largento

Very cool!

It's helpful to consider rigging when you're designing and modeling your characters, too. (As Robert indicates at the beginning of one of the videos, citing Buzz and Woody.) For a no-neck character, consider making the head a separate mesh from the body. I did this with my Ballast character: I think this could work well for your penguin, too, allowing him to turn his head as much as he needs to and greatly simplifying the rigging.

Very informative and nicely done, Robert!

Cool, Myron! Glad to see you're not giving up!

Why not play against the movie title and make it "front window?"

Thanks, guys!

Very cool and great conservation of splines.

If you haven't read Friday's installment of The Wannabe Pirates, the story is getting into the exciting part: The super-science apes were designed, modeled and rigged quickly, but I think they came out great! Kudos to Mark S. for the rigging and Ken H. who modeled the gorilla's head for the earlier non-super-science gorilla model I designed a few years ago. This is gonna' be fun!

Cool!

Thanks, guys! I really appreciate it!

I am having so much fun with this! The Wannabe Pirates comic book! Issue #1 is already available here. I'm working on issue #2 which will come out in August. Here's the cover: I love doing these old-style comic book covers with dialogue on them.

I assume the same way wooden boats kept the water out. :-) Awesome as always, Stian.

I can commit to doing a segment.

And... if we can move fast enough, we could have it done by Halloween!

I'm on board with the Monster Audition, too. A monster could be a very simple model made out of simple shapes, so I don't think it would be too tough for even the most novice modeler. I like it. It's got my vote, too.

Just a thought: Juumping in a pressure suit (even in an imaginary one) would still have significantly less movement. It's basically a suit filled with air, so bending the joints is difficult. That's why we have that image in our head of the Apollo astronauts almost straight legged when they are walking on the moon. Later suits were designed to bend at the knees specifically so that they could operate the moon rover. :-) Of course, an imaginary suit could have all the movement you like, but part of what makes us think "space suit" is that stiff jointed-ness.

Thanks, Mark and Gene! Hopefully it won't be too long. Really no way to tell since it's out of my hands now. I ended up having to do another shot to stick between two shots, so I guess I wasn't finished yet. :-) Final tally now is 45 total shots, 25 featuring character animation with 14 of those having lip synching for a total of 4 minutes and 17 seconds!

I suffered from it once, too. It was a pain to go through all of my files, deleting the stuff that kept popping up, but I kept at it until I finally got them all.

Great tutorial! I actually just spent some time this evening watching several of your tutorials and found all of them informative! Thanks for making them!

Happy Birthday!

I wasn't aware it could be done for the longest time. You just use the patch group tool to select one of the patches, right click on it and select "rotate image." It will rotate the image visible in that patch 90º clockwise. You might have to do it twice, if the image is upside down when you rotate it.

Cool, Chris! Nicely done! My first thought was that you could rotate the decals in the offending patches, but then we wouldn't have gotten to see this solution. :-)

Thanks, Paul! I am, too! I don't know how long it will take for all of the sound and music to be completed. Hopefully not very long.

Crazy go nuts, man! Wow.

It's a valiant attempt, but somehow it still looks like clumps of something rather than clouds. The final effect I went with is pretty subtle. Just some cloud shapes moving in the background, but it feels right to me. But most importantly... I'M FINISHED!! :-) (And there was much rejoicing: "yay!") I'm going to wait until all the music and sound is finished before putting it out to the public, though. Tomorrow I get to work on something else! :-)