robcat2075

One of the methods Nancy demonstrates is often called "paired keys" which is my own preference Here's a tut to add to the pile... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43472

Blocking is the early step in the animation process where you get your essential storytelling poses on camera with minimal attention to the transitions between them. It lets you test out the essential look and timing of your scene before you put a lot of time into refining the motion I prefer to block with "paired keys" because it's easy to edit and experiment with and gives me a bit of automatic transition between my poses and not the sudden pop that strictly"held" poses would have. BlockingPairedKeysH300.mov

I'll guess that Bill W feels only he can properly manage those characters and knows that in animation he wouldn't have that control to himself. And... he's tired of the whole thing anyway. He does strike me as a bit ornery. What could a few T-shirts or coffee mugs hurt? I suppose they don't communicate the stories he was presenting, only fragments of the artwork.

Sure, where? Do a Project>Embedd All and save under a new filename and zip it up with any needed bitmaps and send it to me: theguy (at) brilliantisland (dot) com

For an example of "show it", with no dialog at all there is Frank Tashlin's "Van Boring (He Never Says a Word)" comic that he did in the 1930's Almost all of it has been posted on the facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/vanboring

Yeah, Bill Watterson is famously anti-exploitation. Ostensibly there are no authorized C&H products other than the compilation books. I think an animated C&H sounds like a bad idea. Other than "Peanuts" i can't think of any hugely successful transitions from comic strip to animation and the Christmas and Halloween specials are the only ones we really remember fondly.

Is this something you can send me the PRJ with the models?

When I started at Nortel our media team was very big on "estimates". If we met our estimate of how long something would take that was good for a metric of some sort. However, you couldn't just give a sky-high estimate either, that was bad for the metric. I guess our manager was trying to get us to think in business-like terms. But in the first five years I worked there the estimates were meaningless for me. Every project I had was a completely different thing from any prior ones so there was really no way to make predictions. How do you estimate something that you haven't done before? And there's no one around who's done it either? Regarding a movie... somehow independent movies are made on budgets but they don't reveal much about how they do it or what goes where. On the rare occasions an ACTUAL line-item film budget has been leaked it's like a Hollywood scandal.

He looks cute..

I suppose the way to solve the concept design problem is to recruit talented people who come up with great ideas the first time.

Some other books I'd note on this topic "Save the Cat, The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need" by a guy who screens screenplays for studios. "Screenplay" by Syd Fields has been around for decades and is highly regarded. Directing the Story: Professional Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Live Action and Animation by a former Disney and Dreamworks storyboarder. This book is blurbed by no less than Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg

I think you need to know more about the project before you can apportion resources. And concept design is potentially endless. you go until you have something useful.

And "Quality" setting when you rendered was "Final", yes?

If you enable "Show More than drivers" for the object in the chor you have access to a model's groups and you can animate their transparency settings in the chor.

Hit Q or Shift-Q and right drag a bounding box on the screen to see a final render with current settings. I suspect the artifacts are a real-time render thing only. BTW there are some improvements in real-time transparency display coming in v17. But definitely test a real render.

Cosmic donuts!

I think we've touched on that one before. Here's a search for "shadow" and "only" Try "Shadow Pass" first.

Don't do that at all. Animate to a stationary camera. You don't need the camera to move to animate this shot. Moving the camera is causing trouble.

My impression of McKee after getting about 2/3 of the way through "Story" is that he's not much of a writer himself. Not a great instructional writer, certainly. He has the tone a self-impressed academic professor who babbled observations into a Dictaphone for several days and then told his graduate assistant to "type this up." His own success in the screenwriting field is pretty minimal. Certainly a master screenwriter would have more under his belt than an episode of of "Spenser for Hire" or "Mrs. Columbo"?

I would recommend not to animate via a camera constrained to a character. We do that occasionally with face cams but even that is secondary to the view the camera sees. If you are trying to manipulate a character while you are looking through a camera that is constrained to the character you are creating a feedback loop that will never be manageable. It is making your task 100x harder than it needs to be. It's like trying to move a table while you are standing on the table. You can put cameras anywhere you want, as many as you want, but don't attach them to the character. Send me that PRj and I will look at it.

thanks for the update. On paper it looks good. Their site sure is slow. If they were quite clever they would make an import filter that would let you load an existing Adobe Premiere or FinalCut project. That would get converts

This isn't a camera problem, it's body motion problem. Something basic is wrong and we need to find out.

I'm wondering what it is that you are doing that is causing this very jittery, halting motion as he walks. As I frame thru it there's a spot where the hips actually stop and move backwards a hair even though he's in the middle of walking forward. that can't be right.In general the up and down motion fo the hips seems not to be placed right in the context of the walk motion. His feet are still shuffling parallel to the ground. That will always look odd. You really HAVE to lift the ankles off the ground. In that first set of videos i pointed you to there is some live action that I motion track with dots. Even though the toe of the foot barely clears the ground as it is carried forward, the ankle is clearly lifted up in an arc from footstep to footstep. If you want to send me this project I'll take a look at it.

Based on Steffen's account it would probably require recruiting a serious Mac OS guru to write the new code this would need. Start planning that Kickstarter campaign!

First try dragging the new Action to be above or below the chor action (whatever it is not now). I forget whether above or below has precedence.