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Showing posts from August, 2015

Project Updates - Things I Either Am, or Have Been, Working On

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TET, hard at Work. I've been particularly busy lately working on various projects. Scheduling my time much better so I work on several things for just an hour or two each day. I thought I'd give you a quick run down of what I've been doing of late. Starting with JAC the Cat character... JAC Cat, Crazy Talk Animator 2 I haven't really advanced this enough to warrant a full post dedicated to my progress on this. However I have been working on it daily, trying to solve all the body part import issues that I outlined in my Part 4 update. JAC Cat body Parts. I can tell you I've pretty much resolved everything with regard to importing my DrawPlus template into CrazyTalk Animator 2. Body parts are all in the right place, none are missing or color inverted. I'm now fixing up the various joint masks - which I've discovered don't do their job nearly as well if you use a lot of gradients in your coloring. I'll need to plan my character design better next time,

Diving Back Into Crazy Talk Animator 2 Character Creation (Part 4)

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JAC Last time I posted about the creation of my first CrazyTalk Animator 2 G2 character, Happy Cat JAC, it was just a progress report to say I'd completed a second view of the character in my DrawPlus X8 template and a commitment to say progress had accelerated to daily work on the project. If you'd like to catch up on previous posts before continuing, here are the links for  Part 1 ,  Part 2  and  Part 3 . I'm happy to say I've stuck to the daily progress commitment and can report that today I finished the last of all seven views in my DrawPlus template. Which you can see below. Seven views of JAC finished. DrawPlus G2 Character Template. If you look closely at the 180 view (2nd from the top left) you'll see that view includes a tail. CrazyTalk Animator G1 characters have provision for a tail made up of nine segments. Although the tail is not part of the official DrawPlus G2 character template, CrazyTalk Animator 2 still retains the tail in the character composer -

World First: X-Ray Animated Travel Story Using Full-Sized Airport Luggage Scanner

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Club Med and BAFTA nominee and Art Director/Creative Lead at animation studio 3.81, Matt Oxborrow, have teamed up to answer the question "Is your luggage having more fun than you when you go on a holiday?" Find out in the delightfully unique animation, Sun, Sea and Scanned: A Flip-Flop Family Holiday (below) created using a full-sized airport luggage scanner. Inspired by the 'other worldly' look of luggage when viewed through the screen of a security airport scanner, the colors and shapes you see look nothing like what you remember packing. So Club Med decided to have a little fun with that and created the story of a family of flip flops and their holiday inside your luggage. Their adventure includes: A bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo as a speedboat. Hairbrush water skis. Chewing gum eyebrows. Flip flops faces with metal bead mouths and coin eyes. Tennis ball sun. Paperclip aeroplane. Hair straighteners and multi-plug adapters as skyscrapers. Watch the video a

Bat Storm - A Look Behind the Curtain of a Future iClone Project

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I recently teased the above Bat Storm image on my Facebook wall stating that it was a future iClone project that I hoped to work on. The image is just a fun test that I put together, in the space of about an hour or so of tinkering, after purchasing a bunch of Superhero content through the Reallusion Content Store and Market Place . Because the image looks cartoonish you could be forgiven for thinking it's something I drew myself. If you're not familiar with iClone and 3D animation techniques in general I thought I'd draw back the curtain a little and show you how this image was made. To begin, for all the crap (to be nice about it) GoAnimators get for animating with pre-made and pre-animated content, in the 3D animation community it's just a generally accepted practice to use other people's models, props sets etc. and no one ever calls them out on it (well I did once to a 3D illustrator and he got hugely upset about the thought of having to credit someone else fo

Diving Back Into Crazy Talk Animator 2 Character Creation (Part 3)

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JAC If you've been following the creation of my first CrazyTalk Animator 2 G2 character, Happy Cat JAC, then you may have given up on me finishing, since the last time I posted an update was back in late May 2015. I don't blame you. I said there was no guarantees I'd even finish when I started. Good news is, I've picked up the tools again and gotten back to work. This time the project is part of my daily schedule and not just something I'm doing in my spare time. That means there is a high chance I'll get this done. It'll still be slow going as I'm only working on it for about 90 minutes a day but that is a 90 minute increase from zero so you can almost feel the g-forces in that acceleration! If you'd like to catch up, here are the links for Part 1 and Part 2 . So where am I at? Well I've been working on this for just two days so far. When I downed tools last time I was in the process of converting my Manga Studio finished views into DrawPlus im