Darkwing

Here's an incredibly important document which took the better part of forever to put together and it's still not fully complete! But yeah, thought you guys might like to have a look at the Production Bible! I've removed e-mail addresses naturally as that isn't something we want open to the public. I'm only showing this to you guys too BTW, so please, no sneaking it out to others But yeah, have a look over it! If there's anything you think should be added please shout, this is the first production bible I've ever written up. I'm still waiting on a few credits to come in so the Animation Assets don't have credits and stuff in them, but you get the idea at least Production_Schedule.pdf

Have you ever tried to draw an image in Celtx??? Celtx is a lot of things but as a storyboard tool you'd be better off with paper and pencil. No I've not, never had a reason to try. As you said, paper and pencil does the trick very nicely, or any old annotator. Unnecessary bells and whistles in my opinion (and as Rodney said) where you can use paper and pencil just as if not more effectively. But as I said before, to each their own, what works well for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. Variation keeps life interesting

Yeah, fortunately, having been at a movie theatre for close to half a decade, I'm quite well versed in the styles of teasers vs trailers. There is to be three, first the teaser, then trailer 1 and then trailer 2. As for the bit where the logo is, that is Chris K's jurisdiction. I believe he intends some sort of short battle sequence to go there and then it will cut to the Coming Soon bit or whatever. But yeah, I have little control over what will be placed in the spot that has the logo. Like I'll make sure it fits in editing of course, but Chris K is the project leader for this, so it's his decision as to what will be there. I imagine it will be along the lines of some of the test renders he's shown me (I've posted a couple along the way here.) Originally he was inclined to splicing battle images in between some of the walking shots, but I suggested something more at the end as I think it will break up the continuity and atmosphere if its spliced in between. Of course that could also give a sense of dissonance if spliced in between, so a formidable argument could be made for splicing it in between.

I approve of this model! And you coulda gone CeltX, it's free and very efficient but to each their own.

For the teaser I've approached it in a manner I haven't before, which is to do more of an animated storyboard or animatic or whatever. This isn't the final cut of the music, but gives a general idea of what everything should look like. In the final, there will be words that periodically overlay the footage and other stuff happens when the Red Squad logo shows up, but I was more concerned with the "walking" shots than anything. SO thoughts, comments critique etc is welcome! Oh and the export didn't preserve the aspect ratio even though I told it to, so don't worry about that Teaseranimatic.mov

I find whenever I use that method for decalling a face, I first have to increase the brighter regions via levels in Photoshop or something. So yeah, just play with the levels and save and reload AM, you won't even have to re-apply the decal

I forgot to post this last night. Did up a new desktop for two reasons primarily. One being that a new character was built so I wanted to throw him in somewhere and the second is that this particular style is going to be used for the teaser trailer that's to be released in February

Storage space fortunately isn't a concern, I've close to a couple TB to play with between my external drives And what is this global ambient? Is it like going halfway for AO, but not doing the actual Occlusion bit?

Update: Changes made, all Klieg lights with Z-Buffered Shadows (I just chucked three lights in, not the actual final rig!). Soften turned to off in multipass. Reflections set to 1. Render time at 1920x1080...3 minutes. That's kind of a huge improvement from 45 minutes.

Perhaps it will be a good idea to look at some ancient Egyptian art and pull some styles from that (ie elongated heads, pronounced chins etc)

First of all, thanks for the suggestions! I'm going to admit I've never had to render more than a still frame or a few seconds of footage and so I'm actually not all that well versed in the best rendering techniques. @Mark, I'm not entirely sure how environment maps work. Will they translate movement, because the reflections have quite a bit of variation when the camera or character moves around. And I'll be sure to try out Klieg lights as an alternative to bulb lights. I know again that when there gets to be a combination of lights or a fair bit of intensity between each of them, that my laptop doesn't handle them well. @Nancy, Hair is actually somewhat simplistic for my characters. I use thicker hairs at a lower density which seems to work well and save a little time on the rendering front. Fortunately like I said, my laptop seems to have no problem rendering hair and zips through that very quickly. I never thought to turn off soften, I always thought it helped shadows and stuff not just look like overlapped layers, but I'll give it a try. If I could aim for 30 seconds a frame, I would wonder what on earth ever let me spend that much money on a mega-computer! If I could ideally cut it back from 45 minutes to 10 minutes though, I would equally be impressed. Again, the one thing I don't want to compromise on is the HD factor. If everyone still used little CRT monitors with horrible web connections, sure, I could easily get away with an SD resolution, but this is the age of speed and bigger screens (or smaller screens too I guess, thinking of ipds and the like). I would like for this to look good. BUt I'm gonna play around with some settings today and see what I can come up with!

That shot was rendered with 9x multipass, reflections 2, and at 1920x1080. When there's characters, SSS and Hair will also be rendered I prefer 16x multi-pass, but will have to skimp on that one for final renders I think. The lights are bulb lights (not a final lighting rig) with shadows and whatever the default shadow type is with bulbs. Now it doesn't have to be rendered at 1080 and could maybe be reduced to 720, but the final product we would ideally want in HD, though my poor little laptop probably isn't going to want that. I should also mention that my laptop isn't a great rendering machine to begin with, basic materials take longer on this thing than most computers I find, but it renders hair rather quickly which is nice.

You're doing an awesome job! I started reading your script BTW, I'm gonna wait until I'm more through it before sending off some suggestions, but on the whole it seems pretty good so far. I'm liking your characters and look forward to seeing ones like Death and Gravedigger modeled!

First thoughts are that the mesh is waaay to dense. Reduce it a lot, especially in the cheek area and you'll have a smoother and more accurate model.

Ken, if you could be so kind, see if you can import this and get it's textures as well? Chris K has tried but all he can get is the model and no textures. Midnight.zip

Thanks! Fortunately once this set is built, there won't be much more along the lines of sets/set pieces to build. Still will be a handful of characters, but after that, it's animating time! And yeah, Chris K is getting pretty amazing at those special effects shots! Regarding the extras, that's a good idea, I just might set up another thread for it cause it'll be a huge timesaver if others around have some background extras that can populate the scenes some! And here's another render of the bridge, have been throwing down some basic colours and have been trying to follow the texturing scheme as much as possible. One thing though is that I really need to look into cutting back the render time somehow has it takes 45 minutes to render a single frame, and that's without characters that take at least another 10 minutes depending on the shot. I'm thinking it's the reflections though, which puts me at a crossroads as the consoles very much rely on the reflections for their semi-realistic look. You don't necessarily see it yet in these renders, but once more texturing and the LCARS are in place it becomes very noticeable.

Happy birthday! Have a fantastic day Mark!

After suffering severe withdrawal symptoms, I finally have AM back and to show off that I do, I've done a bunch of modeling on the bridge of the Enterprise so here it is!!!

I'm still lacking AM at the moment. Its on my list of things to do though when I get it again

What about a complex model? I'm kind of curious about the shaping.

I always just figured it was one of the symptoms of the spline to poly barrier. Never actually thought to report it before Now I'm having stuff I want to test. I must get on purchasing AM again...

I suppose I should make a specification. Group attributes will translate over, decals will not. Even when I look in the separate file where the texture data is stored, it never seems to include the decal information even when exporting I set it to do so.

I thought with DirectX that you needed to have a directX graphic card or something? I remember once hearing about it and wanting to try it, but I'm pretty sure due to my nVidia card, it couldn't been done. I don't remember, was a long time ago, as long as it works on Mac Also I'll check out your FBX thing later. Course I probably need Animation: Master, wouldn't I?

Well the main problem we've always found with exporting from AM, is that the mesh just doesn't look right once imported. Plus it doesn't keep textures :/

He already has Max 2011, he has for some time. He's been a Max user as long as I've known him. The main thing is that I'm AM and he's Max and so we always have to completely separate tasks. Ironically, I'm a modeler, he's the animator so anything I model, he can't animate. He did have AM last year though Right now for Red Squad this works, but it's limiting for future (and past) attempted projects. Basically, one day, one of us is gonna have to learn something new