Gerry

I managed to work in some anticipation for this shot. The first Gman will raise his head for a sec, then lower it, before the leaping starts. I'll post something for this in a bit.

Ken, that's a good comment. It won't start quite as abruptly as this shows, as we'll see them on the plate for a second or so before they come to life. But if I can time some anticipation in I will.

Here's the shot where the gmen first come to life in the dream sequence... shot4wireframe3_h264.mov

Yeah it's different with music! they'll be dancing to springsteen so the tempo may change. To create this routine I watched the "Beat It" video, chose one section, and freeze-framed it every 5 or 6 frames and sketched the pose. Filled three pages with stick-figure/Gman sketches, then in an action worked pose-to-pose strictly from my sketches. Once the whole routine was in place I then had to do a lot of keyframe tweaking to give it some snap and remove floatiness. Should be interesting with a whole row of Gmen under the spotlights!

I'd be happy to translate or improve the english. I'll look at it and offer some alternative phrasing and see what you think.

Here's a test for a Michael Jackson inspired dance step for the Gmen. I think when Annie first sees them dancing, it will be a Rockettes style kick line. But after she dives into the TV screen and joins them, it will be this one. BeatItwireframe11_h264.mov

I seriously doubt you don't know what you're doing Al, but it *seems* like adding the lights in an action would be the simplest solution. It's really looking nice so far.

...wrong thread, peut-etre?

Thanks Holmes, that's a great help!

Thanks Nancy. Everything's already as you describe (tga series etc) but I think the prob with getting the settings to obey was that I had set the speed where you didn't. Once I changed that to Not Set the chor and crop settings stopped misbehaving. Now I'm gonna do a quick render to see if I've fixed it. edit: no it was that I didn't set the ending frame. All's good now!

I've been through this before but I forget what the fix is. The settings for an animated decal are confusing me. I've got a 400 frame targa series animation of snow falling, but the settings insist that it's 351 and I can't adjust the length properly. Here's a shot of the settings. I want to slow it down (though having it run at its actual speed would probably fix it) and repeat twice.

That's looking great, and I'm glad you could use some of the props. One thing you might change is the tree trunk is way too thick at the bottom. But your use of hair materials is working great! Much improved over the first version.

that's pretty much what I was thinking about doing if I understand you. Make a second model with the arm missing, then an instant after the bite, swap out the models on one keyframe, making the active one inactive and vise versa. Is that sort of it?

So while I was over at Jeff's site I ordered the first training video. they're on sale until Sunday!

Darkwing, I'm not seeing anything on Jeff Lew's site like that. If you should come across it, maybe post a link here. What he's got there is mostly about Killer Beans and the training dvd's. Not seeing anything like technical hints etc. Holmes, I will look at that, I need to determine just how long the "bitten" characters will actually be on screen. Also, I think it's more than constraining to another bone. For instance, suppose an arm gets bitten at the shoulder, then the arm bends. I'll need to plan out the bites pretty carefully. Or make the boolean objects bigger.

If I have the boolean cutter for the Gmen bites, and then the Gmen continue to move their arms in the action, those parts could pop through the boolean cutter and reappear, couldn't they? I need to think about this a bit more. Maybe swap out a separate Gman model with the bitten part already missing.

Oh right, those things too! Here's the new animatic timed to the music, lots of rough edges but it will help me time out the shots. master_comp_h264.mov

Glad to see this thread coming back to life! It's coming along nicely. Thanks for the comment on my project as well. btw over on Contributor's Cue I've got some christmas props you might be able to use... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=36002

There will be snow out the window eventually, which will be visible from the initial closeup of the plate of cookies. And that's not a bad suggestion about the pose, Robcat. I'm currently cutting the soundtrack together, then I'm going to redo the animatic to the beats of the music so I can time out the animation. It's ironic that in this whole process the actual animation comes last!

Here's a still of the first shot, still a little work to do but it's coming along.

I guess there's a good reason they're extinct!

Yeah, you can't upload tga's to the forum. If you have the snow.tga could you just email it to me? gerrymooney(at)earthlink(dot)net. Thanks! I would like to do snow in AM this year instead of faking it with AfterEffects.

You mean where he suggests doing a forum search? I don't understand.

When I load it it asks for a snow.tga item that's not in the zip file.

Hey I'm looking for that snow prj in Contributors Cue and I get redirected back here! Is it there somewhere?