largento

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!

Awesome!

I briefly looked into that until I realized the cost would be prohibitive. As soon as I saw that I would have to charge $4 each for them, the idea immediately went away. :-) One idea I might consider came from a guy on a webcomics forum. He suggested putting up comic strips between seasons to keep the animal alive for people. That could be fun since I could do more throwaway type things that wouldn't merit an entire 15 minute film. If I do it, it'll only be weekly, though. I know first-hand how time consuming it is. :-) I haven't decided how I'm going to handle the whole website thing yet. I'll just have a temporary one up until the web series is ready to launch. Once the DVD is finished, I'm going to focus on getting the episodes for the first series of Paunk! Shows done. I think now that I am going to go ahead with the five episodes (instead of compressing it to four). I'll have the time to do that and that way, with a second series in the fall, I'll have ten episodes in a year, which is pretty good for a web series. Here's where I'm at with the design of the DVD cover. It'll likely change some as I render out more of the Vulcanine scenes. I'm doing one of those slim digipacks, rather than the bulky amaray cases. It costs more, but since my Kickstarter was so successful, I thought I'd invest more into the packaging.

May have over-stated that a little. :-)

Hey thanks, Mike! In glancing over the thread, you missed the part about it actually being finished. So, kinda' late to reconsider character designs. :-) I'm working on rendering the final five minutes (of the 15 minute total) so that I can send the DVD master to the replicators on Monday. Simplification was the mantra for this project. How else could one guy create 15 minutes of animation from scratch in three months? (And that doesn't count the work I've done for the web series wraparound.) My thinking with the puppets was that I could create a sort of "limited 3D animation." As far as rigging goes, the puppets have very simple rigs that actually allow for more movement than they are actually required to do. My thinking is that with puppets you are essentially animating a forearm and and opening and closing hand. Just like real puppets, dramatic changes are accomplished by swapping out puppets. This simplifies things a great deal. I realize how much this has horrified some people on the forum, but this was always about finding a way to have fun creating my cartoons without having to invest years and years or come up with tons of money to pay for help. Thanks to this, I've already realized a 16 year-old dream in just a few months and I'm going to get to do at least one other fifteen minute film within this same year. I may be able to do a couple of dozen before it's all said and done. So I don't win any awards. I'm not doing this for an audience of animators and I'm too old to get a job in this business. I'm just having fun and hopefully making folks laugh. The civilian folks just watch it as a show. The craft or technique behind it is invisible to them. They might think it's not Pixar, but there's little expectation that a puppet show *would* be Pixar-quality. In fact, more than a few people have mistaken it for an *actual* puppet show, which is pretty high praise when you consider it.

Thanks, Rodney! I'm giving over most of my side of the table to having a 24" monitor that will be playing the movie on a loop. (I went ahead and shelled out the extra dough for electricity back when I bought the space.) I'm also planning on having a retractable banner stand to brand my area. I'll also be giving away postcards that will have a link on them. Among the thousand other things I have to do, I need to set up a temporary website. :-) I appreciate your optimism, and of course, I hope that it will do gangbusters, but reality can be very harsh. Selling out I think is unlikely, but it's how many I do sell that will give me some kind of clue as to whether or not this will be a financial success. To me, just accomplishing making it is success. :-)

Thanks, Robert! Yes, it's the Dallas ComicCon, which is on May 19-20. It's in the Irving Convention Center and looks like it's going to be their biggest convention yet. They have some big names: Stan Lee, Patrick Stewart, a bunch of Batmans: Adam West (along with Burt Ward), Kevin Conroy and Val Kilmer. Neal Adams is coming to this one and boy would I like to see a panel with him, but I'll be stuck at my table the whole con. The one downside of doing this, I never get to see any of the guests unless they do signings in the dealers hall.

Exhausted, but the final shot has been animated! I'm now officially in post-production! The total running time (not counting closing credits) is 14:58, so almost dead on with the 15 minute estimate. I got a surprise contact today from a local composer who does video games and movies and was really interested in scoring Stalled Trek. I told him I wish he'd come along earlier, but he insisted he works insanely fast and so I've commissioned him to score it! This is huge news. By far, the biggest regret has been not having a score on this and now that's not going to be the case! Of course, it now also means, that I'm no longer operating at a profit, but I'm gambling on sales of the DVD justifying it. I've got about 5 minutes worth of footage that I have to do final renders of and there's a lot of sound work needed for this last section, since much of it is sight gags with little or no dialogue. I'm going to be recording a lot of grunts and noises to try to get them to work. :-)

Nifty!

As predicted, once I got back into it, the animation is starting to pick up. I'm 3:08 into the final part and estimate I have about 2 minutes left, which means my original estimate of 15 minutes is going to be pretty true. I have three more shots to finish tonight and seven to do tomorrow and I'll have finished the basic animation. I still need to go back and adjust the lighting before rendering and then there's going to be a fair amount of sound design needed for these "action" shots. I also want to take a crack at recreating some of the more familiar still frames from the closing titles. One thing that's been a big help to me is this app I have on my iPhone: Animation Timer. I bought it years ago, but had completely forgotten about it. I was struggling trying to figure out the timing on the non-dialogue shots when I finally remembered I had this app. It's not perfect, but for many shots, it's been a huge help. I just start the timer and tap out the things I imagine seeing on screen and then I can go back and see the overall time of the shots and the holds between taps. I really wish I'd remembered it before yesterday. As time hurtles out the window, I've decided to hold off on doing the web series until *after* I've finished the DVD. In addition to the animated short, I want to do a making-of feature and spend some time designing the menus and cover art. I'm also planning on getting a retractable banner stand and a couple of postcards, which all need to be designed soon, as well. I don't want to short-sell either, so I'm going to put off doing the wraparound animation and putting up the episodes until after the DVD is complete and off to the replicators. With that in mind, the web series may go back to being 5 episodes, since a big reason for making it four was to conserve time.

Hats off, Gene! That's an amazing accomplishment!

Jpegs don't support alpha channels. Do a "Save for Web & Devices..." and choose PNG-24. Make sure that transparency is checked.

Maps=decals. Once you place a decal you can change the image to be: color, bump, specular intensity, etc. Some materials can include bitmap images.

Thanks, Rob! Yeah, I remember when I first got "Superman: the Movie" on blu-ray and I set it up so that I could pause on the same frame on both the blu-ray and a DVD copy and switch the input signal on my TV back and forth between them. It's astonishing how dramatically "wrong" the colors are in NTSC. Superman's cape is more of an orange and his costume more aquamarine. Seeing the vivid reds and blues on blu-ray to me was more impressive than the resolution. Photoshop has a series of actions you run that first makes sure the saturation levels are okay and then the luminosity levels. It's the second one that is most dramatic. Whites become light grays and blacks become dark grays.

Haha, no, I thought it was pretty good, actually. I tend to surf the forums on my laptop while working on my main computer. I find it awkward to type on my laptop, so I have to actually respond on my computer and by the time I've switched my attention, I forget what it was I was thinking about doing. :-) The characters are definitely odd, but still creative and I think, as I do on each of your animations, that there's a definite increase of quality each time.