This was a bear to do, The coat is not from the plugin I used to make the characters I spent 30 hours trying to attach it so it would animate with the figure. In the end... there is a way to do in the plugin itself which takes 1 minute. God damn it! At least I know about this feature and use it in future. It needed mnor tweaks after it was done but that is often the case.
The eyelids have been the biggest challenge, I had a plugin in the old software that set up eyes and lids and a control panel for them with a click. This time I have to use geometry nodes and set it all up manually. I have that all work except the control panel. There were issues separating the top and bottom beak as well. I would like to ad short fur but not sure how to go about that yet and finally, I use saved poses like for fists, eye blinks and facial expressions so they don't need to be done from scratch each time and I hope to start that today.
The rigging plugin I got for Blender (Auto-rig Pro) is pretty sweet and saves me so much time, the learning it has not been terrible even for a bear of little brain like me. It has some features that were a pain to do before even on character like this which is basically a human like bode with a giant beak!
I have a few more old characters to revive and that should teach me a lot.
In 2001 I films a short documentary about (then) local Boston artist Tobias Blaine Allen. It was edited in iMovie which was amazing at the time. I looked at it online recently and it looked TERRIBLE. 240p was fine on You Tube when it was uploaded and its unwatchable now.
Today I found a better copy but still low resolution on my hard drive and upscaled it to HD. Then I brought it into Final Cut Pro and did some colour correction and audio fixes. Sadly, there are no copies of the images of the art in the film to replace those in the doc so I exported the worst of them as images and did my best to make them look nicer. They still don't look great, or ever did, they were shot with an early 1.5 megapixel Sony digital camera.
The process took about 7 hours to complete the 1 minute film and now it's HD and looks and sounds much better. Hopefully Toby with think so! I will delete the older film so no one has to see how bad it looked on modern devices.
This image is the opening shot after the title sequence and when the narration will begin. It took a few weeks to design and put together despite using some great plugins to lessen the work load. HunGen for the bodies, Fire_fx for the bonfire, Auto building for the houses and castle, Alt tab easy fog 2 for the atmosphere, and Fauna sketcher to ad crows in the sky and flies (not visible in this shot, for the bodies. The fog rolls forward and the trees have a slight breeze blowing them. Depending on how the narration works out this could be several shots or one longer tracking shot. This is straight from Blender so there will be some colour grading etc in post eventually.
One big challenge, other than my dumb debutant Blender mistakes, was placing the flickering light for the bonfire. making was easy enough but when I placed it in the bonfire it wasn't visible and the render time went up 4 times! I am using Eeevee to render as I did with my first Blender short "the Hound" as its pretty good now and getting better but also fast. This shot takes 30 seconds to render (with the light issue 20 minutes!)
Next step is the model the interior castle rooms where the story takes place. it's 7 rooms, identical save the last one but in different colours. I will need to learn to making some blood effects for this one and continue to work on getting better performances from my characters. Hopefully I can get together with the voice actor for the narration sooner than later as not having it slows down production.
This was a suggestion from some people and I assumed the story was beyond my skills for years but I think I might succeed now and upon writing the script I realized it was not as long as I thought and got some good ideas on how to economize the plot to fit a short animated film.
This has about 20 layers, the window frames are on one, the interior lights we can see through the reflection are on another and then a couple for the sky etc. When It can time to paint the church I went window by window. Since each panel had 3-6 layers I had to merge them down as I went or maybe crash the iPad with literally 1000s of layers open. I would draw for a few hours and then look at the illustration overall and see I still have something like 87 window panes to do. I kept pugging away until finally it was done.
Below is a closeup of the part of the drawing. A both complimentary and frustrating part of doing something like this is when I send it to anyone they think it's a photograph because they are almost always looking at it on a phone and never realize the work that went into it. The other image is the original 89 photograph. I could not get the exact angle matched up because there is a lot more stuff going on there now and that angle just wasn't available and other things were blocking the view.
The game relies, as did Myst 4 on too many confusing circular pathways, constantly going back and forth to do one simple thing to progress. Maybe people like that, I don't. Many of the ages in this game are good looking but i tink were limited by the free roaming aspect. Earlier games you could get into smaller spaces and they had a lot more details for each age.
Did I enjoy it. Sure it was fine. I am Myst'd out for the moment. I still have Uru to do which is the first time I will be playing it through as it was not available on Mac when it was an internet game. Because of it's early internet origins the graphics look pretty bad and the story seems to be a hodgepodge of stuff not used from other Myst games. Maybe it will change my life. Likely, it won't. I am much more excited to start getting into No Man's Sky as it looks great and I think will scratch my explore places bug. It has a no conflict mode and I'm all for that.
