largento

Looks great, Jirard... especially with the SSS!

Thanks, Stian & George! I loved being able to show off Stian's work! The Sea Anemone is the crown jewel of the movie!

Thanks, Nancy! I'm taking the little wing-cuffs off of your parrot right this second... :-)

Shameless self-promoting request time! :-) We're trying to get our ranking on one of the webcomic listing sites up into the top 100. There's a "Vote" button on the right sidebar of the site that you can click on to vote for us. Not asking anybody to vote if they don't like our webcomic, but if you do, it would be great if you could help out!

It depends on what you really need it for. If you can get by with something like the Gimp, then buying Photoshop would be overkill. That said, as a long time Photoshop user (since 1993), I look forward to the latest and greatest. I love the fact that Photoshop CS3 Extended can work with video.

Hahaha, Jirard... I'm not sure about how much of this has actually been planned, but I very much like that I've given you that appearance. :-) Well, I totally didn't take my own advice and have been messing around with this shot. I think it's much better. I re-rendered it with Image Based Lighting (just using a picture that included sky and ocean.) I ran into a problem where I had keyed a light coming on half way through the shot and ended up having to go back and re-render the first chunk so that the light would be on to begin with. I ran into a peculiar problem where I was getting random black squares popping up on many of the frames. Maybe something to do with the IBL and the ocean material? I painstakingly removed them all... but that's not something I'd like to do again. Finally, I gave in and rendered a mask version and added a sky image. I was worried that it wouldn't work because of the camera movement, but I think it does work. Anyway, version 2 (sorry, it's kind of a big file): newpass.mov

Darkwing, why not modify your ship design to play to your modeling strengths? Make it easier for you to build?

A big help for me is using the constraint keyboard shortcuts to keep from moving CPs in directions that I don't want them to go. Like, for instance, holding down the "1" and "3" keys mean I can move it side to side and front to back, but not up and down.

Thanks, guys! I was pretty tired last night and thought about skipping this week. Your words of encouragement are much appreciated.

Time for another tutorial! This time, we pick up from where we left off last time and turn our circle into a sphere!

Thanks, Jirard! You know the funny thing is that it seems like I've been working on it for much longer than I really have! I made some posts on the website showing the modeling of Flemm's ship and was stunned when I realized that was just back this January. It seems like I've been at this for years! :-)

Thanks, Martin!

That looks *really* good!

Did you use a special codec? I'm getting an "additional components are needed" message and no video..

Thanks, everybody! Those are very valid criticisms (along with the many others that could be made!) :-) I'm just going to have to accept the shortcomings at this point and move forward. Maybe down the line, I'll be able to revisit them. Still, I'm excited! I'm on my way! :-)

So, I spent all weekend working on this shot (and then about 25 hours rendering!) It's not perfect, but I'm beginning to realize that I'll never finish this if I even entertain the idea of getting anything perfect. :-) lastshot_web.mov This is a landmark for me... an actual shot from the movie!

It's Friday and time for another Wannabe Tutorial!

You're right, Ken. I'll keep tweaking... I think everything needs to be slightly faster.

Thanks, Brainmuffin! I'll let you know if I do! Because I was supposed to be doing something else, I found myself experimenting with how Flemm's ship should animate. Here's my test. shiptest.mov This is from the final shot in Chapter 1. If you can imagine it, a seagull swoops down and disappears behind the ship exiting on the right side of the screen (blocked by the ship). On the fore deck, Mr. Sneeze is calling up to Captain Flemm, who is manning the wheel. As the ship passes us, he spins the wheel in the starboard direction and the ship turns, moving away from us. As it does, we see Poco pop up out of the crow's nest (which currently isn't on the model) and wave back at us. The temp music here is from The Sea Hawk. I put in a simple side to side motion and had the ship sink a little at the extreme of each swing. That way you get a little side to side and up and down motion. It seems to be the right way to go... and the camera's wide angle gives the ship a lot more scale when it passes close. This is saved at 12 fps, so it's a bit jumpy. I did that while I was adjusting the speed.

Of course, you don't have to sculpt your models first. I have no real experience sculpting (except for every once in awhile playing with my kneaded eraser). I've created all of my characters from 2D drawings... but I do think of them as being dimensional when I'm drawing them. My path was that I sought out the info and tutorials that I could find for A:M. (Barry Zundel's training DVDs are excellent!) Then just started messing with it. I've been seriously trying to learn A:M for about a year and a half now.

Thanks, Ken! I'm trying! I really want to see it finished, too! Heck, at this point, I'd just like to see me get to the point where I can finally *start* animating it! :-) Thanks, Rodney! My southern sense of humility thinks you're being too kind, but it's definitely appreciated! :-) I was kind of cornered into the Gif animation. When McCrary and I decided on doing that gag, I realized that the space just wouldn't allow all of the lettering needed. So it started just trying to solve that problem. Then, as I approached it, I thought it would work better having an animated feel. It took McCrary by surprise. He was expecting individual panels. As I got into it, I really lamented that I had to keep the file size down so small. It would've been great to have been able to have full motion.

Apparently they showed Leslie Iwerk's "The Pixar Story" on television in England recently... so, naturally, it is now floating around the internet. I watched it yesterday. It's pretty entertaining and interesting. Most of the stuff wasn't anything really new to me (especially after watching all the extras docs on the Pixar DVDs), but there was one thing I did find interesting: In past docs I've seen on the subject of Toy Story, Lasseter seemed to have accepted the blame for the first version of it having been rejected by Disney... or rather, he never said, "It was Disney's fault." But in this, it's made abundantly clear that the problems with the first version came from the Disney Executive (I'm pretty sure it was Katzenburg, but my memory isn't firm) pushing Pixar to make it "edgy." In "The Pixar Story," the story goes that when they went back to re-do it, they did it their own way and that was what made it great. There's a part in it, where Brad Bird has first come to Pixar and lectures to the room that all of these successes that Pixar has had are not normal... and I think he even characterizes it as a fluke, but it's clear that it's not a fluke. Pixar never really had to worry about the money part. Not that they were making a lot of it, but Steve Jobs came along at the right time and kept them going (even though he was losing a million bucks a year). Pixar saw success as being a result of quality. And it was telling that they never thought that one success gave them a free ride to the next one. They saw it as starting from square one each time. There's certainly no way I would ever imagine being able to reach the quality of a Pixar effort on my own, but it does encourage me to keep on doing it my own way... which is what attracted me to learning how to do this in the first place.... the idea that one guy can sit down and make his own dream come true.

Thanks, Al! I am really looking forward to that part. I think it's going to be the most fun part of the process. Now that the script is done, I'm jumping into making the animatic for it! I've started recording temporary voice tracks and plan on assembling it radio style to get the timing down. Every second is 30 more frames that need to be rendered, so I'm really wanting to make this not a second more than 5 minutes! The only real comment I got from McCrary about the changes were that he lamented that I had to pull out some of the gags. It was kind of a bummer to lose some of them, but I think it actually works better in its new streamlined form. With the limitations, I could really only afford to put in the parts that were absolutely needed for the story. The pace picked up, too, which is good since this chapter is mostly set-up for the story. Going to run another round of ads this week and needed a "skyscraper" ad, so came up with this one. The vertical shape was a challenge, but it also made it easier to use Flemm's ship. It's a shame about widescreen for pirate movies, because it's tough to show a tall sailing ship in all it's glory. I thought it was clever in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie when they had the maelstrom, which allowed the ships to be almost completely sideways, and letting them fill up almost the entire screen.

Are you using Firefox 3? Maybe that's what it is... Here's how it works for me... I should have corrected that the zoom key combo is command-= (I just think of it as plus). zoom.mov

Hmm... Maybe that's a leopard only feature, because it does zoom the image, too on mine.