JohnArtbox

Ask and ye shall receive... Wireframe

Hi Michael, great looking render.... My only crit is that the floor looks out of focus underneach the roach and it's making my eyes go crosseyed

Hey Rod, this looks cool I think the robot looks pretty damn good in 3d. He just needs some of the detail panelling you've put into the security bot but I'm sure that's coming. Two small suggestions The boots are better in the drawing, they're less massive and I like the shape more. Also if you plan on animating him I'd add thumbs, it'll give the robot a far greater gestural range. Mags has a great face, love the expression. But if you insist on putting him onto a robot body I vote for a glass jar /helmet filled with green nutrient

Actually Rod, I'm making this part up as I go along . You're right about it being too dark. The model is slowly taking form, but I'm not completely sure how it fits into the short. I've got to add more detail, texture and lighting over the next couple of days.

I got lazy and left the skycast light in rather than lighting the scene properly. I took a little bit more care lighting this(although still not much), and I added some film effects(because we can). Rod: I use light greys while I'm building because it lets me see the shape of the object much better than the default white.(Question to all:is there a way to set a default material?) I then add colours and texturing knowing that the underlying geometry is good. The grey also helps me see the effect when I'm adding different coloured lights to the scene(although there are none in this case)

Started on the Mad Scientist's lab. Obviously a long way to go but here it is so far.

I got the conch shell, I got the conch shell A simple thing that make it easier to positioin decals. When decalling from a screen grab if you leave your model in the same screen position, or take note of the screen position information in the bottom right hand cornner, you can enter this and the decal will be positioned at the exact size. Here are the steps 1.screencapture model in flattened pose 2.paste into paint program 3.crop image to the area you need for the decal. Save 4.Load into AM and create a new decal. Align the wireframe on the image over the wireframe of the model. 5.Apply 6.Go back into paint program and paint to your heart's content. I leave the wireframe on the bottom layer intact, as it's often handy reference. Had something else to write, but I've forgotten. Next?

Beautiful Stephen and Jim, that's a lovely little piece of animation

I assume you're rendering on a blank background? Try this...add a black plane in the background, so that it covers the camera area. This used to work, but I haven't used the abuffer renderer seriously since 10.5 was in beta ) . Or you could use multipass if you have 10.5. It is better.

Very cool Ed, I'm not big on mocap but for certain productions it'd work a treat.

Thanks all,busy designing the mad scientist's lab, hopefully to build in time for the image contest(crossed fingers). Every other time I've tried to enter commercial deadlines have prevented me from finishing in time . Parlo: the lefthand is for detachable tools. Bakerod:Didn't even get my standard two day weekend, I was so busy Just came off deadline tonight). If you lend me your scientist I'll fit him in the background . The foreground scientists are already designed. KenH: Here's a wireframe, the runthrough might have to wait a while. Expecting some productivity soon, just hope I get a few days before another job comes in. It's nice to be busy though

Nostalgia time again. This is the first ever job I did with AM, and the first job I did under the auspices of Artbox, my studio. I was originally approached to do the dancing logo as cell animation, but when they told me that they wanted the Cheesecake Shop Logo and Type reproduced perfectly on each frame, I thought Animation Master. It was version 3 or 4, I had 1 Pentium 133 with a whopping 64 mb of ram and I still have nightmares about the render . But nowhere near the nightmares I would have had doing it by hand. Cheesecake Shop 1.9MB 320x240 swf file Right click and "save as"

Ok BakeRod, Dan , and all the others who have asked for more Here's an old piece I did in the first version of master to have fur( was that 7?) From concept to storyboard to broadcast it took six very long weeks. The original script called for 25 seconds of roadkill and 5 seconds of "Mr Explanation" but the client nixed that and it changed to 18/12. It's still one of my favourite jobs but I would have killed for an extra week on the animation, which is "patchy". Small swf file 1.9Mb 320 x 240 Big swf file 4.3 Mb 640 x 480 They're flash files because I like the Spark video compressor and I have it for flash. Right click and "save as" if you want to save them. In fact that's probably the best way to view them.

no, the new concept was old fashioned motion graphics. I've just finished it(crossed fingers) so I've got one more web banner to do and I can get back to AM

'nother great little example Javier. look forward to the animation and wireframe Are the flames a textured cylinder with sprite smoke?

Thanks guys, would you believe the client came up with a new concept and this one got flushed. The file as you see it was straight out of AmtoSwf, all I did was load it into Flash MX and reoutput the swf. I didn't optimise it but it still cut the file size by 50% If the client had gone ahead I would have fixed the polygons that flickered by hand.

great model for the little boy Sam, almost makes me want to go back and rebuild Timmy , but I won't. I have stripey blue pajamas on him, but now I feel like I better change it . His face is fantastic and the hair looks phenomenal. Are you going to give him feet or leave him in slippers? I like the pencil sketch too. Can we see a wireframe? Ross: a cookie cut map is like a combined colour and transparency decal. It applies the colour as expected and makes the object transparent where thedecal is transparent(using then alpha channel or key colour as a guide)

Great character David.I would have said a karate cucumber but when I saved the image for my archive I saw he was a gherkin

as always lovely work Peter. There's some great shorts underway at the moment and I think every single one has a different style. This one is wonderfully European

Thanks Sam who's ED209? Got a link? This isn't a final texture but I like the material so I thought I throw it up.

Now the image is too small. They look pretty cool but it's hard to tell because it's so small. Textures on mechanical images will almost always have some problem areas. You either live with it or paint decals to give you the exact effect you want

Thanks Guys, I work in isolation a lot of the time and it's cool to get the feedback. Stephen and Ross: These guys are the physical labourers in the mad scientists lab. The head inside is too large at the moment, my original thought was that it would be like a cramped fighter cockpit with the robot approximately 10ft tall. If I had enough time and energy I'd make the pilot a hunchbacked traditional igor, but I don't think there's any need for that in the current script. Dearmad: The original script was written sometime around 6 years ago for an SBS/govt funded short film competition. As often happens with grants, out of the six films awarded, four went to close friends of the panel members , one went to a panel member and one went to one of the panel member's goldfish So having started 100's of projects over the years I thought I'd better buckle and complete one...and this seemed to have the most potential. There's a quote, I can't remember who it's from: "The best animation is the one you finish" ....but it's going to take a while . I've divided my original script in 2, from 5 minutes to 2.5, in the hope of finishing it, but it's very ambitious and I expect it'll take most of the year. Here's the wireframe, like most of my models, it's very simple

Thanks Curtis ) been busy with flash..flash..flash Damn money making clients. Tonight I got sick of of 2dsplines and spent a few hours in 3d.(been very, very bad....should be working harder). Here's IGORR....Independent Gantry-Occupied Research Robot, the ultimate lab assistant for the modern day mad scientist, Open to suggestions for a better acroynm for IGOR IGORR's still under construction, but tomorrow I'm going to have to buckle under for another week of flash work. I'm thinking a really asymetric lurching walk.

Thanks Doug, the swf file was around 300k after being compressed in flash. Carl, that's it. For curved shapes I'd still go with rendering and auto tracing, but for faceted shapes like these am2swf was great.

http://www.artboxanimation.com/AmStuff/Demo3d.html Intro for the flash animation project I've been working on for the last week. I used kci's am2swf plugin and it worked pretty much flawlessly. AM's animation tools made it a snap to animate quickly, and the rest of the presentation is looking(bad pun)pretty flash Just thought I'd share.