largento

Rob_T, I think you're being too literal with your set construction. Don't think of it as an apartment. Think of it as a movie set of an apartment. You're going to want to be able to take out walls to set up your camera shots. Build them in a modular fashion. Then construct your set from the individual models in a choreography. That will allow you to turn on and off elements as they are needed. Here's a quick set that I did for my Christmas animation last year: All of the walls are individual models (and indeed, started as 1 model that I copied and pasted into new model windows and shaped into the length I needed) and the two walls around the stairs are the same model, just placed into the cho twice. Simple 4-point patches make the floor and ceiling and they can be resized and translated in the cho to cover what I need. Again, this was a quick one, but the theory is the same.

Rob, don't add points to the outer or inner walls, but to splines running between them. That will stop them from forming patches and take care of the artifacts you get from that. [EDIT] Or are you wanting to have windows? Like Robert said, a continuous spline forms a hole.

Great job as always, Stian!

Exactly my thinking, Rodney.

That's very much what I'm thinking, Ken. The harsh reality I've had to face is that my productivity has dropped when it should be over the top. I've been spinning my wheels for awhile now and this represents a way to get over that. And I'd really like to see the webcomic grow and I think upping the number of strips a week is integral to accomplishing that. It remains to be seen whether or not the look of the 3D will garner more interest from readers. What would be great is if the webcomic garnered enough attention that readers began to ask for animation. I've certainly appreciated the comments on this forum, but the reality is that the animations have elicited zero comments on the website. That's disheartening.

The production is going to be very complex and involve a lot of compositing. I'll certainly be making use of 20 years of being a graphic designer. I'm not sure how much re-usability will play into it. I'm sure there'll be some.

To be honest, I haven't entirely come out of shock myself. This is going to be a large undertaking and the reality of the deadlines is kind of scary. Still, I feel like I've been floundering without that pressure.

Big things are happening, Rodney. For starters, after a whole year in the telling, the Henry Morgan's Treasure storyline is coming to an end this Friday! This is coming much sooner than what I had anticipated, which means the Waldo strips are going to have to start next Tuesday. I wasn't expecting them to start for several weeks and haven't built up the buffer I needed for them to run twice weekly. It's possible that I could get them done on time, but that would mean I'd have no lead time before the next storyline. So, the Waldo strips are going to run as a weekly strip over 15 weeks. After that... If all goes to plan, I'm going to be eating my words ...and doing the strip in 3D. I honestly never thought this would happen. We'll also be going to a Monday-Friday schedule and be putting up 5 strips a week! This will hopefully help with gaining regular readers and it will allow us to tell more stories in the time we have to work on it. This also means we'll be able to fill up books for publishing in a faster time. But... this comes at the cost of the animated project. I've been split in two between the webcomic and the animated project and that simply isn't working. I need to focus on just one project and I'm choosing the webcomic. Obviously, with it now being done in 3D, I'll be able to make use of all of the assets I've built over these two years and I'll be creating tons of new ones over the course of the strip ...plus I've got some ideas of how animation will be used in conjunction with the webcomic. (Not to mention that the comic can serve as a basis for storyboards for animated versions of the stories.) This project keeps evolving and I'm not sure how it's going to go, but this feels like the correct course for now. I could write reams about all the pros of doing this, but I think "it feels right" is the most important one. I certainly had no idea what I was getting myself into when I first started this thread! :-)

Another feather in your cap, Gene! ...and the cruelest thing done to poor Thom yet. :-)

Rather than using bone fall off, try manually weighting the CPs. Here's a quick tutorial page I did about how to do it: With a little experimentation, you should get good results. I know this was a big obstacle for me when I first started. I couldn't find any documentation on how to do this and it was a mystery. I finally saw it done in one of the video tutorials and it was a revelation. Hope it helps you, too!

Thanks, guys! I have, Gene! It's one of the classics! One of these days I'll be finished with The Wannabe Pirates and be able to come back to this. I've done this story so many times, that it never feels like it's finished. (The first time I started it was 13 years ago!)

Great job, Josh! Nice looking renders!

Oh, okay, now I get it. :-) That's what threw me, the cap looks smaller in that panel.

Neat looking, Jake! Shouldn't the ends of the handle bend out? It looks like they are supposed to go through those holes in the top tube to hold the cap on...

There's a website out there called GoAnimate that lets you assemble little animations using mostly provided assets. It's really simplistic and the webapp is very clunky, but since they have a bunch of assets for "Star Trek," I couldn't resist doing up a version of "Stalled Trek: Amutt Time." :-) This is just part one and I'm not sure if I'll do the other parts, but it didn't take very long to do this (I started this morning) and it was actually kind of fun. You can see it here.

That really looks great, Zaryin!

Happy Birthday, Fucher!

I never got around to partitioning the drive and installing Windows via Bootcamp, Robert. I planned on getting another internal drive for that, but haven't felt any urgency to do so. I do have Parallels installed, but that's not a fair test of Windows performance. I would assume that Windows would render faster, but can't prove it.

You have 2 quad core processors? Will you try rendering with 7 or 8 instances of AM and let us know how it goes? It sounds like you have a nice little render farm right in your computer. Sure thing! Here's the specs for my MacPro: I used 7 instances of A:M 15f and used the "Toys" project from the Extras DVD. I selected a 35 frame segment (running from 00:03:01 to 00:04:05) and opened the project in all seven instances. I set each to render with step 7, increasing the starting frame by 1 for each additional instance. I kept all of the other settings as they were already set in the project. Once I had set up the render settings on all seven, I went through them pressing the "okay" button. (I unfortunately missed one, so it started a tad bit later.) Here were the final times for the seven simultaneous renders: 2:33 2:27 2:31 2:31 2:31 2:32 2:27 And here's the directory listing of the TGAs: 35 frames rendered in 2 1/2 minutes. :-) And here's the results put together in a quicktime movie: toys.mov

Personally, my iMac has 2 - but I think the answer is "as many as we can muster up". That's why I'm interested, so we can figure out what we need, and then start a'gettin. The trick to running another instance of A:M on a Mac is to option-drag a second copy of A:M's application folder. I have 2 quadcores in my MacPro and have run three instances of A:M with ease.

Wow, Mark, that's really looking good!

I have two A:M books: the Complete Guide and an older 2000 A:M Handbook (by Jeff Paries). Both have valuable information. I like being able to peruse them when I have free moments and I've consulted both of them when trying something new. There used to be more tutorial discs out there, but most of them seem to be gone now. Keep an eye on eBay and you might find some things. Also here in the forums. I've seen people sell all of their training materials here when they no longer need them... presumably for cheap.

Nice job, Eric! Wonderful detail!

Well, true as that may be, I know just how much I love taking the easy way out. :-) Thanks, Nancy! Thanks, Andy! I do have a more cartoony style. I guess the thicker lines are in style in modern day cartoons, but they've been a staple of animated cartoons since they went to television. It helped make the characters easier to see on old TV sets. I try to imitate a brush when I "ink" in Illustrator. I like that it adds weight to the characters. I would think that watching all of those old Hanna-Barbara cartoons growing up in the 70s definitely influenced me. And the coloring books based on them! ...especially a certain stone-aged family... :-)

Thanks, guys! I take that as high praise, HomeS! I love Rocky & Bullwinkle! Ken, there's definitely a difference in style (which is partly why I'm doing this as a spin-off rather than the actual strip), but the big difference really comes down to the amount of time I'm putting into this. McCrary would love to hand draw the strip, but his time constraints won't allow it. He's also had to work with my original character designs, which are a departure from his style. To make it feasible for him to do the strip, he has to make use of a lot of sprites. I think he's done a great job within the constraints of that! Since I only have to do 15 of these and have the time to invest, I'm putting more into it. I'm also challenging myself to get past my usual laziness with this sort of thing and do the harder stuff. I suspect, though, that before I reach the last of these 15, I'll be wishing I'd gone that easy route. :-)