Zlogspot - animationandvideo

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,...

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 -...

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...

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...

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...

I bought Scene of the Crime, a writer's guide to crime-scene investigations by Anne Wingate, Ph.D. at the same time as I bought Modus Operandi so the information, whilst still relevant, much is more relevant to pre 1996 crime scene investigations. That said, this is an excellent companion to that book. Where as Modus Operandi gives you an overview of types of criminals, Scene of the Crime goes into the specifics of how police work a crime scene. Anne Wingate is a retired detective and author of crime novels. Much of this book is based on her personal experience of crime scenes and not only includes anecdotes from her professional career but also includes a specific, real case as a framework for the step by step process of investigating a crime. It is a fascinating read covering everything, from what happens when a crime is first reported, how a crime scene is recorded, how evidence is collected, what evidence can be found, how evidence is processed and what can be concluded fro...

To give you some idea of how long ago it was between buying this book and when I actually read it, the book makes a reference to the movie Jurassic Park being currently popular in theaters. When I read it, Jurassic World was owning theaters everywhere. Despite being published in the mid 1990s much of the information in Modus Operandi, a writer's guide to how criminals work by Mauro V. Corvasce and Joseph R. Paglino is still relevant - especially if you're writing anything set pre 1996 and want to be aware of how things were 20+ years ago. A very useful book for anyone writing crime stories - even something as basic as a Scooby Doo style animated mystery - you'll find plenty of real world criminal behavior to structure a story around. Types of criminals include; Arsonists, Thieves, Hijackers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, Fences, Murderers, Kidnappers, Prostitutes, Armed Robbers, Safe Crackers, Lockpickers, Smugglers, shoplifters and White Collar Criminals. Each chapter gi...