largento

Working on animating my first shot! It looks like this:

Thanks! @Ken I like the texturing, but that may be me overcompensating for normally *not* using any kind of texturing. :-) Virtual Puppetry sounds pretty cool. The blonde is Nurse Chapel (or in this case, Nurse Temple.) @Rodney I was ruminating yesterday on the fact that "The Wannabe Pirates" was supposed to be this little "practice" movie to help me to improve my skills before getting back to Stalled Trek. That was September 1, 2007! I've got to play catch up today. Yesterday was lost to outside distraction and making the mistake of looking up reference material on the web. There is just so much information out there about the original series, that you can get distracted for hours. Did you know that the Sickbay is the only room in the Enterprise that doesn't have gray walls? The walls in Sickbay are a sort of blue-green. This is because hospital walls are often painted green. I've heard two reasons for this. One is that light green is a calming color and a doctor in surgery is under a lot of stress. The second (and more interesting) is that green being the compliment to red, when surgeon's would be focusing on looking at blood for so long, when they looked up at white walls, they would see an ugly green after image. Someone then came up with the idea of painting the walls green to counteract that. Anyway, gotta' refocus and get this set done.

Thanks, guys! Here's hoping I don't screw it up. :-)

Thanks, guys! I've got 11 of the characters finished and have been working on the props for the first episode. The most important one: the USS Secondprize...

WOW, Mark! That's incredible!

Thanks, Fuchur & Nancy! I did weigh that (females having puppet mouths) when I designed them. My determination was that the puppet-mouthed females were too unattractive. Let's face it, as much as Roddenberry claimed to be forward-thinking about things like equality with Star Trek, he only cast very attractive women and made certain they were scantily clad. There are actual gags and beats in the scripts I've written that require the females to be attractive. And more importantly, I'm selling this to fanboys. The type who might buy something just because there's a hot looking female in it. And who (as Robcat noticed) likely will never make it up to see their noses. :-) They are still in my style, and in my eye still fit in.

Thanks, guys! I've been trying to figure out a term to describe the process. My first instinct was to call it "digital puppetry," but that term exists and it's for when you drive a 3D character using a real-time performance. About the best way I've come up with to describe this is "artificial puppetry." :-)

Ah, how the wheel turns! :-) My initial reason for buying A:M back in 2004 was to do an animated Star Trek parody called "Stalled Trek: Amutt Time." I'm finally doing it! :-) I won't be posting very much here since I am rapidly approaching the deadline for when it needs to be completed, but I'll try to stick up a few images now and then and I'll announce here when/where the actual things can be seen! But here's an image of some of the cast: The fun has begun! :-)

I think you should do it. To quote Dr. McCoy: "Get back your command. Get it back before you become part of this collection. Before you really do grow old." I truly believe that online content is going to be the future of entertainment and quality content is going to be in demand. There is no reward without risk and as long as you have a good support network, you should be allowed a little madness. Chances are as an artist, most of your family thinks you're a little off to begin with. :-) If you fail, then you fail and you don't have to die regretting not having tried.

Well, it's probably because Windows users need the software and it's built into Quicktime X for Mac users. :-)

Hope you're enjoying your day, Rodney! Happy Birthday!

My nephews loved Handy Manny. Great work, John!

I think that Santa may be up to no good. Seems kinda' paranoid to me. :-) Great job. I really regret having not tried to do a Christmas animation this year, but I've been distracted by other stuff.

The Spleen Universe is growing and growing! Your style continues to show through, Gene! I do like how they are becoming more and more polished with every new project.

It was last week that I was messing with it, but I think the behavior I noticed was similar to what Matt described. Yes, it wasn't as severe as mirror mode, but it was also not nearly as noticeable as mirror mode. I'd worked for awhile before I started finding CPs in places I hadn't intended them to be. :-)

Just an advisory note: you'll want to make sure you turn off snap to surface when you are finished. It causes all-new kinds of unexpected behavior in the modeling window when it's left on. Inadvertently leaving snap to surface and mirror mode on might even tear a hole in the space-time continuum. :-)

I'm approaching the point of being a longtime Mac A:M user and I can tell you that it's very stable. I use it daily and besides the workarounds Gerry mentioned, it's extremely reliable and v16 was an enormous step forward for A:M on the Mac. The sub price means you don't have to invest very much money to see it for yourself. Also, unlike before, both the Windows and Mac versions of A:M are developed and released at the same time with the same features. Rather than be vague, the workarounds have to do with "Save As..." dialogue boxes and other instances where you are directly interacting with the Finder and the Finder is greyed out. In most cases, switching from A:M to another app and back fixes the problem and in some cases, it's necessary to hide A:M and then select it again. It certainly is an annoyance, but the workaround is easy enough and like Gerry said, you get to the point where you do the workaround without thinking about it. If your Mac has a bunch of cores, you can set up multiple instances and really knock out rendering animation. v16 vastly increased the speed of rendering on the Mac, and when you can have multiple instances of A:M going at the same time, it's like having your own mini render farm. The downside would be that there are some plug-ins that haven't been created for the Mac. And some of the Mac plug-ins have long stopped being compatible with the current versions of OSX. A big loss is the Setup Machine for rigging. Development for it stopped years ago and although the Windows version still seems to work, the Mac version does not. The only other two that I can think of are a reasonably priced motion capture application and a "fake AO" plug-in.

Very nice!

Noting that you can do this to existing patch models, it occurs to me that this would also be great for creating low-patch count substitutes for heavy models.

Very nice! Thanks for demonstrating, Matt.

I've played with this a little in AE and I think greenscreens and chroma keys can be helpful in addition to alpha channels. The instance that I see is that if you need to composite some video images and you want to knock out a part of your animation that has other objects behind it. Since the alpha channel requires you to be able to see straight through, you would have to remove every obstruction, but a greenscreen placed into your set removes that need.

Yay!

Looks great!

Awesome, Nancy! Really well done! Did you try to get it in past the due date? They missed out not letting you in!

Great stuff, Gene!