Woodland character animation spot...

[glow worm]

Hello - just thought I'd post this little piece of which Threedy's very own Jen Downs played a huge part in. Thanks for all your help Jen! Jen contributed to the character models and their rigs. I did all the animation as well as character rigs and Kevin Riley did all the textures and lighting. The premiss of his project was to explain the Florida water cycle in a creative way that would be appealing to an audience of kids. I wish I had some bigger movies to really show all the detail but for now, this is all I got. I hope to have some bigger images soon! Enjoy, and as always feel free to post any questions or comments! CLICK HERE TO SEE THE CLIPS!!! (http://www.glowdigital.com/spectrum/brookercreek.html)

http://WWW.GLOWDIGITAL.COM/SPECTRUM/IMAGES/FROGCLOSEUP.JPG

[MattyG]

Absolutely amazing it was all good except the educational part but I guess it was made for educational purposes so Yee-Hah!

[MonteCristo]

A great character Glowworm. Welcome to the forums! ;) :) What a fantastic expression to be greeted by! Not entirely sure that the frog is pleased to see us though.
The clips are aboslutely great, and the characters are wonderful, both charming and engaging. I recommend everyone go and see these for a bit of inspiiration. Hope that this recieves the success it deserves.

5*

[glow worm]

Thanks for your wonderful comments! To hear that I might inspire just one person is probably the biggest reward of working on the same piece for over 8 months!

[Jenn]

Hey Glow worm! My hat is off to you. That's a lot of animation for one person to accomplish. Between your animation and Kevin's textures, you guys really made my models look good:) I have to say I'm really pleased with how well the morph targets animated.

The turtle is still my favorite out of the group but you did a beautiful job on animating the owls wings:)

[glow worm]

Yes...it was a ton of animation to undertake, but i'm really glad I had this rare opportunity to really make it my own in the way the characters acted out. The facial morphs were great - very well done - I'm sure you've noticed that the teeth were left out on the Owl and Frog - that was a creative decision by Kevin which, although the characters looked awesome with them in, when they talked it just made more sense to leave them out. Could you tell that I adjusted the frog a bit? He's just a little more heavy looking and I made the neck blend into the body a little more. Once we got the VO for the frog (of whom I thought was incredible for the part) I made the adjustments accordingly to match the deepness of his voice. I think it would be cool if you posted your character sheets again. The only character models I was responsible for on this piece with the mouse character who makes an appperance every once in a while and the dragonfly. I thought Kevin did an excelent job in texturing your models - gotta give some props to Deep Paint 3d on that one.

[JHarford]

Great work glowworm and co . Really great. congrats

[Jenn]

Your wish is my command.


http://www.jenndowns.com/images/3dmodels/bigfrog.jpg
http://www.jenndowns.com/images/3dmodels/bigturtle.jpg
http://www.jenndowns.com/images/3dmodels/bigotter.jpg
http://www.jenndowns.com/images/3dmodels/bigowl.jpg

These are renders that Kevin put together. I've been meaning to go back and rerender the morph targets as I lost all my original renders when my hard drive died last fall.

It can be crazy how things change on any particular project at any given time. Originally the frog was going to be female, if I remember correctly.

Brian, it would be great if you could talk about some of the challenges , problems and solutions you came across during the production.

[glow worm]

Ok...huge traffic coming to the site - working on an alternative right now - sorry for the delay everyone!!!

[glow worm]

Ok...everything seems to be running fine now....

Lets see...problems I ran into while in production...well, I'm still baffled by how very few problems we actually ran into given the magnitude of this project - I've worked on pieces half this size in the past of which were complete headaches but I guess the best thing we could have done for ourselves is build in efficiencies to the rigs and actual models that allowed us to do things very quickly and smoothly. When I build a character rig I like to create it in a way that gives me the most bang for the buck but isn't so ridiculously complex that if something goes wrong I'm not able to resort back to something more simple. I think good organization and paying attention to detail was the key to everything we did. The iron here being that I'm the most unorganized person in the world!! There were several things I learned along the way that I immediately put into practice with the projects that followed this one. The smallest thing can make the biggest difference sometimes. It was also rather unique in the fact that we only had 3 people working on this entire piece - ideas and "ajendas" weren't spread out over a huge staff of people which has been a problem in past projects that i've worked on. Anyway, if there are any specific questions that anyone might want to ask about production I'd be more than happy to answer!

[GlahES]

Hey ive not visited your site so im not sure if its mentioned there but what software was used in the modeling/animation?
thanx

[glow worm]

3d max 5.0 - photoshop - after effects - Deep Paint 3D - Corel Painter

[vander]

Incredible work... very nice - The turtle is the best.
Perfect to TV series.
But... i can´t see the clip - maybe the traffic on your site.

Vander
São Paulo - Brasil

[Profane]

cool characters!

[damoke]

hello i like the rendering and lightning very much but my question(s) is:
-did u use gi or fg or just scanline??
-how long was the average render time for one frame???
-did u use a renderfarm?
-and what was the most timeconsuming part of the short?(modeling?animating?text..)
-what type of surfaces did u use??

sorry if im interrogating u but i will be doing a short soon and this info would come handy

thank u

[nico3d]

amazing project !! very inspiring...

who was your client?

[Da3X]

This is some very nice piece of work. Congratulations! Great for schools and educating younger people - well done!

[goat]

hey jenn and all that worked on this great job.Your work keeps getting better jenn keep it up.

[glow worm]

Thank you all for you wonderful comments on this piece! It's great to see your work finally pay off in inspiring other people..the greatest reward of all in my opinion.

damoke...

Thank you for your great compliments on the lighting. All lighting and textures were created by Kevin Riley, Creative Director here at Spectrum. Kevin simulated some GI but all the renders were stickly scanline through the 3dStudio Max 5 renderer. It's tough to really give you an accurate average in one frame of render time seeing as how that variable was so drastic given the requirements for each shot. For example, the otter and owl characters had fur of which obviously cost us big time when they were rendered. I can tell you that some, but not all shots were rendered with the characters seperate from the CG backgrounds and then composited in. Due to the enormous amount of animation that was required within a very small amount of time, we had to cut back on some of the creativity of our shots which left us with a lot of non-moving camera shots containing one character...maybe you picked up on that. The most time consuming part of the project was definately the animation. We did take our time to create a very efficient and stable character rig which took a bit of time, but 15 min of animation was a lot of animation for one person to do in about 5 months. Fortunatly we didn't run into any major problems - I'm still scratching my head as to how we managed to steer clear of those. We did not use a render farm - we have 4 computers here in the studio to render all of our work - we had a farm available if we need it, but we were cutting it real close on budget so resorted to doing it the economical way in house.

[Corth]

If I had something like this when I was in school, I know I would have paid more attention :)

Great job to all of those involved, this is great!