largento

Haha... maybe I should stick to 3D... :-) Ran into some budgetary restraints along the way and my sister was worried that a little cake wouldn't be enough for the 12 kids coming to the party, so had to start with a pre-made & iced cake. I ended up having to use some kind of green "cake mist" spray to change the icing to a green color. Sculpting out of rice krispie treats was a new one on me and the Fondant stuff really wasn't as easy to sculpt onto it as it looks on TV... BUT My nephew Spencer thinks it is awesome and that's what counts in the end. Picture's a little blurry, but I'm too lazy to pull it out of the fridge to take another one. :-)

My nephew turned five today and is having a birthday party this weekend. After seeing some Cake Boss episodes a few weeks ago, I'm wondering if I could do a custom cake for him. His favorite super-hero these days is J'onn J'onz, the Martian Manhunter. For some reason, he doesn't like it if you call him Martian Manhunter, only J'onn. :-) Anyway, I cranked up A:M tonight and did this mockup of what the cake might look like:

Robert, there's a couple of nice looking ears in this thread. This post by Bill Gaylord has a good one.

Happy Birthday, Kat! Hope you are having a great one!

Here's a question I've always wondered... Is it possible to turn hair into a model? Say, if you wanted to print the model in 3D?

That's a pretty cool effect.

I'm not only looking forward to getting to use this plug-in, but I can't wait to see what everybody else does with it.

WOW! Really looking forward to the update!

Interesting. Thanks for the links, Rodney!

Been hoping for something like this for a while now! Awesome!

Hope your birthday was a great one, Rodney!

I've explained SSS to a few non-3D folks and they usually get the bit about light showing through ears.

How about setting it up in an action?

One trick for fasting rendering is to only render what needs to be rendered. I ran into a time crunch rendering the Vulcanine scenes on Stalled Trek and realized that for shots where the camera didn't move (and they weren't interacting with the background) I could turn off the characters, render one frame of the background, bring it in as a layer to match up to the camera shot and then turn off all of the background elements. Those shots rendered much faster. You have to be mindful of lighting and such, but the time saved on those shots gave me the time I needed to render the shots with camera movement.

I thought Eric Camden had done a tutorial on this very thing, but couldn't find it. I wonder whatever happened to Eric. His profile says he hasn't visited the forums in over a year. He was doing a lot of really cool stuff while he was here.

Thanks, Stian & Rodney! The googly eyes was something I immediately thought of with the zombies, because I need some way to communicate what they're "thinking". My take on the zombies are that they are less menacing and more like sheep. I wanted them to be able to look nervous when I needed them to. I like how the hair is looking, but I'm getting some movement. That may be because I turned on dynamics. I'll need to mess with it some more. I think it succeeds in looking like fake hair. :-)

About time I started a thread for this project. I'm hoping to go into heavy production on the 1st of January (like with Stalled Trek last year.) It's a parody of the zombie television show "The Walking Dead." It's going to break away from the format a little in that this will be a parody of the first season of the show rather than just a single episode. Most of what I've been doing is gag writing so far, but I should start having lots of stuff to see starting next month. Here's a test I was playing around with tonight. Experimenting with hair this time around. zomb.mov

I've watched several of those (Andrew Stanton's, JJ Abrams', & Scott McCloud's) and all were informative. I liked JJ's the best.

Very nice. Didn't watch the entire 3 1/2 hours, but I watched 20 minutes of it and thought you did a really good job of explaining things.

People rarely finish "epic" things. It is possible, but they have to look at it as a thousand tiny projects they must succeed at. It's like losing a great deal of weight. You focus on each day and then they add up. I would set up a goal to accomplish something relative to what you'll need to be able to do for the big project. Try one scene or sequence. The experience you gain from this will tell you what it will take for you to do the whole project. And you'll have something to show others who might be attracted to your project.

Wonderful, Gerry! The snow looks magical and the color coming in like that is great. Music works perfectly with it, too. Bravo!

It's Cyber-Monday, so I'm gonna' plug this sale one more time. :-) Thanks to all of you who've taken advantage of this sale ...and if you were planning on getting a DVD, but have been putting it off, remember that it ends the last day of this month. So go here and get it while you can! I've been working on the next project, which I think is going to be big-time fun and plan on making a thread for it when I start having stuff to show.

Bump! Time is running out on this November sale, so I wanted to remind you of it! After this, I'm going to hit some retailers and won't be able to discount the price, so this is the best time to pick one up for you or for a gift to that Star Trek fan you know!

Simon, Having that done will give you the ability to make lists of what assets you'll need. I made folders for the different assets I knew from experience that I'd have. You can see what I came up with here.

If you're the lone person on your project, then I'd say tailor it to your own work habits ...or account for your own bad work habits. Think about what things have worked well in the past and things where you could have done better. For me, I had a real problem with asset management. I'd keep saving newer versions of models as I made changes to them and I was always having to ask myself which version of which was the right one. Once I'd figured out a directory structure, I went about making sure that only the latest and greatest models were put in and were named simply. Working on my own, I found I didn't need as much as far as planning, since it was going to be me doing everything. I did have the luxury of having been very familiar with the story and having drawn it as a comic at least three times in the years before I worked on it. I found the structure worked great for me and made the rest of the production much more efficient.