thefreshestever

i started this project almost two years ago and didn´t do anything with it the last year, i´ve just had too much work. but i decided to pick up on it again and to actually finish it! i think posting this here on the forums as a wip might help getting it done, and with your crits and suggestions i´m sure i will get better results. first of all, here´s the story: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- scene01 (ca 90 sek) daylight shot. camera moves through the attic, slowly zooming in on the shoebox. the doll lies in the shoebox, surrounded by other toys and stuff. it´s head is half ripped off, cotton batting is coming out of his neck. a spider crawls by and starts to stitch the head back on. afterwards the spider leaves. scene02 (ca 120 sek) camera shows a wide view of the attic. it´s night.it rains. moonlight is shining through the window. cameraswitch to the doll in the box. as a thunderbolt strikes the doll abruptly sits up. it looks around puzzled, breathing heavily. the doll stands up, trying to stabilize itself in the shoebox full of stuff. as it climbs over the edge of the box it slips and falls down on the woodflooring. it stands up again, rubbing its head, looking around. scene03 (ca 10 sek) the doll sneaks through the attic, moves past the window, from the darkness into the moonlight and out again. scene04 (ca 240 sek) the doll notices the silhouette of an old desklamp in a corner, gropes the switch and tries to turn the lamp on, but nothing happens. it finds the plug and plugs it in. the light hits it right in the face, it holds one hand before its eyes and swivels the head of the lamp into another direction, tries to get a picture of the nearer surrounding. the lightcone freezes at a pile of polaroid-pictures. the doll walks to the pile and takes a look at it. every single picture shows the doll, hanging in the attic with a thin white rope around his neck, it´s head halfway ripped off. frightened it throws away the pictures, runs to another corner of the attic, crouches down. scene05 (ca 90 sek) the camera view now from the top, somewhere in the woodwork, looking down at the doll, still sitting frightened in the corner. the doll tries to stay awake, but falls asleep soon. scene05 (ca 90 sek) dawn. birds are singing, light is rising though the window. the doll lies in the shoebox again, the head half ripped off. scene06 (ca 90 sek) cameramovement through the attic, focussing on a polaroid-camera that is lying in a corner near the pictures. the spider is crawling from behind on top of the camera. THE END ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the story is kinda open, so please tell me what your interpretation of the story is, what you think i´m trying to say with it. almost everything is modeled and textured by now and i´m starting to animate. i´m trying to get a "timburton-like" stopmotion feel to it, so i´m rendering at 12 fps. it took a long long time to figure out the right lighting setup, but i´m very satisfied with the result by now. i´m rendering in 1280x720 and using AO, so it takes some time to render. the attached 5 sec sneakscene for instance was rendering about 5 days or so. i hope now with v16 and a faster computer render times will speed up a lot. the soundtrack will be completely made with my iphone, i thought it would be a fun thing to do. the music in the sneakscene was made with a cute little app called "bebot" a very intuitive to play synthesizer and i´m going to use it for most of the scenes i guess. so here are some models and tests i made so far, the titlescreen and the sneakscene (wich are pretty much final, just got to get rid of the jumping of the waterdrops on the window) i hope you will like it. titlescreen_low.mov sneaktest_720x405_lower.mov 01_01_camstest_low.mov

thanks guys...now i get it!

aaaahhh.... thanks, david...this explains everything.... no i´m feeling stupid... again @mark: i don´t move the pivot by only moving the hips as you can see on my screenshots! why i would wanna do that? when animating in a chor i usually move the hip controller to move a character, not the model bone, so the feet would stay in place at first. or is that the wrong way to accomplish that?

No. aha... so there´s A) no chance to adjust the pivot in the x and z-axis and B ) no pose for just squetching the torso like in tsm2? hmmm, sounds like wish-list items to me

thanks mark... that helped a bit... but i still don´t get one thing: as i mentioned before, when i move my character a bit to the right with the hip-controller so that the body-bone isn´t exactly in place with the character anymore the character moves to the right when squashed and to the left when stretched. with the body-stretch-pivot slider i can only adjust the y-axis. how can i adjust the x- and z-axis? and what´s the difference between "whole body squetch" and "body squetch"? for me they both do the same. isn´t body squetch supposed to just squetch the torso?

great character! love the giant forehead.

i´m also in! rendertime with 1 character in the scene in 854x480 on a 2 x 2,8 ghz quad-core intel mac: with v16beta: 1:38 min!!! with v15: 3:50!

wow! there´s so much detail in it! i´m really curious how the final renders with bertram in it will look like.

a few days ago i rigged a character with the squetch rig, first time since 2 years or so... a whole lot has changed, it´s so easy to install now, great job guys! i love it! but i must have something messed up, the "body squetch" slider doesn´t work. when i try to grab it, it just won´t move. also it´s kinda odd that when i move my character in a chor by moving single bones (not the model bone) and then drag the "whole body squetch" slider the character moves to the right or left when squetching because the pivot doesn´t follow the model. is that usual behavior? if so, how can i let my character walk and squetch it in a chor without shifting it to the sides or front and back???

WOW! AMAZING!!!! i went to nyc a few weeks ago, that just took me back on top of the empire state building within a second!

freak.

when i see your models, or stians, or al´s, i guess you all NEVER sleep i´m really curious how the actual brass model will look like...

nice one... @phatso: nice one, too

i agree... that skin really makes one wanna touch

thanks guys... the carpet is nothing fancy, just a regular color and bump decal. i was surprised how good it looked when i saw it rendered for the first time. the picture it was made of was in a pretty good resolution and quality, i guess that´s why...

looks a bit too bright in my browser window, just pulled down the gradiation a bit in photoshop, hope this comes more close to how i see it in photoshop...

had a few free evenings lately and put together a living room mostly of models i´ve made some time ago, tried to fake a radiosity feel, so it would be suitable for animation... this render in 1024x768 took about 50 minutes (16pass) on my 2 year old mac book pro, a vga resolution with 9 passes takes about 15 minutes. a lot of time goes into computing the reflections in the window, for a still it would be no problem to fake it with a decal, but for animation? the lighting setup was a mixture of bulb and klieglights as described in yves tutorial (but only one bulb with only one ray casting shadows for faster rendering), but i mixed it also with heiners skylighter (thanks for this great fast rendering skylighter btw...) to produce the soft lighted feel and soft shadows. actually i´ve used this skylighter in almost every lighting setup since i stumbled on it, i love the soft feel it adds to scenes, works for in- and outdoor shots...

thanks nancy... hmmm, i don´t really understand it... maybe we have faster connections in germany ... i´ve tested it on many computers with different connections, and the only time i had to wait were the 15 seconds at the beginning, everything else starts immediately when i click it.... meowx: the videos are not for navigation only, most of the video-content is used to show the products 360°... and that´s not silly.

thanks guys... matt: a mute button is already planned, it will be integrated within the next update by the middle of the next week... meowx: i don´t know how fast your connection is, but with a fast dsl-connection you only have to wait about 15 seconds at the beginning, everything else is loading in the background meanwhile, so when i click on any product it starts immediately...everything is streaming, so the videos don´t have to be loaded completely to start... on a bit slower dsl-connection it can take a few seconds to start the animations you click at first, but after you´ve viewed one product-animation everything else should already be loaded. i had no complaints so far and the website was visited by a lot of people, it´s online for almost a week now... so it definately IS practical for professional webdesign

hey everyone! here´s a link to a website i´ve made for my biggest client, using a:m, after-effects and flash... i hope you´ll like it. took almost 4 weeks to get me there, so don´t say anything bad about it, or i will be about to cry www.ld-premium.com cheers...

very nice goat, impressive... i´m sure you´ll get the age right after a few tweaks.... i´m wondering no one asked before: wireframe?

i´m really wondering what you wanna do with this... the biggest renders i made in a:m were 2000 x 1500 px with 16 passes, and that were advertisings for a 210x297 cm magazine... they were packed with grass too, and the toughest one took almost 32 hours... the needed resolution at 300dpi for that format is a width of 2400 px, i just pushed the rest in photoshop, nobody in the whole wide world can see any difference when it´s printed. why do you put yourself through the hell of aborted renders and 36 hour waiting??? i hope you´re not only doing this because your digicam has 15 megapixels or whatever... it´s just a silly argument for selling cameras, nobody, really nobody needs such a high resolution, for nothing!

looking very good so far.... only the lip-movement of the first few frames right before he starts talking seems a bit too slow... i like your dog, very cute and funny... good luck.

another cool spot stian.... very nice... i don´t really get it, but i like it a lot the others are propably right about a few details regarding lighting, reflections and stuff, but i have the suspicion that it was your intention to get that lovely surreal feel to it. cheers...

that´s great! the long rendertimes with hair are always a pain in the xxx.... maybe you could lower the density a bit and make the hair a bit longer with more length-variation, maybe a bit kinkier too... so you could save a few minutes per frame eventually....especially the hair at the legs are a bit too short and uniform IMO... i always like watching your projects, i´m looking forward to the jungle he will jump through...