largento

T'Poodle's "pet-bed" chair.

On the Mac, none of it.

Thanks, Mark! Finished up T'Poodle's model today. Don't know why, but I kept putting her model off. I just have a couple of props to make and then I need to make sure I have all of the voices recorded. If all goes well, I may be able to start animating the final section tomorrow. I'm expecting it to take about 9 days. Once that's finished, I'm going to look at how I can edit it down to 12 minutes so it can be broken up into four parts (instead of five.) The wraparounds shouldn't be too difficult to do. I'm going to try to limit those to one minute before and one minute after. February is almost over (thank goodness this is a leap year!), but I feel pretty good about being able to complete everything by the end of March.

Clever and fun, Matt! Well done! I can appreciate the work of folks who want to spend endless hours obsessing over every detail, but I can't identify with them. My first year of college, I was an art major and there was this guy who would lock himself in his dorm room for a week before a drawing was due and come out with this photo-realistic piece that everybody would "ooh" and "ahh" over. I'd do mine the night before and we both made "A"s in class. Afterwards, though, my teacher would come over and say that he was disappointed that I hadn't put more time into it. And I would politely nod and agree with him, all the while thinking, "Why are you telling me this. Is there a grade above A?" :-)

I'm totally with you on this one, Gerry. It's partly why I've opted for simpler characters. :-) I found Barry's rigging tutorials the least helpful of the set. That's not saying that they didn't convey a great deal of information on the basics of bones, but it seemed clear that Barry was following his notes, too ...and as you pointed out, making lots of mistakes that make it frustrating to follow along. And then Barry sort of skips over assigning control points, which was one of the great mysteries for me early on. Errol Flemm was rigged a few different times and it really put the brakes on my productivity. (I ended up rigging him with the Setup Machine the last time around.) Big thanks to Mark S. for his help and his rig, because I would probably still be stuck. :-) Myself, I approach animation more like stop-motion, so I'm okay with just using FK for everything and you can create a very simple rig requiring no cosmetic or control bones if you're okay with not having any bells or whistles. (I simply use cp-weighting for the joints.) It's not very elegant, but it can get the job done. I also find myself considering the rigging when I design/model characters and look for things that can make it easier (wristbands so that the hands don't have to be attached and twist the arms, etc.)

Have a good one, Jason!

Ah the word I was hoping to hear. :-) Just for fun, here's some stereo anaglyphs of three of the sets I've built for this:

A quick update. Still building all of the stuff I need for Vulcanine. Here are the Vulcanine Bell Carriers:

There wasn't a redshirt who beamed down in the actual episode, but how could I do a Trek parody and *not* kill a redshirt? In previous versions, this was just a monster, but for this one, I based it on a LeMatya, which is a Vulcan animal featured in an episode of the Animated Series:

Just voted again today, so that's two votes!

Fight it! Fight it! :-) Thanks, Ken!

Neat stuff!

Congrats! I'll head over and add my vote!

Thanks, guys! What's been fun for me, is that there are still elements from the aborted 2007 version that I've been able to make use of in this new version. The sparkles come from the "glitter cylinder" I created back in 2007 and showed in this post. I didn't even re-render it. Just used the old quicktime movie I'd made. There's some controversy over how the original sparkles were created. The "official" story is that it was by pouring glitter down a cascade of water with a heavy light on it, shot against a black background. Others have claimed it was a very large, backlit tank filled with alka seltzer. :-) Whatever, I still think the spinning transparent cylinder works, since you can get sparkles moving in different directions. I looked again at some online tutorials, but found them somehow lacking. The basic idea that the characters fade into view (in other words, you fade from a clean plate to one with the actors in it) and covering the figures with a matte outline and some kind of sparkle effect is obvious, but it didn't quite look right. I did some reading and found a reference that Roddenberry made in a production note that the people should come in as a single color. I never found a reference to this before, but it instantly made sense. I added a yellow layer that fades in first and then sort of fades in and out slightly over the fading in of the figure and blammo, it instantly looked more like the real effect. For the actual shot, I want to do a tighter matte around the figures and I plan on adding a couple of moving elements to the scene so that it feels less static.

Speaking of transporters. My first experiment doing the transporter effect: transporter_ae2.mov

I wouldn't mind at all! What input do you need? You can mail me at randarr@gmail.com Thanks!

Agreed, Rodney. I've been going through my old files and with some adjustment, I've been able to use most of the pieces from the old Vulcanine arena set I modeled back in 2007 in the new set. Certainly going to add some new lighting challenges.

Thanks, Gerry! Please do share it. You are right One cool part about doing something like this is that you know you're learning as you go. The big thrill for me is just being able to do it. Who hasn't dreamed of having their own TV show? :-)

Man, this has been a rough week. Most of the time at the freelance gig, I've been there as back-up, waiting for work to come in. Kinda' like being in a waiting room day after day. I've got to go back in today, too. I'm just hoping that I don't get the flu that's going round up there. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the work, but it's hard not to think about how much work you could be getting done at home. Episode two is almost complete. I still need to get my two lady friends to record their lines. Hoping I can get that done soon. I've rendered all of the shots except those three shots that need the female lip synch. I'm looking into the possibility of making it four episodes instead of five. I think it may be possible to edit 3 minutes out of the last two episodes to make it just one. My thinking is that it might seem a little long drug out to the fifth episode and I can make the extra time exclusive to the DVD version, giving incentive for folks to make the purchase. This also means that I don't have to do a wraparound for the fifth episode, which makes meeting my goal easier. I'm waiting until I've got the Stalled Trek part completed to see if this is doable. With the pilot up, I've seen a few comments from around the web. Most are on the positive side, but there was a reviewer who called it "Innocuous eye candy, not much more." But he also said, "...the humor ranges from sophomoric to silly to somewhat sly, but overall I enjoyed it, and I'm pretty much a grownup, at least chronologically-speaking. It's very colorful and fun to watch..." and gave it a mild recommendation saying it would do as a "virtual snack."

Thanks! I finished the main animation for episode two yesterday. I'm going to have to get a female friend to voice the female characters, so I didnt animate their lip syncing. It's just three lines, but there are more in future episodes. Working freelance this week, but using time to render shots. Have a bunch of modeling to do this week and hopefully will be able to animate episode three over the weekend. Four and five won't require any more models, so I should be able to animate them next week. Then it's a matter of writing and animating the Paunk! Wraparounds and Series One will be finished!!

Awesome, Gerry! Very cool!

Join the two crossing splines. That's why there's a hole.

Very cool, Gazz! Nice to see them coming back to life!

Thanks!

Hear-hear, Rodney! That Chaplin is awesome-squared, Paul!