largento

I hadn't really thought of it in this way, but Tar of Zandoria being anthropomorphic could tap into the large audience for that kind of thing. I don't know much about the "furry" fans, but they are a pretty large group.

One possible solution is to cheat. :-) Here I created the keyhole with a face on it and used that same outer spline as the front of the padlock. This way I didn't have to continue the splines all through the mesh. You can see in the quick render that as long as it all remains flat on the front, there's no evidence that the keyhole isn't attached. I did this on one of the panels of my Star Trek bridge set and it saved me a lot of frustration.

Have a great one!

Nifty!

Nice texturing and modeling!

Finished setting up the set for the framing sequences.

I might, too. :-) Thanks, Mark, Jake & Rodney! I should have the opening titles sequence finished today, which will be all of the visuals for the first Stalled Trek segment. I finished the "Earth Nerd" character yesterday and started planning out the set for the host segments. I also took the whole thing into Garageband and did as much sound work as I could, making new sound effects since the original ones are copyrighted. I played around with some of the loops to create a theme song for the main show. It'll do for now. :-) Unfortunately, this chest cold still hasn't cleared up, so all of my voice work is temporary. It's going to be annoying to have to redub them all, but being that I'm dubbing to puppets, it shouldn't be too difficult. On the plus side, my raspy breathing provided the basis for a "ship's hum" sound effect. :-)

Happy Birthday! Hope it was a great one!

So, change of plans. After I animated the first shot of episode two, I started to be concerned that I needed to make sure that episode 1 was fully completed before moving on. So, I've been doing final renders and fixing up the shots for it over the last few days. It occurred to me that I needed some sort of framing device since this is being split into three-minute episodes. So, I came up with the idea that the episodes would be hosted by an alien character who has been intercepting broadcasts in space and is sharing them via his own show. This gives the show an actual name ("The Paunk! Show") and frees me up to do other parodies down the road. Although the plan to do ten episodes for this first season remains the same, I've decided I only need to have the first story finished by the deadline. By adding two minutes of host stuff to each episode, I now end up with five-minute episodes and 25 minutes of content is agreeable to me to put out on one DVD. This is a profound relief to me. I'm not really saving any work since I'll still be doing all ten episodes anyway. (In fact it's going to add an additional 20 minutes of animation to the project), but it means I don't have to kill myself to have all ten episodes done by April 1st. As fast as it's going, I might still succeed in that, but I don't *have* to. :-) Here's an image showing screen grabs from the first episode!

Thanks! Nothing as fancy as that, Stian. Although, probably more work. :-) 1) I use A:M's DOF in the render, which does the "big work". 2) In Photoshop, I duplicate the layer and use a pretty big gaussian blur. I set the layer's blend mode to either overlay or soft light and set it's opacity to something like 50%. This gives the entire image a sort of "filmic glow." 3) I create a mask in a new channel that is essentially a circle (or circles) around what I want to be in sharpest focus (the heads, for instance.) I then blur the mask, so that it is very subtle. 4) On the bottom layer, I load the mask as a selection and apply a very small gaussian blur. 5) I then create a new layer on top and fill it black using the same selection mask. I set it to multiply and then I dial the opacity down until you just get "darkened edges." 6) Lastly, I use an adjustment layer to color correct the image. All of this can be done in AfterEffects, too. I've just been doing it in Photoshop since they are still images. [EDIT] Here's an example taking one of your train renders and doing the post process. Without actual DOF in the render, you don't get the dramatic effect of it, but you do see how it softens the look of the whole render and focuses attention on the face. I can't actually change the DOF this way, but it does enhance what A:M is giving me and gives that "tilt-shift" look to it.

Thanks, guys! @Stian: I agree. It's partly post work I'm doing in Photoshop, but I like that it gives it all a "miniature" look which plays well with this being puppets. I also think that using the roughness combined with dof helps to sell the effect.

Thank you, gentlemen! Much appreciate it! I'm counting on there still being a bunch of old TOS fans out there. :-)

Thanks, Myron! This particular part of this whole crazy project was so daunting. I wasted a lot of the first day, researching photos and blueprints and the like, just because I was so intimidated by the size of it. When I was first starting out with A:M and working on Stalled Trek, creating the bridge set seemed nearly impossible. I managed to build the captain's chair and a couple of horrible attempts at some of the other bridge pieces, but couldn't imagine doing what I've done now ...and in only 3 days! As a bit of superstition this time around, I purposely held off modeling the captain's chair until last. A sort of, you can do the fun thing when you finish everything else. :-) Goes to show what perseverance and a whole lot of hard work can accomplish.

Thanks, Gerry! I'm definitely calling this a labor of love. I love the source material and I think that shows. Finally "finished" the bridge set! I'm going to have to revisit it prior to episode six, but this has everything I need for episode two. This is just a screengrab of a realtime render. Once I have the dummy legs made for the characters I'll set up the lighting and do a decent render. Hard to believe I'm only two weeks into this project! :-)

This is some really cool stuff, jake! Love the car!

The budget. :-)

I built out a small portion of the adjoining room which saves me from having to build another set. About to tackle the Bridge set. Going to allow myself a couple of days for that. It is the most dense set, but it's also the one with the most reference material out there. I'll be building the wedges individually and assembling the set in a choreography. That way I can remove sections (just like the real production did) to position the camera. It's going to be a ton of work, but fun work. :-)

Finished up the Sickbay set tonight!

With the iPad and other readers, it would make sense to do an eBook, but right now I can't see the return justifying the effort. Sales just aren't there. The iPhone app had the benefit that it would take the reader panel-to-panel through the comic. It worked really well. Of course, on the iPad you could just read it at a full page at a time. I was kinda' bummed when they decided to kill Oxicomics and took down the apps. I still have them on my iPhone, though. I would look to find out what the standard size is for that sort of thing. I still think of eBooks as being black and white epaper. If you're going for the iPad/Kindle Fire/ Color Nook, I'd look up their specs and what they recommend for publishers first.

@Robert I think that one has been done before. I just came up with the name for the model. He isn't identified by name in the dialogue of this parody and the second Trek episode I'm parodying is from Season 1. Thanks, Jake! Doesn't look familiar. I sort of went the ebook route. The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island was made into four iPhone/iPad apps and Greyhawk and the Starbucklers of the Caribbean was made into 3. The first apps were released for free over a weekend and generated a lot of downloads, but there weren't a whole lot of sales. After Apple's cut and the developer's cut, I made about $70 from the venture. I also made the WBP available as a PDF download at a site that sells illustrated e-books, but never saw a single sale from that site.

Thanks! I'm pretty good about backing things up, but this happened to the file on the same day it was modeled. I hadn't had a chance to back it up yet. (A danger of this rushed of a project.) I just finished the character animation part of episode 1! 2:10! That leaves me with :50 for the opening narration/theme. All I've done so far is just copy and paste the shots back-to-back into a QT file, so the timing might be a little different once I take them into Premiere for editing. The shots are flowing well and even in this rough assemblage, the timing works. I wrote most of these jokes 15 years ago, but I've gotten a kick out of seeing them come to life finally. Next up, I've got to build the sets for episode two: Sickbay and the Bridge. The bridge is going to be a special challenge since I can't shoot from the waist down without giving all of the characters legs. I might very well do it just to have an establishing shot, though. :-)

Setting up the lighting for shot 005. I love how adding colored spots evokes TOS. Although I've taken liberties with simplifying everything and making it a parody of the original, I get a thrill when it looks like TOS.

I used the Facebook login thing and it worked. One more vote, Gene!

Rest assured Sulu and Chekov (here called "Solow" and "Checkitt") are part of the group of models I've finished! Had a near disaster today when the model file for my hallway set started giving error messages and crashing A:M. Thankfully, I was able to make note of the offending CP in the error message and delete that spline from the file with a text editor. I had to do some minor repairs (replacing all of the decals and fixing a bunch of normals), but I'm happy to report that all was not lost! I've animated three more shots and now have the first 45 seconds of episode one finished. I'm hoping to get a couple of more shots done tonight.

Thanks, guys! Hard to believe that I'm only one week into this and I've already animated the first shot! About to start on the next shot and hoping I can get a huge amount done today.