see how things are set up. It's been slow-going, but I'm sure that it'll be faster once I've gone through rigging a couple of characters.
I think the Squetch Rig is really going to up the quality of the characters. You guys have done an amazing job!
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This might be helpful for you, Wang:
http://migrate.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22803
The first part of the first Squetch Installation video tutorials has a section where David Simmons goes over the basics of bones. I'm still learning myself. There's a tremendous amount of things that you can do with bones.
Even if you do not plan to use the Squetch rig, there's still a wealth of information passed on in these videos.
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Well, I figure one of the plusses to having so much work left to do is that I can jump around some. :-)
Seeing the new video stuff that Photoshop can do now made me realize it would be pretty easy to create the transporter effect. It was really easy. I'm sure I'll be able to improve on it down the road, but I think it's a good start. I've attached the quick 5 second video as a zip since the m4v quicktime file is so much smaller and the quality is so much better.
Here's a screengrab of the file open in Photoshop:
You can add video as layers and treat them basically like normal layers in Photoshop. In this case, I created a sparkly image which I brought into A:M as a png file and mapped to a cylinder as a cookie-cut decal. Then I made a cho and animated it rotating 180 degrees. That gave movement to the sparkles and since you could see through to the back of the cylinder, you've got sparkles moving in two directions. I duplicated the frames a few times to give me 6 seconds of video.
I brought the quicktime movie I made from the animation in as a layer, and resized it so that it filled the area where Spott would be standing and set the layer style to screen.
I used the mask created by the alpha channel from my render of Spott to mask off the effect and then animated the opacity of both in the timeline.
The background was just an image I'd grabbed off of the web awhile back.
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I'm assuming that you would only see any animation in the close-up of the keys in the air and that shot would have to be in slow-motion.
I'm not thinking your average off-the-shelf video camera is going to do a very good job of capturing that with the level of detail you want.
I would think you'd make a replica of the fob to use in the normal speed shots (which will be blurry) and then do the entire keychain in CG for the slow-motion close-up.
But this is coming from a guy who had, before this post, never heard the term "key fob" and had to look up what it meant. :-)
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That's pretty cool, Eric. Neat idea for a character.
Dar, I used to do that as a kid, too! Actually I think the only reason I'm not still doing it is I don't have a fan in my apartment. :-)
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I just noticed the fact that his mouth is going to open and close over the blades. That's pretty wild! Is his voice going to sound like it does when you talk through a rotating fan?
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Hey, Darkwing. Looking good! Yeah, I was talking about the edge running around the hull. Looks like you've worked on that.
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Haha, you've got me wrong, Lee! :-)
The velour looks great and really adds a bunch to it! Heck, the Star Trek action figures I had as a kid *did* have cloth uniforms. :-)
But seriously, thanks for the encouragement ..and the tips!
I'm having a blast with this. There's so much to do and so many more things to learn, but I've wanted to do this as an animated short for 11 years! Kinda' makes a year and a half (or however long it takes to do all of this) not seem like so much time at all. :-)
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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?
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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.
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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.
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I actually use Freehand at home, which can export to AI files.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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! :-)
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I found these (might be helpful):
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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.
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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...
Should I?
in New Users
Posted
That *is* subjective, Bob. My current experience is that the more time I invest into it, the more enjoyment I get out of it.
The first time I picked up A:M on a whim (a few years ago), I wasn't really interested in investing the time and my enthusiasm dropped off. At the beginning of this year, with a different mindset, I decided to give it another go and really invest the time and effort.
Now I'm having a blast!
A:M is the only 3D app I've ever really used (I've opened a couple of others, become disoriented and confused and closed them), so I don't think previous experience is required in the least ...and my impression is that a lot of the people on these forums call A:M their first 3D animation app, too.