largento

*Very* nice splining, David!

Congratulations!

It appears you can also accomplish this in the UV editor. Select the whole mesh and press R and rotate it. I did it with a simple 4-patch grid and it worked (it did appear to look like it distorted in the editor, but in the model it was fine.)

That's a really short attention span these kids today have. :-) That it offers the possibility of making it better is a cool thing. It's making me wonder if Blip.TV offers this kind of feedback. (They post your content to the various video sites automatically.) Having this kind of information would be valuable moving forward.

Thanks! So, one of the unexpected plusses of putting up the Paunk! pilot is that now that I've generated over 1K views, I can make use of the analytics that YouTube offers to help me in doing the actual series. For instance, these two graphs show Audience Retention. It shows where people stopped watching along the timeline of the movie. The first is the raw data and the second is the relative data, comparing the information with statistics about other films of the same length. My results aren't too bad. I seem to retain the majority of the audience for most of the film. There is a noticeable drop off during the first 30 seconds. This could be people starting to watch it again and stopping it, but it could also be a reaction to the opening titles being too long. I'm going to go with the latter and tighten them up to something much shorter. I'm also going to tighten up the wraparounds. Make them shorter and faster paced. I'm going to add a "next week" trailer over the closing credits to see if I can stop that dramatic drop-off at the end. It also gives me gender and age demographics which are pretty much what I expected: Mostly males between 35-54. This will help me at the convention, since I can focus my pitch to this group. Males between 35-54 is a pretty good demographic considering they usually have more money than teenagers. :-) I'm going to start gearing up this weekend to begin creating the episodes next week.

I'm not sure about "smart," but it was "bold." :-) Yes, I am still a free agent. The road has been a rough one. Freelance work almost completely dried up for awhile and I was forced to move into my sister's spare upstair's bedroom (where I'm still residing.) Work seems to be improving, so I'm not sure how much longer that will be. But without question, the freedom has allowed me to do a great deal of work I wouldn't have been able to accomplish working nights and weekends after a full week's work. I've found that "stuff" isn't nearly as important as I once thought it was. I've had most of my stuff in storage for over two years now and somehow I manage to get by without it. I wonder sometimes if I knew what I know now, would I make the same decision and I'm not sure. The stability of regular income and my independence is a strong lure, but clearly I've accomplished things that in the end, are more important to me. We don't have a whole lot of time on this rock and it would suck to not at least given it a try.

Rusty, I think because this is such a short piece, you see the asteroid moving for too long. Proportionately, it's like the "getting run over by a steamroller" gag in Austin Powers. Enough frames go by to make you forget the preceding image and pulls it out of context. If the impact could somehow be brought closer to our last view of the character, that might do it. Another option might be to intercut between the two shots to keep the context alive.

Will, have you ever considered approaching Roy Thomas with this? I want to say he lives in South Carolina or some place like that now. He might be able to connect you with some like-minded folks who'd be interested in telling these kinds of tales. Heck, Roy might even be interested and then you'd have a pretty big name to use to attract others. He's in his early 70s now, but he still does the occasional writing gig. You might be able to contact him through Two Morrows publishing.

Thanks, Mark! The ocean rig is the star of the commercial. :-)

Definitely entices me to want to find out more about the book. Although, in the first "bread" should be "breed." Unless that's some hip phrase I'm not up on. :-)

I did use Kickstarter to fund the Stalled Trek DVD replication, but I don't think there's an audience for a Wannabe Pirates movie. I'd like to come back to the webcomic at some point and finish up the last storyline, but there's not a good financial incentive. Audience for the comic just never grew to a decent size. It *is* funny reading my old post discounting Kickstarter in light of having used it so successfully later on. :-)

Thanks! I like to make the distinction. Don't want to give Muppet Studios any ammo for suing me. :-) I'm not sure when the DVDs will be available for purchase, but I'll certainly make mention of it here. It would be awesome if I sold out of them at the convention. :-)

Glad to hear they're still valuable! These were fun to do and it was great to be able to pass along the little "lightbulb" concepts I'd learned that helped in my understanding how to use A:M.

Wow, Scott finally finished the music for ! He barely squeaked in on time for it to be included on the Stalled Trek DVD. It's a pity this got waylaid like it did, but after it dragged on for so long on the back end, I lost my enthusiasm for it. I should have pushed for it to be finished earlier, but I was already wanting to do something else. Nevertheless, I still think it came out fun! Here's the book trailer/commercial/"scenes from": !

Thanks, although I'll quickly point out that these are *not* muppets. Muppets is a trademarked term (like Kleenex). Muppets can be puppets, but only Muppet Studios puppets can be Muppets. :-) Although these are really more like representations of puppets, so they aren't really puppets, either. I toyed around with trying to come up some fancy term for the process, but I've just settled on using "animated puppet." "Stalled Trek:Amutt Time" and The Paunk! Show webseries will use that term. Reading this thread (and the old Stalled Trek thread) will give you most of the info on how this was done, but having reached the end and now looking back on it in retrospect, I can point to these key things I would have to say in answer to, "How did you do it?": 1) Determination—It's finished because despite how seemingly difficult it was (and boy, was it), I determined to do it. I set the goal and the deadline, dove in and kept at it until I reached it. At any point in the process I could have hopped off of the train, but I didn't. 2) Confidence—I said it was a "crazy" idea when I started, but honestly, I knew that it was possible and I knew I could do it. I'd spent years doing an incredibly large amount of work on The Wannabe Pirates. I'd faced many obstacles and found my way through and was reaching a point where I didn't shy away from the hard stuff. If I'd had significant doubts about not being able to do it, it wouldn't have succeeded. You can't finish if you keep putting off the hard parts. 3) Experience—Working on The Wannabe Pirates and the other things I've done over the last five years, has given me enough experience to know what the best ways are for me to accomplish the tasks I needed to achieve to finish this project. I was able to tailor it to my strengths and come up with a way to do a project like this in such a short amount of time. The only way to know that about yourself is to spend a lot of time doing. Without experience, I would never have been able to have the confidence to d something like this. 4) Talent—The fact is that you must have some talent in order to be creative. There's a pervasive myth that cgi can replace having talent or that people who work in 3D aren't talented ...but it can't replace talent and those people making amazing things in cgi are talented! Probably not the expected answer, but you get all introspective when you finish climbing a mountain. :-)

Just to make note of it: Today I placed the order for 1,000 DVDs and dropped the master off at FedEx. Barring complications, I will receive a huge number of boxes filled with coolness on May 4th, plenty of days ahead of the May 19-20 Dallas ComicCon! I've got two more small jobs to do: design a banner and postcard to order in time for the con ...and then I'm going to sleep for a week!

I think that looks really cool, Rusty! For what it's worth, my first impression is that I'm more interested in the visuals than the story.Probably because the story pitch is a familiar one. Aliens come, give us their technology, we think they're good and then they turn out to be bad. Reading your summary clarifies that it's different aliens coming to destroy them, but the trailer leaves the impression that it's "V" on another planet. I would play up the hook, to better sell the story. Clearly you've invested a huge amount of time in this trailer, I'm a little surprised by the plain-ness of the book cover. Is there not a way to use some of these visuals to create more compelling cover art? I grant you on a black and white kindle, it won't look as cool, but you'll be advertising it on websites that can show full color art. There are also quite a few people who read Kindle books on color devices. I think, if I were browsing for books and I had the option to watch a book trailer, it would give me more incentive to consider the book, but like I said, while you have my attention, do the best job you can to pitch me on the story. In a sense, it's like the cover painting. A compelling cover painting gets me to pick up a book off of the shelf, but I immediately flip to the back and if that copy doesn't sell me on the story, it goes back on the shelf, no matter how cool the painting on the front was.

Not the limited version, but Photoshop Extended has been able to import video since CS3. I haven't installed the free public beta of P:E CS6, but as I understand it, you can do even more with video, like rudimentary editing and working with audio.

That would be awesome. So, I'm finished with the film and all of the other stuff and I've built the DVD menus and stuff in Encore. All the functionality works, but I'm not happy with how the film itself came out during the transcoding. It was much darker and contrasty than the original video. I might be tempted to let it go if it weren't that I was about to make 1000 of them. :-) Trying out some different things in Photoshop, but it's slow going since I'm working with uncompressed files. I'm also using Photoshop to convert from 24fps to 29.97fps, which makes render times out of Photoshop even longer. This is the kinda' stuff you don't know to worry about when you start out. :-) I did end up going with a slideshow for the "making of" bit. It just made more sense that way, since it's actually possible to read the earlier comic versions on the screen. I'm also including the 4 minute Wannabe Pirates video I animated last year. The sound part was finished this week. Creating the DVD menus was actually very easy. Encore allows you to create them in Photoshop and you set them up in a certain way so that when Encore opens the PSD file, it automatically knows what are buttons. You then just drag links to what you want the buttons to take the viewer to and ...boom, you've got your DVD interface.

As Robcat says, the investment is small for a full-featured animation software. And A:M is remarkably easy to learn. That said, remember creating 3D animated films is a complex process. There are a LOT of parts to the whole and learning all of them takes time and effort. I highly recommend Barry Zundel's series A:M Training videos, that you can purchase here. They were an enormous help to me in the beginning and the key to my understanding the basics of A:M. I literally went from being completely in the dark to having a good foundational understanding of A:M. Especially in modeling. And no, I don't get a cut of the sales. :-)

Yeah, just save it as an AI file and make sure to make it ai 8. Make sure the "Auto" radio button is on in the plug-in when you're bringing it in. I have found the plug-in to be buggy, so make sure you save before using it. Keep in mind that sometimes it's smart to think A:M instead of AI when you are making your paths so that they'll be easier to patch when you get them in. Watch for problems. Sometimes when AI makes a rounded rectangle, it doubles up points, which can cause unexpected results in A:M.

I did experiment with baking the surface and the baked surface version actually took considerably longer to render. I'm assuming because of the bump maps and such. We're not talking about astronomical times here. At worst, they never went over 12 minutes a frame. I'd just gotten used to it being more like 2 or 4 minutes a frame on the ship sets. I'll probably have to say goodbye to using the darksim textures, since the plug-in doesn't work in the current Mac OS.

Wow, took a really long time to render out that last section. The Vulcanine Arena set made heavy usage of a dark sim texture, which made render times much longer. I did end up rendering some of the backgrounds before hand and bringing them back in as layers to speed up the process, but that only worked when there were no camera movements or interaction between the characters and the background. I've edited together the entire movie including the new music soundtrack and am almost finished with the sound. There's a couple of places where I need to provide some character vocalizations to enhance the action. The last thing is the credits. If JimD is reading this, let me know if you'd like a mention in the credits. I haven't done the Paunk! Shows yet, but I did use your transporter sound effect in this. I got really lucky with finding sound effects on Amazon's MP3 store. I have been pushing myself all day to get all of the loose ends taken care of. I'm really looking forward to getting to watch the whole thing tonight. It really does feel like a different animal with the musical score. All that's left after this is to design and build the menus for the DVD itself and put together the extra "making of" featurette. I was hoping to get it to the replicator tomorrow, but it looks like I still have a couple or more days before I'll be ready. After all these years, it's finally going to be finished and real! :-)

Don't forget that you can create paths in Illustrator and import them with the AI Wizard. I do that for nearly all my rounded rectangles.

I already wished you on Facebook, but I'll second it here, Gerry... Happy Birthday!