June 2012 – Zandoria Studios

June 29, 2012August 22, 2017

Bring Your Dreams to Life!

I was reading a story in the LA Times about low-budget animated movies. The writer says:

Last year’s “Puss in Boots”was made on the lush 13-acre DreamWorks Animation campus in Glendale by 300 people working for four years at a cost of $130 million.

Its knockoff was made on the second floor of an office building just two miles away— by 12 people, in six months, for less than $1 million.

The tone of the article isn’t what got my attention, instead it was the difference in approach between the two types of studios, and the radical difference in thinking… I think that there is a mentality that it can’t be done except the Dreamworks/Pixar/Sony/BlueSky way: lots of people and lots of time.

One of the objectives of The Tin Woodman of Oz project was to road-test the production capabilities of A:M–and it did! I already knew that it could–I used it to create CG animation for Brian Michael Stoller’s “Miss Cast Away” a few years before. There is no reason that producers wanting to try to cash in on the animation craze shouldn’t be looking at Animation:Master and its community of animators.

I’ve been working with A:M since 1999, and I can take a character sketch and turn it into a ready-to-animate model. Or I can start with just your idea or script and help you to produce it. I’m available as a consultant if you need help setting up a studio, or with training.

For an independent animator, or a small studio, or if you are a producer looking to create an animated film, I can help you bring your dream to life.

June 16, 2012June 29, 2012

Resolution Independence

If you are familiar with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, you know that vector artwork is scalable to any size, from business card to billboard, and it will look good. A raster or pixel-based image will not look good if you try to print or display it larger than it was created for.

Similarly, most 3D models are created with a level of detail appropriate for the intended output; different models for animating, higher resolution for rendering, even higher (billions of polygons) for 3D printing…

Animation:Master’s splines are very similar to Illustrator’s curves. You can create a very detailed model without a lot of polygons (actually A:M doesn’t use polygons at all). The splines connect to form a network called “patches”. Because the model is light, there is usually no need to use a proxy model when animating.

Because the geometry is spline-based, you can view it at any scale and it still looks good. It is resolution independent, so you can render it at any size. Technology continues to evolve, and what is considered high-definition today may seem low-res in a few years. However, the models that you create in Animation:Master today will still be good no matter what future display requirements might be.