Zlogspot - animationandvideo

Bat Storm Muvizu (left) In development Bat Storm iClone (right). If you've been following my work for a while you'll be familiar with my Batman parody character Bat Storm. The character first appeared as a GoAnimate Comedy World design . When GoAnimate dropped all its fun themes in favor of Business Animations I moved the character into the 3D realm of Muvizu shortly after I purchased a license for it in 2016. I really love Bat Storm's look in Muvizu. The thing is, as easy as Muvizu's developers claim their software is, I find trying to do any form of character animation with it to be infuriating. Which is why you haven't seen a single Bat Storm animation created in Muvizu so far. My Muvizu Bat Storm Character. Lately I've been experimenting with Reallusion's 3D Character Creator 2 for iClone 7, which is soon to be released as a stand alone application in version 3. Although I haven't done a lot of 3D animation with iClone I actually know my way around...

I haven't posted to this blog for nearly a month because Animation4Business projects have been monopolising my time. As well, I prefer to write about actual projects I'm working on over writing fill in posts like reviews (of which I have a couple I've been meaning to do). The last week or two I've had some time to get back to my Random Testing Unit short animation project so I thought I'd give you an update on that as well as my Comedian animated short. The Comedian Regular readers will know I released a one minute, cut down version of The Comedian which I entered into Reallusion's CrazyTalk 8 Comedy Contest . Unfortunately my entry didn't even get an honourable mention and lost any chance to win the entry with the most 'Facebook Likes' after some entrants tried to game the system with fake accounts. That prize was split between the three honourable mentions. Links to all the winners are in the embeded Facebook post below: I don't want to sound...

Jump Fail Animation The only way to get better at animation is to actually do some. I figure I can't keep sitting around waiting for time to complete full projects. So the other day I fired up iClone6, after having watched an iClone tutorial on creating action scenes, to try and create a short action sequence of my own. The result is this short sequence of a character attempting to jump between two roof tops but failing to make the distance. The character features on of Gary Pye's recently released Comic Faces which you can read more about under the next heading. Watch the finished scene in the animation below, that is also a comparison between my first render of just creating the basic action, and my second render, done a few days later, that includes some facial expression and a little more arm movement once the character realises he's falling. I wouldn't say it's perfect animation by any means. I had issues key framing the arms and legs. If you look a little too ...

Screen Shot from 'Random Testing Unit'. Towards the end of last week, inspiration hit with an animation idea I could create relatively quickly in Muvizu (so I thought). Over three days I wrote a script with the working title of 'Random Testing Unit'. I can't go into great detail about the script as it would spoil some of the initial humour. I can tell you, the basic premise is a comedy sketch featuring a Police, Random Testing Unit, road stop and a driver who is stopped to be tested. The finished animation will run for around 3 minutes. By the way, if you're looking for script writing software the free, online version of   Celtx is great. I swear by it as the easiest and fastest way to write a script. The paid version has many useful tools but for me, the script writing tool is enough. About two days into writing my script I felt confident enough that it was going to come together so I began designing my set in Muvizu. What I've come to realize with 3D sof...

Reallusion's Comedy Contest. Reallusion, the creators CrazyTalk 8 , which makes animating 2D or 3D talking heads easy, launched their latest animation competition, The CrazyTalk Comedy Contest . The competition closes on June 24th, 2016, which is plenty of time to learn CrazyTalk and submit a 60 second comedy animation created with the software. Even better, if you don't own CrazyTalk 8, you can still enter as Reallusion is making a special free edition available for download from the contest page. Making this the ideal time to give it a try and possibly win over $1000.00 in cash. Of Course I'm Entering... Work in progress. The Comedian in iClone6. The Comedian Back in March I started working on a CT8/iClone6 animation based upon a character I created for a planned series of comic strips called 'The Comedians'. Even though this animation was intended to use both CT8 (close ups) and iClone 6 (medium and wide shots) to create a complete short, my comedian's entir...

The Comedians - by TET.  Over 20 years ago I had the idea to create a comic strip that was based on the stand-up comedy of three fictional comedians. It was one of those bursts of inspiration that never got any further than headshot drawings of the aforementioned cast before being filed away. One of the reasons I bought the latest version of Reallusion's CrazyTalk 8 is that the promotional videos showed it being used to create 3D, talking head versions of cartoon characters. Something I thought might be an easy way to put my own characters into animation. I was reminded of that recently so I thought it was time to give it a try. Remembering my comedian characters I thought, that's the ideal place to start with talking head characters. Hat-wearing Comedian. Of the three character designs, the one I liked the most was the hat-wearing comedian. I knew I'd purchased just the right hat in one of the content packs for CrazyTalk 8 so I felt a good character likeness was possible....

Lil' Peepz TET... I miss you. For some time now I've only been sporadically posting to this blog, which has been personally disappointing, as I've tried to make this and my Writing About blog something that I consistently update with new content on a weekly basis. Whilst I've been more prolific on my Writing About blog, I don't have the same broad scope to write about almost anything I choose here. This blog is devoted to documenting my personal animation projects and things that relate to my work, such as reviews of software I'm using, tutorials, animation tips and, occasionally I'll feature other animators work that I've discovered too. Typically, I post more often when I have an active project on the go. Unfortunately I haven't really had an active project on the go for months because of my commercial animation work . It's the same story of freelancers everywhere. When you get busy professionally, all personal projects fall to the wayside. I...

In my recent updates I've been teasing a new Animation 4 Business Promotional video created with Reallusion's iClone 6 . It's taken me longer than expected because I've only been able to work on it for a couple of hours each day - part of my new schedule that enables me to work on many projects concurrently. Finally the animation is finished and, although I've already debuted it on the Animation 4 Business website , Facebook and YouTube, here is the only place you can read about the behind the scenes creation process. The finished video is below. Example of the default 'Curvey' body type. Character Design The main character is a custom design made from Reallusion's ToonMaker pack  using the 'Curvey' body type. I had to tone down the curves and try to create a more conservative looking outfit for a business video. Which is one of the great things about iClone character design. Every single body part is scaleable. You're not stuck with just th...

Buddy's World TET at his desk. I'm busier than I ever have been working on animation projects. The trouble is, most of what I'm doing doesn't make for very interesting blog posts. Half my day is spent learning about animation or animation software. The other half is spent doing the grunt work on projects, drawing hands... well paws, so many paws and key framing... so many key frames. There's also that game app I'm working on. So here is a quick run down of what I'm doing since I last posted some Project Updates . JAC the Cat CrazyTalk Animator 2 Although I finished my blog series on creating this CrazyTalk Animator, G2 character, the character its self is far from finished. What Reallusion don't tell you in their promo's for ' making your own G2 character with our custom template ' is that it's actually templateS (that's plural). To make a fully functioning G2 character, after the initial full body template (that you saw me create), ...

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,...

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...