largento

I've begun work on the Wannabe Pirates Christmas Greeting for this year! I took some down time today and did up the rough storyboards and placed those in Premiere. (This will be testing how to create a workflow as well as doing something for the website.) To refine the storyboards, I started creating poses and rendering them out. A couple of them amused me: As I make progress, I'll post some more stuff!

Wow! Now I'm feeling really inadequate! :-) Awesome!

Very imaginative! Good work!

Great job as always, Gerry! You're making me think that I should do another animated x-mas card this year. Last year I waited until the last minute and nearly killed myself trying to get it done in time. At least this year, I could put it up on the Wannabe Pirates website...

Yes. The trick is to option drag a copy of the application folder (it needs all those bits and pieces in it.) And by application folder, I mean the Animation Master folder, not the entire application folder! I have the 2nd copy on my desktop. Both applications can be launched and will work simultaneously.

This is awesome news, Mark! I look forward to seeing how everything works!

Bravo, Gerry! I got a laugh seeing the Christmas Snail from last year! :-)

Well, McCrary and I did have an initial meeting about the story before I wrote the first draft of the script... and Stian modeled the ship for me... and Mark S. did some rigging for me. Other than that, it's just me trying to figure it all out on my own. :-) I've had some offers for help, but right now I'm not organized enough to take them up on it. It's mostly all inside my head. I think a good path to coming up with a story would be to flesh out your characters. Give them names and write up little bios for them. Find out how they are related to each other and see what comes out of that. You might come up with some interesting character info that would inspire a story.

Thanks for the info Stian and Gerry!

Aha! That works! And by setting an offset translate to constraint to the null, I can translate the ship in the y-axis, too!

Not sure what you mean. If I were to do this, the cube *would* be the ocean level... Oh wait, now I see what's happening. If I rotate the body bone, to tilt the ship, the cutter bone rotates with it, because it's a child of the parent...

Hmm... there is one downside I can see... or should I say, "bottomside." :-) If you tilt away from camera, you can see the bottom of the model that is being cut by the boolean. Also, I wonder if you could do the y-axis up and down motion with the boolean as a child of the parent bone.

Cool, Stian! So, how do you go about doing this? Does the boolean cutter have to be part of the model?

Thanks, Gerry! I signed up and flipped through a couple of them... nifty stuff!

I agree with everybody else! One of the biggest hurdles is just finishing that first cartoon! There are so many things that can distract you from that... That's a huge accomplishment! And it's entertaining, too! Keep moving forward!

I see what you mean, Gerry. I need to look at the camera movements in my cho and "move" the ocean to match. I was too excited this morning by the fact that it worked at all. :-)

I would worry about successfully pulling off the boolean. As Rodney correctly guessed (and Stian knows better than anybody!) the hull isn't a an enclosed object. Experimenting would find different ways of accomplishing this, I'm sure. Anything's possible when you set your mind to it, but when this opportunity became available to me, I jumped on it!

Feel free to critique, Rodney! This may not be the final shot in the end, but it's what I've got now. The fact that I'm not going to have to deal with 23 hour long renders will make me less resistant to revisiting things. And if I don't agree, I'll just ignore them. :-) As to the reason for the green screen, I said it in the original post. The ship has a bottom... a bottom that interacts with the plane of the water level and is variably obscured by it as the ship tilts and moves. Rendering it just with an alpha channel, would have meant I'd have had to go in and animate a mask for the bottom of the ship. Not an easy option. In the past, I'd tried rendering it a few times, making some sections black so that I could composite them using layer properties in Photoshop, but with the green screen, I could do it in one render... and do one click of an eyedropper to remove the green.

Oops. Must've done something wrong. It's not working for me, either. Here's a postage stamp-sized one. :-) green_s.mov

Well, I've been playing around with After Effects. After more than 10 hours of video tutorials, I feel like I at least have a handle on the basics. I decided to revisit the Sea Anemone "Beauty Shot" I'd worked on: (EDIT: Something wrong with file... see smaller version in post below) (EDIT 2: Looks like if you change the suffix on this file to "m4v", Quicktime recognizes it.) Sorry for the size, but I didn't want to stick in a postage stamp version. I'm doing the actual file at 720p. A couple of changes: 1) The change in size means a change in format, so I've framed the shot now so that the part of the ship that meets the ocean is largely off frame, which limits the screen time for noticing that the water is flat. 2) The water is now just an effect in After Effects. It's not very realistic, but this is a cartoon and nothing else is realistic, so I think it works... and it certainly solves the enormous render time for the animated texture I was using previously (as well as eliminating the glitches I was getting.) Since I needed to have the water line still interact with the ship, I set up the shot to be like a green screen shot: I was worried that it might be difficult to remove the green, but it was as easy as applying an effect and using the eyedropper to select the green color. Really easy! I'll probably spend some time tweaking things, but I'm feeling good about the possibilities. This is basically a one-man show and I'm not going to have the option of buying a bank of computers to render frames! I certainly won't be getting Pixar-level quality, but there was never any danger of that happening anyway! :-) greencomposite.mov

Very cool!

Thanks, Spleen!

Really great work, Stian!

It looks like the camera is moving in the choreography, which might explain the motion blur...

I can say that when I first encountered A:M, I saw the splines/CPs/Bias Handles like paths/points/bezier curve handles that I was used to in Illustrator. That was pretty disastrous for me. I was trying to use the bias handles like I would use the bezier curve handles in Illustrator and the results were *not* the same. Modeling became much easier for me when I turned off the bias. I don't even peak CPs very often. If I need a sharp edge, I just end the spline and add a new spline. With it being non-continuous, I get the sharp edge I'm wanting. Granted, I'm not really doing anything that has ultra-fine detail... nor mechanical models that require extreme accuracy.