largento

Welcome to the forums! Unfortunately, version 10.5 of the Mac version of A:M doesn't work with the current Mac OS's (it was designed to run on 10.3). Tiger support wasn't added until version 12. The Subscription version gives you the latest version of A:M (now at 15) and has to be renewed each year. It's only $79, so it's far cheaper than the disc version. The subscription version doesn't require a CD but is tied to one machine (you get sent an activation code). You can only use it during that year, at which point it will expire and you will need to renew your subscription. Hope that helps!

I agree! That looks beautiful!

I don't think you're screwed, Rob. Just look out there and find out how to use the correct aspect ratios. As to rendering for panels, welcome to the same exploratory place I'm in. :-) Rendering at the actual panel ratio is bad, since you'll have some wild perspective going on. I've been rendering my frames almost square, accounting for where they'll crop. For the extreme of the one strip I did where all four panels were one render, I brought in a strip template as a layer and placed it in front of the shot so that I could see where things were and then turned it off for the final render. I suppose I could do that with the individual frames, too, but I trust my own sense of space. :-)

Awesome, Gerry! Look forward to these each year! Maybe I should give thought to starting mine this early, too! :-) Still love the idea of us doing a bunch of Christmas animations and having a virtual fireplace with all of the animations as Christmas cards... Maybe we could do it this year?

VIII. Shot 4: New Version No longer enamored with the fogging up the window gag, I needed to come up with something new. I knew that I was going to be introducing the Mr. Sneeze and Poco Boco characters with a wheel barrow in the final shot, so it seemed like a good idea to introduce them earlier to show they were around. Remembering the snowman character from the 2007 Christmas animation, I thought it would be fun to put him into this version and came up with the idea that Sneeze would be lifting Poco Boco up with the wheelbarrow to place the hat on the top of the snowman. Out of this idea, came the thought of using the villain Cutthroat Jacques in the video and thought it would be funny if they had made the snowman look like Cutthroat and had stolen his hat to use. Then I thought, what if Cutthroat finds them doing this and chases them off! I had a very limited amount of time for this shot and realized that I would need to start with the hat already on the snowman. Alas, because I was making the snowman different now, the only holdover from the 2007 snowman was his arms. :-) Looking at the setup, it occurred to me that a quick way to escape would be for Sneeze to propel Poco Boco into the air with the wheel barrow, pluck him out of the air and run off with him under one arm. One of the unique problems was how Sneeze could do this with a hook as one hand. I ended up animating the wheelbarrow first, then Poco Boco being launched into the air and then Sneeze interacting with the two. (Keeping in mind that he was supposed to be generating the animation of the other two.) For Cutthroat, I used a simple run cycle as an action and drew a curved path so that he would enter from the right side of screen and turn and run almost straight towards camera. In hindsight, it does look a little mechanical since I really didn't take the time to animate his face. I would definitely do more with him if I had it to do over again. This was an ambitious shot to add to what time I had to do it in (and the fact that it only generated 3 seconds of video!) :-) All three of these characters have very short legs which made it difficult to show them walking. For Sneeze's exaggerated movement, I actually stretched his legs out when necessary, trying to create a cartoony speed blur. This happened in such a quick period of time, that I literally animated it frame-by-frame as if it were 2D, looking more at the individual frames than thinking about any sort of 3D reality. I even went so far as to have his leg stretch out incredibly long so that his foot would remain on camera after his body had left. :-) I had some stretch with his arm, too, when he's pulling Poco Boco out of the air. I wanted that to have a sort of "snap" so that he starts moving before he pulls Poco in. That part didn't have quite the speed I wanted. Here's one of the frames where Sneeze's right leg gets reeeaaally long! The rule-of-thumb I used was that something needed to appear on screen for at least 2 frames in order to register with the viewer. This was a complicated shot mostly because I was dealing with the three characters and I needed more motion than I had previously attempted. I ended up rendering it as a single pass, which sped up the render and looks fine in the final product.

Wow, I hadn't intended to completely abandon this, but out of sight, out of mind... :-) Let's see if I can finish this up!

My memory isn't as good as it used to be, but checking my old files reveals most of what I found out when I did the work for my Christmas animation... Here's the settings I used (so that I could have it as a widescreen DVD): width: 720 height: 480 pixel aspect ratio: 1.21 After you've rendered the footage, bring it into Premiere Pro and right-click on it and choose "Interpret Footage..." Then change the aspect ratio to "D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2121) The pixel aspect ratio for video is not the same as the pixel aspect ratio on your computer. By default A:M renders square pixels for computers. Note: If your copy of Premiere Pro is prior to CS4, then it's aspect ratios are faulty. Adobe fixed them in CS4. I don't know how to account for this problem. If you're doing standard 4:3 for TV, use an aspect ratio of .91 I'll point out that this is for NTSC video. PAL is different.

You guys are awesome, thanks!

I hope that's not true, Mark! There aren't that many of us left that really contribute! Part of what makes this forum work is a sense of community. It's a very personal thing to put up a work of creativity and it can be really discouraging to spend hours working on something, get excited about finishing it and posting it to the forum ...and then it just sits there with no comments. It really doesn't take much time to drop a word or two. I know I'm guilty of not doing it as much as I should, but I do try. I got all excited awhile ago when I saw that the number of posts on the Wannabe Pirates thread was reaching 500 ...until I realized most of them were probably posted by me. :-) Which is not to say that I haven't really appreciated everyone's feedback, quite the contrary! It's hard to be fully self-motivated and isn't encouragement a part of why we seek out a community like this?

Thanks, guys! I do appreciate it! Gonna' check on file info to send this poster off to print! Hopefully I can find a cheap frame while I'm at it! I'm realizing that the last time I made a poster for myself was when I was in high school. :-) Everything since then has been for somebody else! It feels good to do one just for me! :-)

I voted earlier this morning (even registered this time), but the total views didn't change... I hope it worked. :-)

I was supposed to be writing the next five strips and lettering five more Greyhawk pages, but I put that off until tomorrow to play with this! I decided to make a one-off poster that I could get framed and put on my wall. Wal-Mart charges less than $16 for a 20"x30" print... I may play with it some more, but I think it came out pretty cool! When I get everything done with this Curse of Greyhawk Island story, I think I'll do a "movie" poster for it, too!

Thanks, Paul! Just realized that I missed the 2 year anniversary. :-) I started this thread on September 1st, 2007! Doesn't seem like it's been that long!

Thanks, Ken! You're right ...need to fix that! All of the strips have identifying codes. First number is story number and second is strip #. So this one is the 15th strip of the 4th story.

I like him, Ken! Great job!

Thanks, guys! I think I can ...that's a great idea! Finished up #15 today. This will probably be the last one for this week. I need to write a new batch and do some modeling!

A classic old tune I remember hearing many a time on Dr. Demento's show! I wonder if he's still around anymore! Good stuff, Gene! Nigel was an excellent choice for this one...

Yeah, I tried it and it works, too. I don't know that I would bother turning on "Has Falloff" if you're going to manually weight the CPs. I've never had real luck with Falloff and just manually weight all of them.

Thanks, Andy!

#14! Working on #15, but probably won't finish it tonight...

I have to do some writing before I get into doing today's strips. I'm hoping to get 2 done today! But, I wanted to ask for your help! Trying to get votes for the webcomic on this Top Web Comics site. I discovered the comic was listed on it last week and it was in the 5,000s. I've been trying to get people to vote and with just 20 votes, we're already up to 501. Hoping we can make it up into the top 100! Click here to vote! Thanks! The site lets you vote once a day, so if you do happen to go to read the comic, look for the little blue "TWC" button underneath the comic (on the right side) and vote each time. It resets every month, so as many people as I can get to vote regularly, the better! Hoping to build up some awareness! I'm going to do a little Webcomics convention here in November and I saw something about it somewhere and the quote I read was "it was a bunch of webcomics you've never heard of." Not exactly ego-boosting. :-)

Thanks, Zaryin!

Looking cool already, Mark! Jim Talbot's barbarian model is great. I wonder about maybe having a more dramatic camera angle? Maybe from low and behind the barbarian, so that the dragon really looks huge?

I wouldn't count on Flemm ever learning. He doesn't seem to recognize that there are people who would take advantage of him. :-) Only one strip today. My allergies have been making me miserable all day...

No, the bookseller is not Mr. Sneeze.... He's Henrietta! :-)