largento

rdUtjbf3U9g Just experimenting to see how embedding a YouTube video works ...and success!

Looks very convincing to me!

Don't forget that you can also create an environment map for your sphere. Create a new material and change the attribute to: Plugin->HashInc->Environment Map Choose a bitmap to represent the environment that it's in and apply the material to your sphere. Now you don't even have to use reflection, it will reflect the bitmap. See image below:

Thanks, Mark! It was a bit rushed, but I'm so happy to have one now.

Happy birthday, Robert!

Better late than never, I finally made a trailer for Stalled Trek: Amutt Time! You can see it . I must've tried a dozen times to do it and just had the dickens of a time trying to figure out how to do it. What do I show, what do I not show? It's a 16 minute movie, how do you make a trailer for that? For some reason today I thought of an opening title card and just started writing down the whole thing. It changed very little from what I put together. The beauty part is now I have the trailer embedded on my Storenvy product page, which is something I've long wanted to have. How do you sell a DVD without showing a video?

Presumably with much larger budgets. :-) And remember, most of the uniques saw it twice. There might be a better follow-through if I were selling a DVD rather than having it link to a Kickstarter. That adds another layer of complexity to the thing. Also, a lot of advertising is just aimed at awareness. Potentially 45K people are now aware that there's something called "The Wobbling Dead" who weren't aware of it before. If my product was on shelves in store, this might translate to them seeing it and saying, I've heard of this and considering a purchase.

Just an interesting bit of process, folks might find useful if they try a KS in the future. My webhost offers $25 in Facebook Ads credit that I've never made use of. Wanting to get the word out, I thought I'd give it a try, so I set up an ad linking to the KS page and targeted it to The Walking Dead and some categories that matched it. I set my budget at $5 a day and have run it for four days. According to the stats, during those four days, the ad appeared for 45,724 unique Facebook users and they were exposed to it 1.9 times. It was clicked on 45 times, so basically one in one thousand. Not a whole lot of clicks and I don't know if there were any pledges that came from the ad. It's an option, though and you can target your audience.

Thanks, Matt & Rodney! I don't know about them having much value outside of the A:M community, Rodney. I've never really worked with a polygon/subdivide system for modeling. Mine's purely A:M-based. My goal with it is to show a user how to create a simple, yet neat-looking character that they can then customize and use to make their own A:M projects, be it animation or web comic, etc. Hopefully, folks will see value in them and help get The Wobbling Dead funded. I should point out that's just the one model up there. He's just in three different poses.

That's impressive! I got the impression that Pixar's patent claim analyzed this after (?) the posing and somehow made the compensation based on analyzing the two poses, which would be different than this, but it seems like A:M's solution is much more practical and easier to implement.

Sounds right, Robert. My impression of it all was that it looks at Pose A and Pose B and adjusts the interpolation between the two to have realistic movement, removing the need to go back and key in-betweens to fix the straight-line movement of the joints. I'd think the patent would have to be for their process of accomplishing this, not the actual doing of that ...since the end goal is to mimic real world anatomical movement, but the document was so dense, I gave up on reading any more of it. :-)

Here's a side-by-side comparison. On the left, the Amplitude plug-in, on the right, manually synching with the pose slider: jimmycomp_s.mov Hands down, manual is better, but for time-saving instances, I could see going with the Amplitude plug-in. Especially for a long speech delivered by a character who isn't in close-up. I'm debating another project (if TWD doesn't get funded) that would be episodic. Essentially as close as I could go to doing an animated webcomic and being able to simplify things will be key to making it doable.

Agreed, but can be helpful to look at real fencing and then exaggerate from it. That way it looks less like they are just wildly moving about. :-)

Ignoring movie fencing, part of the posture is to keep the torso facing perpendicular to the foil. That gives you the maximum arm length. If you turn towards your opponent, your reach lessens. There is a move in fencing very similar to what you're doing here, I can't recall what the name of it is, but essentially the first foot movement is more a less a "fake" and then you go in for a long thrust with the second movement. So, if you can imagine it, the first foot fall is done to make noise and fake out your opponent and then the second part is a lunge. Alternately, you could bring the back foot forward after the first move and increase the distance of the lunge. I took a couple of semesters of fencing in college, so my knowledge is limited, but there was a guy in my class who was vertically-challenged and he used to use that all of the time, but he almost made it a sort of hopping action. It wasn't at all intimidating, but it was very difficult not to laugh, which made it somewhat effective. :-) I was very disappointed early on when I found out real fencing and movie fencing had very little in common. :-)

That seems to be caused by static in the recording. If you cleaned up the audio and removed the noise, you would lose a lot of that. Where I see it being a big plus is for newbies who just want to make their cartoon character talk. This is much quicker than setting up phenomes and typing words into the dopesheet. With this method, a simple open/close mouth pose and an audio file and they're ready to go.

Trying out amplitude on a model with teeth. It really is serviceable to do the lip synch with Amplitude. It's not full animation to be sure, but for simple things, it can definitely work. It could also be used as a starting place, I think. Go in and edit the mouth shapes in some place (O's, MPB, etc.) and it would look pretty good. jimmytest_s.mov

Thanks, Gene! This comes under the category of grasping at straws. :-)

I guess, what I'm saying is that with all the freedom the internet gives us a distribution method, the gatekeepers still have a lot of influence and power. If I'm Stephen King, I can sell a book online without a publisher and do well *because* I had a publisher before that spent lots and lots of money on making my name famous and publishing my books. If I'm me, I've got a higher mountain to climb. :-) The "trick" seems to be that you have to come up with something that a person reading or viewing immediately feels the need to share with everyone else they know. And those people are also so motivated to share it to everyone they know. How do you accomplish that trick, I don't know.

As you know, I'm running my Kickstarter to fund my The Wobbling Dead movie. I'm nearly halfway there, but that means I have over half to go! As an incentive to try to persuade you to pledge, I'm offering these bonuses: $15--Free Model! So, in addition to a free Wobbling Dead desktop picture and a downloadable version of the film, you get the above model. He's got a basic rig in him and some basic poses for eyebrows, eyes and the mouth. You can use the existing rig, or pull it out and put in one of the available rigs. $25--Free Model & Extra Stuff! With this, you get the desktop picture, the downloadable version of the movie, the movie on DVD, the free model and an extras pack with things like different hairpieces, facial hair, hats, a couple of shirts and pants, etc. $50--Free Model, Extra Stuff, & Video Tutorials! This is the biggie! You get all the above stuff, plus your DVD will be signed, your name will appear in the credits and you'll get a series of video tutorials by me, showing how I model a character like the above! Remember, the way Kickstarter works, you only get charged if the campaign is successful. If it fails, you won't be charged and won't receive the rewards. Click on this link or in my sig file below to visit the Kickstarter page!

I posted a link to the first story to my Facebook page last week. Basically pointing out that we now live in a society that tosses aside our older employees. Not just in comics. People get let go because they are older and their salary/benefits are too expensive. It's a reality I didn't factor into my decision to quit my job four years ago. :-) The support the artists you like pre-supposes you've heard of the artist in the first place.

Heck, if I could get a booth babe, I wouldn't even bother making the cartoons, more or less going out and trying to sell them. :-)

That was the thinking behind doing The Wobbling Dead. I thought even doing TNG would be too narrow. Although there are folks who like Star Trek AND The Walking Dead, the two have mostly separate audiences. That, and The Walking Dead is extremely popular these days. I don't doubt that one of my biggest weaknesses is that I'm simply not a salesman. Heck, I hate even attracting attention to myself, more or less talking to hundreds of strangers trying to get them to take a chance on this thing that I poured my heart and soul into. I can't help but think if I were the outgoing type and had thousands of friends, this would be a lot easier. 'Course, then I probably wouldn't be the type who could spend days on end in front of a computer never seeing the sun. :-) I've heard that argument against the business side from many artists. But, to be successful, you have to have that instinct and knowledge. I've been trying to set up a regular meeting of some of the local cartoonists here in Dallas, and so far have only managed to organize one get together, but one of the cartoonists there had been a newspaper cartoonist since the early '80s. When his paper went out of business, he literally had no idea what to do. He's still doing about six cartoons a week, but they barely pay anymore. On the web, there's opportunities, but they still require capital and who-you-know and luck. I can tweet about making this movie I made by myself, but it's not going to get anywhere as much attention as a Kardashian tweeting about what kind of shoes they like. The problem is that the internet is still like standing in the basement holding up index cards that say "Buy my stuff."

Thanks, Rodney! I'd like to think that they would have done something similar with a real puppet show. Just have someone stick it in its hand as soon as it went out of sight. As to the legs, there's no way to get around that. I thought I could on Stalled Trek until I started building sets and realizing there wasn't going to be an easy way to shoot them from the waist up all the time. My thinking was that if you believe the puppet's a character, then you believe it has a lower body, even if you can't see it.

I put the YouTube link to the Hospital Sequence in the Kickstarter thread, but I wanted to make sure it was here in the main thread. For me, these threads are kinda' like a journal that I can go back to. Anyway, here's the . This one was definitely a rush job! One simple bit I'll share was this little Texas Switch I did to get the comment card in the puppet's hand: 1) I made an action that was just the card positioned in the puppet's hand and constrained to translate to and orient like the hand bone. 2) I positioned the cards so that I could have the character's hand go out of view (presumably with the card) 3) I had the action set so that it didn't become active until the puppet's hand was out of sight. 4) The hand comes back into view holding it. For being quick and easy, I think it worked pretty well.

Never say die, Rodney ...until they kill it. :-) I haven't given up at all (and thanks for your pledge, btw!), just being more realistic this go around. I read somewhere that the danger of having a great imagination is that you can imagine something being successful. :-) I've thought all of these projects had potential to go over big and imagined them all taking off, but the reality is that at the end of next month, it'll be four years since I quit my job and with the exception of Stalled Trek, everything has been a loss financially. That's not to say they were unsuccessful in that there were actually 2 or 3 fans of The Wannabe Pirates who enjoyed it and I certainly learned a heckuva' lot in the process, but I think this gives me a gauge to say how far should I go with this. Using Stalled Trek as my only other example. I originally did the Kickstarter to make 200 DVDs, thinking that would be about what I'd expect to sell at local cons. (A conservative number as actual sales bore out.) However, when it went over the goal, I opted to get 1K DVDs made. If I'd looked at the numbers of backers and saw that it was more on the small side, I could have stuck to a lower number and used that extra money to travel to a larger Star Trek show, where I probably would have had an easier time selling it. This time, I'm trying to make use of the info. If it makes it's goal, then I'll consider that in the number of DVDs I order and the way I go about selling it. If it had been a runaway success, then I could have planned for that, as well. As it is, though. If it doesn't go, then that's a pretty good sign there aren't that many people interested in buying them and I wouldn't have the money to make them for them, either. Better to have that info *before* I've spent six or seven months working on a project, rather than after the fact when I can't get that time back. So, not being a defeatist and haven't given up yet (in fact, I'm working on another one of the character models today), just allowing reality to interfere this time, rather than foolishly not letting it into the room. :-)