Gosh and Crikey!! So funny I nearly choked laughing...
But first, my newbie discovery for today: Next time I do a battle scene, I'm going to try loading all my sound fx onto my props and particles in iClone to generate a single sound track when I render, coz... wow... doing it the "old fashioned way" during editing seems so messy and inefficient... and I've still got three tracks to load for all the arrrrrghhh's, eeeeks, yipe-yipe-yipes and various other screams for running about with their helmets on fire...:
And yeah, I know, I could have consolidated the track for voices (all screaming at once) in iclone automatically when I animated all the lip-sincs, but I used iClone's handy voice-to-text (because I need to do most of my animating at night when the kids are asleep) - and because I live so far away from the city, the only voice-actors I could record on my phone through the day (to replace the computer voice track) were friends, family, neighbours, the post-man, a delivery guy, the power dude who checked our meter before our next bill, and that nice old couple of tourists who stopped to ask me for directions...
"You want us to do *what* first?" they ask.
"Okay, so you're on a fantasy planet in a battle between trolls and a little cow who wants to cross their bridge and you're running along the turret of your wooden tank when..."
Then the old lady slaps her husband with her map and says; "See Fred? I *told* you we were lost!"
Like any artist, I can always see something to polish every time I look at it, but I must also confess that I'm really impressed at how easy iClone makes it for a newbie like me to create this much in such a short space of time, and after only 6 months learning animation through the uni of youtube.
It's also taught me that I still have a lot to learn, including particles, lighting, camera motions and angles.
But in the meantime, I'm having a fun time just making it this far...
Arrghh! And why is my link not appearing as a video..?
Cyber-monsters must be attacking my link, because I'm fairly sure it's the same code I used last time to post a video...
but oh well... they can have their victory for now... it's 2am downunder in oz... and time for me to go check all the cows are camped safely away from wild dogs.
But this is so fun and easy, from now on, I'm using steps 4 and 5 too,
so I can make my avatars dance in and around the text during the credits, and point/react to specific words.
NOTE: I also learned that if I want to copy the fill-colour of the text box, then in Word, select Objects, then Copy to clipboard.
Handy Tip: I resized the black background so it was wider than my screen in iClone to avoid seeing a feint white outline around the square shape of the png. Maybe there are better solutions, but this was fast and easy for me as a newbie.
Gremlins are preventing me from uploading my other entry: High Noon Toons!!...
It keeps timing out and I need to start again. But wish me luck, because I still have a whole day.
(It's rainy school holidays here downunder in Oz, so all the school kids in our valley are at home and using up all the bandwidth for our internet land-lines...so it's hard to get messages through... but I'll keep trying!)
an example of how I used this handy little program to generate small reliable vids for use inside iClone...
it's especially fast and handy for green screening - which I used to convert Crazytalk 2D toons for use in iClone... as per my next post if the gremlins of cyberspace are kind today.
And I'd love it with a modern twist, by blending modern 3D animation with contemporary 2D, so here's a pic from my other entry "High Noon Toons"... which is still struggling to upload due to timeouts. :
Here is my second entry scraping in with a few hours to spare... Yayyy!...
Darn those cyberspace gremlins who kept me from uploading for 2 days during these rainy school holidays while the whole valley is using up their bandwidths... hahaha
Okay, so as mentioned in my competition entry, these include facial animation, puppeteering, motion editing and lipsync for 3D characters:
1. Run screaming with head on fire
2. Slip-fall from tank
3. Frantic Waving
4. Archer Misfire
5. Retreat flee panic 1
6. Retreat Flee Panic 2
7. Hide-n-dont-seek
8. Sneak-Crawl away
9. Crouch-Panic-Leap
10. Abandon Ship
You can see them all in the Troll Bridge scene on the Purple Planet in Last Cow in Space between 4:30 and 5:00, as well as tweaked for other purposes in other scenes.
Or you can see an early draft version of "run screaming with head on fire" in the "giant killer alien robot" scene at the end of High Noon Toons...
But since most of the motions are a little obscured by explosions, splashes, lasers and various other battle debris, particles and shrapnel, I'll also upload a separate link for their fbx files here in my thread, (unless Polycount need to archive the whole competition thread soon, in which case I'll add the link to the description under the youtube video), as soon as I can solve a little issue with my anti-virus software conflicting with Reallusion's special "uploader" for my first freebie content store with them
- with extra thanks to the members who already provide stacks of free and affordable content there.
I hope to be contributing with more sets of comedy caper motions soon, but I only had time to make a few in draft "pre-viz" style during this competition.
Thanks to the fast, friendly usability of iC5 and 3DX, creating, animating, rendering and editing High Noon Toons from start to finish took only 3 days (excluding the x-box controller).e.g :
1 day to create all the sets and characters, by either modelling them from scratch with iClone primitives or adapting/rebuilding them from other content.
2 days to keyframe, render, & edit.
Ironically, the process of documenting it for the competition took longer at each stage, which possibly also explains why so many animators can be such quiet, shy folk when they're working... haha
Modelling the X-box controller in C4D took me an extra day - a very pleasant day with lots of coffee, chocolate and only minimal swearing at my lack of skill and practice with splines, nurbs and symmetry - but only because I took the time to make a working model that's now worth about two hundred smackeroos on turbosquid, but I'm thinking I might just give it away to members in Reallusion if they like my vid...
... which I chose not to spend additional time polishing too much, because it is only intended as a sample competition entry for a rough "pre-viz" for pitching as a kids tv series, and I've been warned by friends who've already succeeded down that path that producers and financiers tend to pay more for shows if they can see how "their ideas" can help to polish a production up to commercial standards.
... where I'll also be able to share many of the freebie props, motions, etc that I've made and adapted for this project, (including the Daleks, my little "helper" from post #30 and more...) over the next fortnight whenever I can get time between work and taking care of our farm and family.
And in the meantime, good luck to all of you with those fabulous dystopian, sci-fi, fantasy, anime and rich exotic entries! It's been such a pleasure getting to know you all better. I don't envy the judges and their truly difficult task in choosing between any of the top contenders...
so hugs and good luck to all!
And, as we say downunder in Oz;
catch ya later mates!
Well, it took me a while to figure out why (and how) my Avast Antivirus software was blocking the special iClone uploader for the new Store I made in the Reallusion City Marketplace... I had to open the uploader in a sandbox before it would let me add an exclusion to flag the uploader as "safe"... but this also solved the block I had against Indigo, so even though the standard renderer in iC6 is already amazing, now I can also try their best next time.
If you try it, could you please let me know if it arrives safely at your end?
Then on Sunday, I will have enough time off work to upload all my free "iCloonie Toonie Comedy Combat" motions and a few of my other favourite freebie props, scene projects etc for members.
As shown in my first posts a few months ago, they were all made using a combination of every style of animation I could find: e.g, keyframing, puppeteering, spring motions, facial animations, visemes, emotions, hand motions, iclone mixmoves, and a few frames of "canned motions" that were tweaked to make them more unique and suitable for specific situations.
So they are all motionplus files, not motion files.
All of these motions were already used in my entries, so this sample video is not for the competition. It's for my iClone store to show how they work with various skeleton styles, and different sizes of heads and limbs.(At the moment, the uploader for my iClone Store is giving me an error message that I'm still trying to solve.) But in the meantime...
To help celebrate my first batch of free motions, I have included 3 bonus "crouch-fear" motions which were also fun to make.
NOTE: The grid on the ground in this video is just the tool I mentioned in an earlier post, which helps me animate to avoid foot slippage.
RE Other Images in this post:
I have just exceeded my upload limit for images in the Reallusion forums, so if you have any problems seeing any of the images in this blog thread, then you can now also find them in my 2 albums with GooglePlus.
Replies
But first, my newbie discovery for today: Next time I do a battle scene, I'm going to try loading all my sound fx onto my props and particles in iClone to generate a single sound track when I render, coz... wow... doing it the "old fashioned way" during editing seems so messy and inefficient... and I've still got three tracks to load for all the arrrrrghhh's, eeeeks, yipe-yipe-yipes and various other screams for running about with their helmets on fire...:
And yeah, I know, I could have consolidated the track for voices (all screaming at once) in iclone automatically when I animated all the lip-sincs, but I used iClone's handy voice-to-text (because I need to do most of my animating at night when the kids are asleep) - and because I live so far away from the city, the only voice-actors I could record on my phone through the day (to replace the computer voice track) were friends, family, neighbours, the post-man, a delivery guy, the power dude who checked our meter before our next bill, and that nice old couple of tourists who stopped to ask me for directions...
"You want us to do *what* first?" they ask.
"Okay, so you're on a fantasy planet in a battle between trolls and a little cow who wants to cross their bridge and you're running along the turret of your wooden tank when..."
Then the old lady slaps her husband with her map and says; "See Fred? I *told* you we were lost!"
So I'm still having stacks of fun, obviously...
*gulp*
Here's my first entry:
https://youtu.be/lDv1RUQ-Htk
Like any artist, I can always see something to polish every time I look at it, but I must also confess that I'm really impressed at how easy iClone makes it for a newbie like me to create this much in such a short space of time, and after only 6 months learning animation through the uni of youtube.
It's also taught me that I still have a lot to learn, including particles, lighting, camera motions and angles.
But in the meantime, I'm having a fun time just making it this far...
Cyber-monsters must be attacking my link, because I'm fairly sure it's the same code I used last time to post a video...
but oh well... they can have their victory for now... it's 2am downunder in oz... and time for me to go check all the cows are camped safely away from wild dogs.
Here it is....
[ame]
Very kind, and greatly appreciated.
My internet is glitching so badly this week, it took 11 hours just to upload that much.
(which also serves as marketing material for the educational market... with luck!)
PITCH: It's Goldilocks in Space
THEME : To find or make a safe home.
Main Metaphor:
Environmental sub-themes explain why she's "Greenie Locks" instead.
And using a basic story structure:
Opening: A little cow struggling to survive in a crazy world
Flaw: She's a couch potato.
Taken too far: Get's caught by the farmer in his chair
Add a Storm : Meteor Strike
Insult to Injury: Ozone Leak
Unhealthy Choice: On the Blue Allergy Planet, she leaves, even though her
Ozone is running low.
Finale : She finds a safe friendly home with a comfy couch
Ironic Twist: Her new world is even "madder" than her first.
Script:
Last Cow in Space
In a far away place
across time, across space,
lived a cow in a race
to find a new place.
The first place seemed easy,
so bright and so breezy,
but also too freaky,
too cold and too squeaky.
The next place glowed hotly;
so red and so rocky.
The people were stocky,
and rode monsters like jockeys.
The third place was creepy.
The people looked sneaky.
They also seemed greedy
and acted like meanies.
The fourth place was cheesy
with bright golden cities.
The people liked goatees -
even on babies!
The fifth place... well, maybe...
The food tasted tasty.
But it made her feel queazy,
and wheezy and sneezy.
The sixth place was hazy
with seas made of gravy
and bowls empty, waiting...
but *not* for her safety.
The last place: amazing!
All covered in daisies.
The people seemed crazy,
but friendly and zany.
They gave her cheese sandi's
with healthy fruit candies
and sold her the door keys
to her own tree-top tee-pees.
Now the first cow in space
is the last cow in space.
She has style and good mates
in her cushy home base.
(c) Ani Bell, 2015
In just 3 simple steps!
But this is so fun and easy, from now on, I'm using steps 4 and 5 too,
so I can make my avatars dance in and around the text during the credits, and point/react to specific words.
NOTE: I also learned that if I want to copy the fill-colour of the text box, then in Word, select Objects, then Copy to clipboard.
Handy Tip: I resized the black background so it was wider than my screen in iClone to avoid seeing a feint white outline around the square shape of the png. Maybe there are better solutions, but this was fast and easy for me as a newbie.
Gremlins are preventing me from uploading my other entry: High Noon Toons!!...
It keeps timing out and I need to start again. But wish me luck, because I still have a whole day.
(It's rainy school holidays here downunder in Oz, so all the school kids in our valley are at home and using up all the bandwidth for our internet land-lines...so it's hard to get messages through... but I'll keep trying!)
Never say die!! Haha!!
an example of how I used this handy little program to generate small reliable vids for use inside iClone...
it's especially fast and handy for green screening - which I used to convert Crazytalk 2D toons for use in iClone... as per my next post if the gremlins of cyberspace are kind today.
I love this fantasy style, ever since I saw this cartoon:
[ame="
And I'd love it with a modern twist, by blending modern 3D animation with contemporary 2D, so here's a pic from my other entry "High Noon Toons"... which is still struggling to upload due to timeouts. :
Here is my second entry scraping in with a few hours to spare... Yayyy!...
Darn those cyberspace gremlins who kept me from uploading for 2 days during these rainy school holidays while the whole valley is using up their bandwidths... hahaha
https://youtu.be/ZkZ8BBJFbrw
Hmmm... but they're still not permitting me to post the video preview here... Just the link, sorry.
I'll try this link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkZ8BBJFbrw&feature=youtu.be
nope..?
okayyyy gremlins... this means war...
hahahahahahahahaha
Okay, so as mentioned in my competition entry, these include facial animation, puppeteering, motion editing and lipsync for 3D characters:
1. Run screaming with head on fire
2. Slip-fall from tank
3. Frantic Waving
4. Archer Misfire
5. Retreat flee panic 1
6. Retreat Flee Panic 2
7. Hide-n-dont-seek
8. Sneak-Crawl away
9. Crouch-Panic-Leap
10. Abandon Ship
You can see them all in the Troll Bridge scene on the Purple Planet in Last Cow in Space between 4:30 and 5:00, as well as tweaked for other purposes in other scenes.
Or you can see an early draft version of "run screaming with head on fire" in the "giant killer alien robot" scene at the end of High Noon Toons...
But since most of the motions are a little obscured by explosions, splashes, lasers and various other battle debris, particles and shrapnel, I'll also upload a separate link for their fbx files here in my thread, (unless Polycount need to archive the whole competition thread soon, in which case I'll add the link to the description under the youtube video), as soon as I can solve a little issue with my anti-virus software conflicting with Reallusion's special "uploader" for my first freebie content store with them
- with extra thanks to the members who already provide stacks of free and affordable content there.
I hope to be contributing with more sets of comedy caper motions soon, but I only had time to make a few in draft "pre-viz" style during this competition.
Thanks to the fast, friendly usability of iC5 and 3DX, creating, animating, rendering and editing High Noon Toons from start to finish took only 3 days (excluding the x-box controller).e.g :
1 day to create all the sets and characters, by either modelling them from scratch with iClone primitives or adapting/rebuilding them from other content.
2 days to keyframe, render, & edit.
Ironically, the process of documenting it for the competition took longer at each stage, which possibly also explains why so many animators can be such quiet, shy folk when they're working... haha
Modelling the X-box controller in C4D took me an extra day - a very pleasant day with lots of coffee, chocolate and only minimal swearing at my lack of skill and practice with splines, nurbs and symmetry - but only because I took the time to make a working model that's now worth about two hundred smackeroos on turbosquid, but I'm thinking I might just give it away to members in Reallusion if they like my vid...
... which I chose not to spend additional time polishing too much, because it is only intended as a sample competition entry for a rough "pre-viz" for pitching as a kids tv series, and I've been warned by friends who've already succeeded down that path that producers and financiers tend to pay more for shows if they can see how "their ideas" can help to polish a production up to commercial standards.
(insert cheeky wink)
[ame="
... and by the time you've watched the end, you may also understand my last joke about my internet gremlins, and my comment about "this means war..."
... because the gremlins should have known that I'd beat them eventually, even if I needed to employ giant killer alien robots...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
(and yes, that's really how you spell an evil laugh)... :P
Edit: by popular request, larger versions of each image in this thread are now also being uploaded over at Reallusion's iClone forums:
http://forum.reallusion.com/242573/Freebies-Crash-Course-in-iClone-via-Contest-threads-2015
... where I'll also be able to share many of the freebie props, motions, etc that I've made and adapted for this project, (including the Daleks, my little "helper" from post #30 and more...) over the next fortnight whenever I can get time between work and taking care of our farm and family.
And in the meantime, good luck to all of you with those fabulous dystopian, sci-fi, fantasy, anime and rich exotic entries! It's been such a pleasure getting to know you all better. I don't envy the judges and their truly difficult task in choosing between any of the top contenders...
so hugs and good luck to all!
And, as we say downunder in Oz;
catch ya later mates!
Well, it took me a while to figure out why (and how) my Avast Antivirus software was blocking the special iClone uploader for the new Store I made in the Reallusion City Marketplace... I had to open the uploader in a sandbox before it would let me add an exclusion to flag the uploader as "safe"... but this also solved the block I had against Indigo, so even though the standard renderer in iC6 is already amazing, now I can also try their best next time.
Anyway, here is the first big freebie to test that my store is working properly.
If you try it, could you please let me know if it arrives safely at your end?
Then on Sunday, I will have enough time off work to upload all my free "iCloonie Toonie Comedy Combat" motions and a few of my other favourite freebie props, scene projects etc for members.
Hey everyone!
As promised, now that the competition is closed, here are my first set of
"iCloonie Toonie Comedy Combat Motions" in a Dropbox.
As shown in my first posts a few months ago, they were all made using a combination of every style of animation I could find: e.g, keyframing, puppeteering, spring motions, facial animations, visemes, emotions, hand motions, iclone mixmoves, and a few frames of "canned motions" that were tweaked to make them more unique and suitable for specific situations.
So they are all motionplus files, not motion files.
All of these motions were already used in my entries, so this sample video is not for the competition. It's for my iClone store to show how they work with various skeleton styles, and different sizes of heads and limbs.(At the moment, the uploader for my iClone Store is giving me an error message that I'm still trying to solve.) But in the meantime...
To help celebrate my first batch of free motions, I have included 3 bonus "crouch-fear" motions which were also fun to make.
[ame="www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQw9R-fcOII"]www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQw9R-fcOII[/ame]
NOTE: The grid on the ground in this video is just the tool I mentioned in an earlier post, which helps me animate to avoid foot slippage.
RE Other Images in this post:
I have just exceeded my upload limit for images in the Reallusion forums, so if you have any problems seeing any of the images in this blog thread, then you can now also find them in my 2 albums with GooglePlus.
But if I missed any, please just let me know.
And in the meantime, Enjoy!!