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Bring Your Dreams to Life!

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.

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Resolution Independence

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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.

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Cloak Test

Tar walking out of the desert (finally). I’m happy that I’m finally getting some work done. I had to replace my laptop, which meant that I had to switch to Windows7–that has been a pain, because of having to update a lot of software to be compatible. I had to upgrade Animation:Master to version 16 64bit–which made me a little nervous to switch versions in the middle of a project. But everything seems to be working ok.

One of the things that I was trying here was compositing everything directly within the render. but I’m going to switch back to rendering everything as separate passes, just for the ease of fixing things or making changes without having to rerender the whole shot.

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Texturing

Just finished-up the texturing…I used 3D painter and Photoshop to paint the maps, and used Simbiont A:M materials for the gear…

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Rigging

I’ve been working on the rigging for the new version of the “Tar” model. I’m using the TSM rig for these characters –though it is no longer supported by Anzovin. That’s OK, A:M isn’t really a mainstream software….
the most tedious part of this process, no matter what control rig you choose, is the CP weighting and smartskinning. On this model, I am taking the time to stick with the recommended process and work with the “pre-rig” version and literally work-out the “kinks”.
I’ve just finished weighting and smartskinning the model ( I still need to add some little tweaks, eyes, ears, tail–but almost ready to run the “rigger” plugin).
My hope is to get an animation-ready model done, textured, and rendered for the Hash, Inc. ‘mascot’ contest layer this month.

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Watusi Warrior

I was watching History Channel this weekend, and saw some piece about dairy cows….It gave me an idea for a group of Watusi warriors having a drink at the waterhole (bar). Typical fantasy “horned helmet” types–except that those are their real horns.

The same idea for antelope, gazelles, goats….

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Adventures with Boomer

Kevin Detweiler’s long-awaited DVD project is finally available: Here

I built some of the character models and sets a couple of years ago, and I have been looking forward to seeing what they were to be used for 🙂