largento

Here's #22! I should be able to finish #23 today... Turns out Barney's transaction didn't work out as well for him as he thought... :-)

Thanks, Gerry! I took a look at Zazzle! I'm going to try and make a real effort to talk to some of the local printers around here in Dallas and see what kind of a deal I can get. I'd like to keep the price fairly low for the reader and still have a decent amount of profit for us! Here's #20 from last week and #21 from today. I should make it to #25 by the weekend. That's the halfway point to the 50 strip buffer I've wanted to do! There's a minor character who's going to appear a little down the road. Not important enough of a character to do a whole new model, so I gave Mr. Sneeze some plastic surgery and turned him into this guy:

Again, master chief, you have to define an "inch." If it's 72 pixels per inch, then a square inch is 72x72. If it's 300 pixels per inch, it's 300x300. However, a 300x300 block of pixels is 3 square inches if you are saying 100 pixels per inch. Define your inch and then you'll know how many pixels to use. Pixels don't exist in real life. :-)

How many more scenes do you have, Kat? You've really done a lot of work!

This is going to be tremendously cool, Eric! Always fun to see the insane amount of detail coming together!

Thanks, guys! Steve, that Spidey was a project I worked on several years ago. It's designed to go on top of a drink machine (it was done for Dr Pepper). I didn't draw Spidey in that exact position, but the idea was that Spidey was sitting on top of the machine and had one hand that went down in front of it. Either they decided to change the pose I had, or were limited by what art they could get from Sony. I don't know how many of them actually went out in the world, but I know that Sony changed the release date, so that's not the actual release date for the movie. :-) Thanks, Andy, that's part of my embarrassing DVD collection ( I included some of it to try to show scale.) The poster is 20"x30", which isn't enormous, but it's a decent size. If I can get a decent price on getting them printed, I'm thinking about printing up a bunch to sell on the website!

Hey, I got my poster today! My iPhone takes crummy pictures, but it actually came out looking pretty cool! Neat to have it up on the wall!

Haha! That was great!

Wow, looks cool, Paul!

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, everybody!

I'm not sure if that's the latest and greatest one, Nancy, but yes, it's Mark's 2008 face rig. The more I use it, the more I love it!

What about "Frankenstein" by the Edgar Winter Group? Not funny, but a kickass tune. :-) PS-->Gene your lighting is looking great!

Thanks, Nancy! The original Wannabe Pirate models all have the TSM2 rig with Mark S.'s great face rig! The "guest stars" are pure Mark S.! 2008 rig and face!

Cool! The movie version of the Enterprise (1701 or 1701-A) has always been my favorite Enterprise!

Thanks, guys! Gerry, I do feel like it's getting easier as a I go and thanks re: the posing and acting. I've really been working hard at that! Did #20 late last night, but ran into some technical problems and need to do some re-rendering. I've let another Talk Like a Pirate Day sneak up on me (it's tomorrow) and need to come up with something for it today!

Thanks, guys! Yeah, I liked the second one better, too! Here's 2 for today (so far). Might try to tackle the last of this week's tonight! Three in a day! I did these simultaneously and that seemed to work out well!

Trying an alternate punchline...

Two down, three more to go for this week! I did have to go back and make changes to the last one. Debating how many frames I'm going to rerender because of it. (McCrary busted me for having the sails on when the ship was in dock.)

Thanks for all the votes, guys! Doesn't look like there'll be a chance of getting into the top 100, but in the high 200s is definitely better than in the 5,000s! Getting a late start at these this week, but here's #16! This one plants a plot-seed for the next story that Ken was helping me with!

Well, that's the speed of progress! Still, I started with 10.5, too and it was released in June of 2004, so it's actually FIVE years old! If you wanted to use a 5 year old version of Photoshop, you'd be back to Photoshop CS (8) and Adobe doesn't support it for the new OSs, either. :-)

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.