I don’t believe people really think about the practicalities of the things they off handedly request for Chirstmas. Having said that I don’t think people really want the things they say they do.
At about 2.40am yesterday morning I had the urge to animate a little.
16 hours later and I finished, only taking short breaks for eating and to use the toilet. More impressive (to me anyway) is the fact that I hadn’t slept since the previous day.
Despite the fact that there is still some colouring that I would have liked to have done, I don’t think it’s too much of a problem in the grand scheme of things. The main thing is that the joke comes across.
First thing I did was make a background. I then animated stick men straight ahead using the pencil tool, this was the quickest part of the process. I then went over this with the brush tool very loosely and coloured santa red.
Interestingly (to those that are interested) I recorded the audio about 14hrs in then spent 5 minutes on rough mouth movements which do the job well enough. I then spent an hour on sound and an hour putting it all together.
Wierd way of doing things.
Although I would not reccomend this method of working I find it amazing what a person can achieve when they’re on a roll. However as a result of going to sleep after awake being awake for 35hours my eye sockets hurt and part of my brain still isn’t responding yet insists on hitting itself against the inside of my skull.
I must say i’m not a big fan of 3D, what I mean by that is I’m not a fan of doing it, or I haven’t been.
I had some classes at university but I found it a bit dry and didn’t enjoy them much. Probably because it didn’t match up to anything I was doing at the time or wanted to do. Namely drawing.
As I’m sure you know I like to draw.
Zbrush was always intriguing to me since it seemed to be like drawing and sculpting it also looked easy (rather than building virtual lego, using maths and playing around with different confusing tabs and sliders in Maya or 3DS Max). I was intimidated by the deceptively complex interface.
Last week I started doing some Z brush tutorials on Lynda.com from the beginning. I was pleasantly suprised with the results.
Here is my first attempt:
Is it just me or does the first one look a bit like Michael Winner?
It’s amazing what you can do once you get the hang of an interface.
I think the problem with learning a new program is getting it to do the things you want it to do. Skill is transferable, which I guess is reassuring. I don’t feel 100% comfortable with the interface yet, given a little time, not as much as one might think. I reckon a week or two of tutorials and playing around would leave one feeling pretty confident.
There are some great things made in Zbrush on CGhub ch-check it.
What better way to start the year than with a nice little bit of animation?!?
I am often asked by people ‘how long does it take to make/complete an animation?‘ And I find it slightly frustrating, not because I don’t have an answer but because the answer I usually give never seems quite adequate enough and I am often rewarded with a blank face still expecting an answer.
I will clarify it. How long is a piece of string? There are so many variables.
It comes down to three things; Time (as in time available vs looming deadline) Money/Man power and Technique/quality. These determine more or less how long an animation (or anything else for that matter) will take.
The more people producing images, backgrounds and or colouring, etc means things will be quicker as they can all work in tandem. The more detailed or complex the drawings are or fluid the animation is the longer it will take as each individual image has to be drawn.
This animation should have taken a week to complete but ended up being spread out over a month and taking a little longer. Which is odd since there isn’t a lot going on or even any colour. The rough animation was done fairly quickly, and it was the cleaning up that took the longest.
I have made a really basic no frills guide to getting animation work from Adobe Flash into Photoshop.
Why?
Here’s why…
Both programs have their strengths and weaknesses: Flash is easy to use, quick to animate in and it’s simple to change the timings or order of images around. It only has two ‘brushes’ the pencil tool and the brush, giving only a few options in terms of the lines you can get if you include the four or so style options the pencil tool has. In Photoshop you can use brushes and create your own if you want, there are unlimited possibilities. However animating in photoshop is a clunky and doesn’t flow well.
Here is a way of combining the best of both worlds.
One can use Flash for the basic animation; whether this is just simple shapes or really rough drawings, like in the 1st or 2nd stages of the character development in image below.
When one is satisfied with the animation exporting a png sequence and importing it into Photoshop is simple. Once in photoshop there are any number of options from brushes, colour or textures…and more! (I can stress that enough) For instance a just going over the rough work with a brush tool (taking the character to the 3rd stage as seen in the image above) makes a hell of a difference, just experiment.
The guide I have made HERE simply shows you one way of transferring work from Flash to Photoshop.
What started as a simple lip synching exercise using sounds of Arnold Schwarzenegger devolped into an intense 12hour+ animation frenzy.
It made perfect sense to turn him into the Hulk especially since Arnie didn’t get the role in the 1970’s TV show because he was apparrently too short.
This seems unfair to me because it didn’t stop Elijah Wood getting the part of Frodo for being too tall. You can do a lot with in camera magic and how short is ‘short’? Arnie is at least 6ft 2”! Ridiculous.
If he had been in it I have no doubt it would have been bigger than Star Trek.
The title came last minute mostly because i’m not a big Superman fan (let’s face it he’s just an intergalactic stepchild) and I couldn’t quite figure who Arnie (as the hulk) would be saying that to.
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