largento

A little further along...

I wonder if it would be possible to use 4 cameras, positioned to capture the 4 quadrants?

Thanks, Rodney! I was just looking back through this thread and it looks like the last time I modeled the head of a character was in January of last year!

Great stuff, Paul! I got a big kick out of seeing Alfred E. Neuman. :-)

Thanks, Paul! I did a little bit more on him the other night: I hope to get a bunch done tomorrow while I'm off.

Got a bug to model another couple of characters and this is the beginning of the first one. "Nash" has worked his way into becoming Cutthroat's first mate and since I need to give Cutthroat a couple of men, Nash seemed like a perfect choice. Nash will also be the first time I'm modeling a character not based on my design... another challenge, to be sure. I must confess to wondering if I still remembered how to do this! It had been a fairly long time since I worked on my last model.

Marcos is giving some great advice in this tute! (where were you a couple of years ago?) :-) Continuity is THE most important aspect of modeling in A:M.

Great job, Dan! Funny, too!

This is for rendering animation. You get one copy to render the first half of frames and the other to render the other half at the same time. That *is* a nice image and I think I've been behind that same guy before. :-)

This may be helpful to others: I found out how to make my YouTube movie display in "high" quality when embedded on my page. You go into the code and add: &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 after the two times the address appears. (You may have to put a semi-colon to separate it from other tags.) It does make a difference!

Thanks!

Thanks, Gerry & Paul! The ending grew out of trying to find a way to transition to 2D art from McCrary. I came up with the what-if-this-was-all-just-in-a-snowglobe (since obviously it never snows in Jamaica) and then remembered reading somewhere on the boards that depth-of-field could give a "miniature" look.

Hi Glider! I use A:M on a Mac and will share what little I've learned over the last couple of years! For speeding up renders, consider splitting them up. You can option-drag a copy of the Animation Master application folder and launch a second version of A:M, allowing you to have two copies going at the same time. More RAM will definitely help with this! Having 2 renders going at the same time can cut the render time in half! (I recently switched to a Mac Pro with 8 cores and have run 3 versions of A:M at a time.) I would at least consider getting Parallels or running Bootcamp with a copy of XP. I don't use it very often, but it's nice to have when you need to use a 3rd party utility that's only available for Windows. With Bootcamp, Windows is running at full speed. I thought I would use it more (for things like rendering), but I so dislike having to leave behind the rest of my computer to do it that I almost never use it. I focus more on making it so that my renders don't take forever and a day. I avoid most things that cause long renders and that seems to work well for me. Many of the shots in the animated Christmas card I just did were done minus multi-pass and in most cases that worked just fine and my render times for whole shots were minutes instead of hours. Also, running two copies of A:M at the same time lets me work on something *while* something else is rendering. When working with bones, keep the resolution at its lowest setting. To preview movement, switch to choreography mode (or muscle mode in an Action). It'll move much snappier. One plus side on the Mac is that A:M loads much faster than it does on a PC. If something is going wonky, it's not a huge time investment to quit A:M and relaunch it. There have been some new things that have popped up since Leopard came out, but it sounds like you've figured out the workaround for the largest one. The only warning I would give you is that intensely large rendering times may not always be friendly to your hard disk. If you're rendering for a couple of days in a row, that's near constant writing to the drive. Since swapping out a hard disk in an iMac isn't something you can do on your own, I offer the hard-learned advice to set up a Time Machine backup drive!

Thanks, Rodney! You are too kind! Thanks for the comment on the website, too!

Thanks, Martin! It's tricky with the Is It Funny Today site because they consider our comic a "story" comic. Right by where it says "Top 20 Today" there's a place where you can select "regular comics" or "story comics". Clicking on that gets you into the story comics area. Right this second our latest is at #4.

It's up on the website! But it's in YouTube quality... If you click through the YouTube page, you can choose to watch it in High Quality, which seems to be decent, but it doesn't seem to give me that option when I'm doing the embedding. Anybody know how to do that? In the end, I couldn't do the frozen in ice gag. It just got bigger and bigger and as I began animating it, I figured out that it would leave me only a couple of seconds for the "card" part of the Christmas card, so I dropped it. I hated to do it, but as I looked at it, I realized it did work better ending with the last line of singing. Here's a still from it. I may go back and finish animating it anyway for fun, but for now, I'm done!

Thanks, Gerry! I think maybe I should start on next year's next week. :-)

Thanks, guys! I am now rendering the second-to-last shot and have finished setting up the final shot! This one will be the most difficult one I've attempted, but also hopefully the funniest. This has really been a tremendous amount of work, but it's also been a great learning experience. I had thought that last year's Christmas card was a tough chore, but it was nothing compared to this year's! (Makes me absolutely terrified of next year's!) :-) I've no doubt I'm going to be up late again tomorrow night, but the prospect that soon I'll be able to relax and enjoy the holiday is keeping me going!

It's working great, Mark! Thanks again! Posting an update. I've added another 5 shots since last time and am getting to the point that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! :-) Sequence_01_4.mov I'm going to do at least one more shot tonight and then I'll have three more shots to do tomorrow and the whole wrap-up. With luck, I'll have a little bit of time on Monday night to revisit some things. I'll post the final version up on YouTube and The Wannabe Pirates website on Wednesday... exactly one month after I began! :-)

As I'm waiting for a test render of the lip synching of the next line, I feel compelled to say another public thank you to Mark S. for the great job he did of rigging the faces with his new face rig! Thank you again, sir!

Cool, Chronos! Nice job!

Thanks, Spleen! Still toiling away. I've got six to eight more shots to go. Going to be cutting it close to get it finished on Wednesday, but I think I'll make it.

Congratulations, Spleen! Another one in the can!

Halfway Point! Sequence_01_9s.mov I am really starting to drag. The prospect of going a whole 'nother week and having to work all weekend again is pretty grim, but I think I can make it. (I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...) This goes through shot 8 and gets me through the second stanza.

Most places use 4K as a standard. Obviously the higher the resolution, the better, but I'm not sure how far you can go down on the low end of resolution before getting a "soft" image.