D.Joseph Design

Huh? Maybe it's because I haven't had my coffee today—or the past four years—but that just didn't make sense to me. The wires aren't coming out of the conduit.

LOL! That's kind of similar to what I was seeing while placing the 3,223 rubber duckies that were eventually cutout to 1,916.

Aah! Rule number 1: don't trust an engineer in matters of art. (Anyone thinking of that poor Chinese guy from American Idol? "Sha-bang"? That's the only episode I've ever seen.)

I appreciate your thoughts, Glenn. However, of the dozen or so in my office who have seen the slide, most saw the wires last (the first thing was always "Zing!"). So I'm not too worried about it. BTW, I uploaded an animation preview here (916 KB QT).

That is really looking awesome! I'd like to talk with you about using this model for some of my stuff. You may also wish to consider Enhance:AM. I like this more than SimbointAM. It's not free, but I think it's only $45.

I have been asked to speak on presentation design at the upcoming Answers in Genesis Creation College in West Harrison, IN. My talk title will be "Making Your Presentations Zing!" I'll teach graphic design principles, eye candy skills, dos and don'ts of design, and more. I'm going all out on this design and using Apple Keynote to present for its advanced multimedia technologies and awesome transitions. The gears and globe were modeled in Animation:Master. The globe will slowly rotate in the Keynote version. Cover (JPEG)

AWESOME! These are the kinds of pictures that I'd use as desktop wallpapers.

He seems very simple but yet quite unique. Looks like you've got a good character in the developments.

Sounds like your memory could be the problem; either your physical RAM or your system's virtual memory. I often experienced crashes with test renders from my "March of the Rubber Duckies" until I maxed-out the VM. If you have the hard drive space, try setting the minimum to 2,048 MB and max to 4,096 MB. If you have multiple 7200 RPM HDs, do this for each drive; restart your computer and try it again.

Just so everyone knows, I now have "March of the Rubber Duckies" on A:M Films.

Pretty good. One thought: I expect the spider to have at least some motion while hanging in the air, but since you're planning a title to show there, it's probably not a big deal.

A lot of noise, but still some good lighting.

Good job! I'd also like to see you animate him. Maybe find one of his speeches and do completely opposite expressions to his attitude. Or just take multiple speeches and you'd have a great back-and-forth debate between just one person. Any plans to do other "famous" people?

A trilobite?! When you get that completed, please let me know because I am interested in any "pre-historic" models (even though there is no such thing as "pre-historic").

Nice! Looks pretty good! Adding some bubbles to the inside would make it look more like a carbonated drink.

WOW! That's awesome!

"Gratis use permission" is a free license strictly for non-profits with a tax-exempt number. I request this form of license since I do these videos for my church and I don't get paid.

Oh, wow! I didn't get all of these forum-only replies! Let me try to answer all the questions. First, thank you very much for the compliments! Music: The music is "The Chickens are Revolting" from John Powell & Harry Gregson-Williams' Chicken Run soundtrack. Because the animation is for my church and I'm not getting paid for this, I am covered under "gratis use permission" of the music. However, considering this piece's great success and review, I'd like to use it to promote D.Joseph Design, enter in contests, and list on my website as more than just a "personal project." For that, I'm applying for commercial license of the music. There are 1,914 rubber duckies in the animation. These are not simulated with special trick-videography, and they aren't calculated by a flock. All 1,914 rubber duckies are "individually animated" meaning each one exists in the choreography as an individual model-copy with it's own action. I can select and ducky and do whatever I want with it. The choreography file is 5 MB uncompressed and contains nearly 90,000 lines of code. Unless I'm wrong, I believe I hold the record for the most individually animated models in a single choreography. Combined total for render time was 1,100 hours rendered by Mike Ulrich with RenderMuscle. Half of that time is re-rendering an eight-second section at 9x multipass where single-pass motion-blur just didn't cut the peanut butter. This took about 300 hours to model, animate, test, time, compile, and place. Are the duckies symbolic of anything? No. It was just a crazy idea my father and I had after getting sugar-high from ice cream and watching a movie with my mother(sorry, I can't remember the movie). I am rather pleased with the camera movement. There are a couple flaws, but you wouldn't catch them unless I point them out to you. Concerning the squeak. I decided against the constant squeak because it just got so annoying after much longer than I already had. Fading out just didn't seem to work because the duckies were still right there. BTW, that Camera2 scene at ground-level with the marching sound was inspired by old World War II movies that showed marching troops' feet down the ranks. Last year's opening animation? That was my first A:M project! This is my seventh animation. That's including little title sequences I did for last year's video. So what's next? Sleep. After that, I'm working on some fun ideas that involve less than 20 models. I'm working on a thorough document on how I did the animation. If for no other good, at least it gives me something else to put on my website. As of 11:53 PM EST, Thursday, February 5, I have had 596 unique visitors to my website, and over 3.4 gigs transferred since I announced the animation Thursday morning, January 29. Half of those numbers were the first two days after announcing the animation just to some friends and the Animaster Mailing List. Anything I missed?

I like 3. It does not look too harsh, but it still looks cool. 4 looks like cheap sunglasses. :)