largento

Nice start, Douglas. I believe others have written to Barry and he's sent them the rotoscope he's using to help. You can also do a google image search for character model sheets and find suitable images to use. Keep in mind that joints (elbows, knees, wrists, shoulders, etc.) usually need at least three splines. The outer two hold the shapes of the connecting parts and the center one handles the bending. Avoid placing splines very close together. They don't like that. Best practice is to try to keep a spline in the center of the two surrounding splines, if possible. Keep going, though! The more you do, the more this will start to make sense.

Thanks, Douglas! That would take a bunch of pages. :-)

Thanks, Douglas. No, those are all of them. I had thought once or twice about doing more, but I did think I had covered all the key concepts I had wanted to. All of them were things that had been key to my understanding of modeling, but things I wasn't finding in the learning materials. I guess the old timers just assumed you understood them. Spline Continuity isn't obvious, but it's enormously important. Barry's videos are great. He walks you through everything warts and all. The only really important change to modeling is that you can hold down the shift key to start a new spline with new continuity. He was either unaware of it, or it was a new feature.

Patch modeling hasn't changed very much, so any of the tutorials out there are still relevant. The ones that changed my life were Barry Zundel's Animation Training Videos. They were available on DVD when I purchased them, but now you can get them as individual movies. Some of the concepts that I believe are central to patch modeling in A:M I covered in my comic book tutorials here. I had a locked thread with just the tutorials, but Rodney seems to have tossed it into the haystack again. :-)

Thanks, Nancy! Robert, to better explain, here's the rotoscope I've set up for the next one I'm doing. Taking screenshots of the various views, I construct a rotoscope like this (although mine is much, much larger.) This is a really great example of what a backlot building can be. This a center building that most of the other buildings in the Midtown section sit around. You can see that it has tons of possibilities for what kind of building it could be based on where you train your camera or what sort of set decorating you use.

Thanks, Robert! It's all in A:M. I found some models built in Sketchup that I've used to create the rotoscopes, but all the modeling is in A:M. I started out really intimidated by the thought of modeling buildings, but I think I'm over that fear now.

Continuing with my virtual backlot, recreating buildings from Forty Acres. Still some detailing to do, but here's the ol' Mayberry courthouse and market. Love how set designers thought. The courthouse could just as easily be a bank or post office or a law office. And of course, all the storefronts in the market, can be whatever store you need.

Yeah, I've never used projects, either. Nancy nicely covered the reasons.

Thanks, Rodney! Just for fun, here's the house with some color and texture ...and made black and white, since that's the way most folks saw it. Had to help a guy move a piano today and lost most of the day, but going to see if I can knock out another building tonight.

So, first building for my Forty Acres backlot: This was officially known as Residential House #4, but more famously, it was used as the exterior for Andy Taylor's house in The Andy Griffith Show. [EDIT] Myron asked to see a wireframe on Facebook, so since I made one, I thought I'd include it here, too:

Hey, you know the old saying, you're only as old as your birth certificate says you are. :-) Happy Birthday, Gerry!

Presumably this effect (at least in film) was created by closing/opening an aperture like on a camera. I don't know if there was a way they did it in camera or during printing, but you could very easily make a model of one. See this flash diagram. It's a series of blades that are all exactly the same, rotating on their pivot points.

It may be a crazy idea, but I think I'm going to try to make a 3D model of the old RKO/Desilu backlot (40 acres.) My thinking is that since it was designed as a set that can be used multiple ways, I could use it multiple ways. Not only for The Wobbling Dead, but for future projects. It also would have the fun factor of being vaguely recognizable to people who are aware of it. 40 Acres goes all the way back to Gone With the Wind and was used in tons of movies and TV shows, most recognizably in The Andy Griffith Show. It was also used extensively in Star Trek and there's that fun scene where Kirk and Edith Keeler walk past Floyd the barber's shop: Which would mean I could parody City on the Edge of Forever in the future if I wanted to. I found some 3D models done in Sketchup that I'm going to try to use to model new ones. I downloaded Collada versions and exported them out of Meshlab into OBJ, but even as props, they look pretty sketchy. Still, the buildings are mostly just facades, so there's not as much work in rebuilding them as you'd think.

I honestly find it a terrible mis-use of Kickstarter, but it seems to be the trend now. Why use this device for funding independent artists with no means of support to fund the "promise" of a movie version of a TV show (Veronica Mars.) Goon has been around for many years and has an enormous audience. So does something like Veronica Mars or some of these other celeb-campaigns. It's great publicity for Kickstarter and the huge returns mean money in the bank for the website, but you have to wonder how much attention and potential backing they take away from the folks who really need the funding.

I got the individual sets as they came out (much pricier, since I think they ran $60 a set). I've been too broke to get any of the new blu-ray releases.

I've got a project that requires my full attention until October, but after that, I'd be game to consider something like this. Especially if it had a reasonable production time (i.e. months instead of years). :-)

Thanks, guys. One of the plusses of that desaturated, shallow depth of field look is that it hides a myriad of sins. :-) But it also gives it a miniature look, which works well for a puppet show. I was guessing at the scale on the semi, Jost. The majority of these vehicles are just going to be abandoned or flipped over and have no interaction with the puppets.

Happy Birthday, Mark! Hope you have a great one!

Thanks, Mark! Well, Agep & Xtaz aren't any immediate danger of having competition, but this'll do for my little puppet movie!

One of the dreaded dangers of the South ...the Speed Trap!

I think a great source of promotion would be to try to reach other fantasy-type creator's audiences! Drawing a sketch of one of the characters in a webcomic is a great way to get them to feature you on their website and link to your project. Here's some I found just doing some googling: The Legend of Bill— Funny barbarian strip by Dave Reddick (who works for Jim Davis' studio doing Garfield.) Dave has several routes you can go to do fan art. Battlepug—A Conan-type character who rides a horse-sized pug. Sword & Sarcasm—A funny-animal sword & sorcery comic Swords & Sausages—Anthropomorphic fantasy comic. I gotta' believe there's an audience out there for TAR. You just gotta' find it!

Great job, Gene! Love the stuff with the dog and the amusement park ride feel of it. The music sheet for the height chart when they were getting their mugshots was a nice touch. Bravo! Keep livin' the dream, man!

It might help some to draw out more of the story. Incidentally, I looked at wikipedia wondering if there was any odd characteristic of Hippos, but didn't find much. The only thing I found amusing was that Hippos seem to be overly aggressive to crocodiles for no real reason. They just don't like 'em. :-)

Just bear in mind that Scott Sava pays for his models and sets. I'm wanting to say around 2007 or 2008, he said that he had already spent over $100K on assets for the strip. I don't know how much he's spent since. That said, if Hash were to be okay with it, a team could work on a strip set in Oz using the assets already made. Essentially create their own stories in that universe leaning heavily on pre-existing assets.

I think David's idea of teams is a great one! I'm going to make an alternate suggestion for a community project. I know my experience was that I got A:M in 2004, spent a month or two in love with the idea of doing something in 3D, but just couldn't understand the concepts and dropped out. When I came back in 2007, many of the old guard were gone, but I got lucky that so many of them had left behind tutorials that I could seek out. Hash should really attempt to buy Barry Zundel's training videos and make them available to all. They were such a key into my understanding this app and the difference between my 2004 experience and my 2007 one. But even with all those tutorials, the real learning comes when you are trying to solve problems while working on a project. And you soon realize that hey, even though I'm capable of creating all the things I need for an epic feature film, I don't realistically have the time! The haystack doesn't look that big until you start trying to count the straws. What saved me was doing a comic! Doing 5 comics a week on The Wannabe Pirates was a huge learning experience for me. Each of those strips had 3+ shots that had to be set up, lighted, characters posed, etc. I had to figure out how to organize assets, deal with the demands of the story and my own abilities or lack thereof. The sheer volume of that helped me immensely. Sure, it wasn't animation, but it was almost all the steps around animation... and a lot of animation is posing and composing, which is what most of the work is in a comic. It kinda' makes sense when you compare it to doing storyboards before animating. Comics also don't require any audio, so you don't have to worry about soundtracks, voice artists, sound effects, etc. You can just concentrate on storytelling. Comics can also be distributed much easier. They are smaller in file size and require less time investment from the audience. Also, you get to cross the finish line over and over and over again. After having spent more than a year trying to make an animated Wannabe Pirates short, I suddenly found that I was getting to finish something five times a week! I think it's worth considering doing a comic strip or comic book project as a stepping stone ...and I can tell you from experience, that once you've set up all those choreographies for the panels, it's not a huge leap to take them to animation and you've already got your storyboards finished, too! Just my thought...