I did redraw much of Flash's face as I was very unhappy with it. I showed Ming to a couple people they really liked it a lot so maybe Flash suffered from being my first vector portrait as well as me giving into some of my worse tendencies like making him too pale, especially the lips. For the ship I used a 3D model I made combining several Flash Gordon designs. I used it as a special effects test years ago. I was able to position as I wanted for the poster and drawing it was fairly straightforward.
I finished Ming and so far I think I like it... and of course, now I had the Flash portrait. I might start over or at least remake the eyes and mouth and see how that comes out. This one was going to have Ming's hands and his rings showing but I didn't want Flash, the focus of the poster to be a floating head and Ming to be more complete. I think Ming might have worked out better because he is much more of a cartoon with his heavy eyeliner and giant collar. The thing that really brought his face together when when I added the ears.
I have been starting and stopping and restarting this project for years now. I wanted to make Buster Crabbe front and centre with Ming, the spaceship and the cloud city as elements but I wasn't sure if I could get the likeness strong enough, especially when I decide I wanted to make it in Affinity Designer all in vector drawing. I more recently have been wanting to make portraits with AD and thought if I want to get to a place to do that this Flash Gordon project might be a good training ground and test. Afterall, all the people I'm drawing are dead and can't be mad if I do badly.
This will work for the poster, though I am not sure I got the likeness as close as I would like. I used layers of shapes with blurred edges overlapping to get the soft blending for a more natural look over the overly clean 3D model look vectors can have. I think I really got the overly dyed blonde hair right. There are 100s and 100s of lines to make the hair and I added shapes for shading underneath to keep it from looking too flat. His shirt was inspired by but not copied from any one shirt or another from the series, there were a few to look towards for ideas and I think I get something with a little of all of them in it.
I can still make adjustments as I go and likely will. I wasn't going to do Ming but now I think I will start him and see how it goes.
The final poster will have an art deco feel and I don't think I'll do a logo or anything like that. I made one from the original movie version but it's pretty ugly and not having it will give me more options when making the composition.
Another poster project caught my interest. I love the martian designs in this movie and the film is really good despite it's departures from the book, maybe because of some of them. The Martian probe and war machine are pretty slick looking. I remade the original poster logo and I would like to draw the arm and three fingered hand of a martian. Not sure how I will fit it all into a poster. My plan is to draw elements I find cool basically and then see what i come up with. All drawn with Affinity Designer like the last poster. So far anyway.
I have been drawing a local house recently and, as always, until I reach I certain point I HATE it. Every single house drawing has been like this. To give myself a break I became obsessed with doing a poster for The Day the Earth Stood Still. I am drawing the elements separately and will arrange them in Affinity Publisher when they are drawn. I am using only vectors in Affinity Designer. I would like to maybe try a realistic portrait in Designer and all or mostly vectors and this Michael Rene shows me... I'm not there yet. I do see my getting there though so it's a good step in that direction.
Below is an "Xray" view of the drawing that shows the lines some light greyscale but not the shading and tones. some invisible elements like the mesh show the entire mesh of that before I distorted it. This took 15 hours to drawn and the Xray image makes it look WAY too easy!
I would like the poster to have an art deco feel to it and I had a composition in mind but after an online search I saw someone else had done something very close to what I was thinking so I will have to come up with something else.
Gort the robot will be next. The saucer is already done. I still have to decide on the logo design and how much information like cast, studio etc I want on the poster.
Opening shot completed. It's good the characters are too small to really see clearly as I fully animated them and found some issues that would have been more serious in a close up. I finished the second shot and went OK. I don't think anthropomorphic animals would like they did in "Cask of Amontillado" but I prefer animated those sorts of characters it turns out. This should be very short, maybe only 3 minutes as there is no dialog and not much story.
My next animated short is an adaptation of the Ambrose Bierce short story, A Vine on a House. I have started by making the one and only set piece which is a house on the side of the road - one version of it fairly new and well maintained and then another in a ruined state years later covered in vines. I also have been working on the logo.
Next step is the make the 3 (sort of 4) characters which I would like to be very simple. No more than 2 appear together at a time so my computer should be able to handle the shots with not too much slow down.
Another change from my previous project is there is no dialog, something I have tried in the past and abandoned. Since I don't have access to both my voice actors, one I have to go to his place to record which is 500 km and a closed national border away, this is a good time to do a silent project.
My next little animated series is finally in production. I did a lot of pre-production work between other projects so I'm ahead on some of it. Thsi one will have quite a few challenges, the dog is one of the few times I have done a 4 legged creature and making him walk well will be something I have to learn. There is also some laser blasts going on. I did some tests and think I can make that work and look cool, but you never know until you try to put it in a real scene.
Mike Luce did the voice of the Jon Bellette, the weasel and also did the voice for a future "guest star" in the series, so I'm set up for at least 2 of these over the next few months! I am going a little more stylized/cartoon with this one.
Almost all the visual elements are ready for my adaption of Edgar Allen Poe's, The Raven. Most of the rest will have to wait until I get the narration recorded at the end of the month. While Lenore is most just seen as a portrait on the wall, I have a rigged version of her that will appear as a ghostly presence.
This dog I have been working on for a quite a while and finally got it to the stage it can be animated. It is loosely based on my dog Watson, so I might use that as it's name in a project. Rigging it was the big problem. the tongue was a nightmare to figure out, and the character object for quadrupeds in C4D is pretty wonky compared to the biped. As of today he also has a collar but I didn't feel like re-rendering the images to show it. Laziness I guess.
This project will be short, but not sweet. The sheep isn't called filthy for nothing! I am going for a completely different style here, very cartoon-y despite the language that will be used by the characters - or maybe because of it. It's not too out of the box for me, however. I think Charles Billingsworth the 3rd from my Dramatic Readings series would fit right in - stylistically anyway.
I have 2 shorts planned for this. In the first I'll use the weasel I made recently as the second character. The sheep modelling went terrible until suddenly it didn't - and i got pretty much what I wanted. The farm-scape is exactly what I pictured in my head. I wanted and outdoor, pastoral location in broad daylight to counter all the shadowy gothic horror stuff I've been doing. All the voices will be me this time around and I'll have to use all my audio tricks to pull that part off.
I am well into production of my next gothic horror animated short, The Tell Tale Heart, my second Poe story. I have plans to do the Raven at a later date, maybe next year.
This one has three characters, I cut the number of policemen in the story from 3 to 1. Makes its more do-able for me and 1 is more than enough for what happens in the story. I got some feedback on the set designs at C4D Cafe from some of the members and I think that made them much better. I kept them very simple.
A couple challenges so far have been making the floor which needed to have several floorboards removable and the thin ray of light lipping through the slightly open door on to the face of the sleeping old man. I am also having some motivation issues getting it all done. It happens - you just feel like you are screaming into the void making these things at times.
I feel like I'm getting closer to finding out what this guy is all about. I have been improving his finger movements and gave him toes and shortened his feet even more. Plus the glasses. At this point he's is ready to go - but where?
I made a little test film of this guy doing the Flashdance scene where the water drops on her head a few years back. I had lots of issues with the final rigging and as I animated, the rig got more and more out of whack.
In this version, he has the same head slightly modified and feet, but long pants, better shirt and arms with 5 fingered hands. I used the rig I have been using for Charles Webster Billingsworth the 3rd in the Dramatic Reading series so it's stable and flexible. This new version has a lot more controls and many more face morphs so he should be more expressive. His cheek fur uses the jiggle deformer for extra motion and his tail has a dynamic joint chain for the same reason.I used the Nitro4D eye plugins to make the eyes. The older ones were nice, I liked them but they didn't work as well and gave him a meaner look than I wanted.
Not sure what to do with him now, I want to do more varied cartoon work like the Dramatic Reading series but I'm sort of out of ideas right now on exactly what I want to accomplish.
As the price of Cinema 4D has jumped astronomically over the years with less and less improvements and new features to pay for that extra cost, it has become apparent that unless I get a hell of lot more work that pays a hell of a lot more money, eventually my current version will run out of steam and be unusable. Already, I am trying to adapt to the untimely death of Cactus Dan whose plugins are essential to rigging in C4D (In my opinion) and are no longer being updated.
To start finding alternatives, I decided to learn Blender, a free program that has been used for some amazing animations and has ALL the features and more of C4D and frankly just about any other software out there. Of course being free software it has its pluses and minuses , a big minus being not many places use it professionally.
Just Starting to Learn
Blender is a very deep program to learn. I decided to start very simply as I had tried to learn it unsuccessfully in the past. Despite having used a number of software over the last few decades, I couldn’t even place a cube into the scene or render anything. It was frustrating and I have to say, it still is. The interface is pretty terrible from an end user’s point of view. Like much of the freeware out there made by programmers, it is set up more to a programmer’s set of needs. Blender requires that you learn a huge amount of keyboard shortcuts in conjunction with a 3 button mouse just to navigate in it’s windows. Many of the shortcuts are non standard so it can be like learning a new language just to do the most basic of tasks. It’s a well known issue in the Blender community and there is an ongoing debate from what I read on various forums on what to do, if anything, about that problem. It IS a problem, despite the alleged benefits of typing in values by hand for some people, it simply isn’t how we work these days and limits drastically the reach of this fairly amazing effort. Many of the arguments for keeping as it is are reminiscent of those when computer went from DOS commands to a graphic interface and I would argue that argument was lost a long time ago.
To get over this hurdle, I bought a 600 page book The Complete Guide to Blender Graphics (3rd addition) by John M. Blain. I don’t find the writing style so easy to understand but it covers seemingly everything and should be a great reference source as I go on. Another thing I did was follow tutorials, a few about the basic interface which were somewhat helpful and a few at www.LittleWebHut.com which I am using as my work samples here because of the simplicity of the projects and the instructor never assumes you will remember the complex series of shortcuts and goes over each progression step by step which helps me to slowly memorize and adapt to the interface while creating something interesting. I picked two basic modelling projects, an animation that involved particles the node based cycles render engine and one that creates a robot dog and introduced me to the key frame and timeline system in Blender.
My Impressions So far
Having only scratched the surface, many of my opinions will surely change over time. I plan to keep at this another 3 months intensely, hopefully ending in doing a complete short animation in Blender from start to finish.
The modelling tools are interesting and while not intuitive, cover all the bases and have some interesting ideas behind them. You have to accept each change before moving on to to the next - this is pretty annoying and slow. The bones IK/FK system is clunky and something like setting up an IK chain (so far, there are certainly plenty of functions I have not been exposed to yet) is manually accomplished bone by bone while it’s a simple click in C4D and other programs. The particle system is pretty good from what I’ve experienced. Not as good as X-particles (which is an unfair comparison) but I found using them fairly easy. Rendering is a little complicated. The Blender engine is only barely serviceable and might be good as a test render while the Cycles engine is nodes based and manages to give flicker free animations using techniques that take longer and are not as usefully implemented as they could be. You have a lot less control in Blender in the final render from what I see and a lot more control in setting up the textures. The key framing is not great sorry to say. It’s hard to get a handle on and I found myself swearing quite a bit just moving a sphere from on spot to another.
Things I need to Learn for this to be Practical
Compositing is a large part of my work flow, not just 3D into live action video but often separating things like motion blur and depth of field to be adjusted in another program like After Effects or Motion to gain better control and save on rendering time. The capacity is here, I just have to learn how and if I can save different layers (like a shadow, z depth, motion vector or object layer) as separate files on export. Mograph-like clones and animation are the bread and butter of many 3D artists and Blender is lacking in this department but they update with new features regularly so who knows how long it will stay behind in this aspect. Blender has some pretty awesome character rigging tools, if you can learn to use them. I think I will gain some very much needed experience in more advanced rigging techniques as I go along.
Blenders Biggest Advantages
Being free is one, but not the most important as functionality and ease of use trumps free while doing serious work. Time is money and also the less aggravating something is to use, the more you will use it. Blender’s add-ons are nothing short of amazing and super useful. They provide easier and faster ways to do things you would pay tons of cash for on another platform and many are freely included. Some examples are an auto-rigger, a room builder and even a very adaptive character builder, something all high end 3D software should have as making characters is the biggest time killer and often the most discouraging aspect of 3D work fro many animators. I wish there was a clothing generator as well! Those working on this software update it quite often and it’s always improving. They seem very transparent and open to suggestions - something Maxon (C4D) has most definitely not been in recent years. While far to many features are hidden and hard to find, they are there and I was surprised to discover many features I paid for in C4D plugins were just sitting below the surface in Blender. It should be stated that overall, it is fairly stable and doesn’t crash often, but it does crash. It can be a little buggy as well. So like all complicated software, save often!
Conclusion So Far
I can’t say I love Blender or that it will come my main software anytime soon. I can say it’s got the potential to become those things. I also find that learning it has already opened possibilities I had not thought of in C4D in terms of workflow and other things but can be applied to it. I can also see using some of the features in Blender as a way to get around or create things that C4D does not offer or do well and importing them.
Maybe the tenth try to get this further along. It is in fact further along this time, however. I will have to re-dress the interiors little but not much and I redid the street completely. The stumbling point has always been the two main characters and while I am not 100% happy with the look, they will have to do. I even rigged the main guy completely and did a short test. problem was the rigging system in C4D while a lot easier than ever - was causing some joint lock and was little hard to find all the controls on. Sad since the automatic walk cycle may have saved me tons of time on some scenes. Recently I was finally able to wake up enough to get my tried and true Cactus Dan tools updated for V16 C4d and did a ton of rig updating on older puppets to get back into the feel of it. SO I've decided once again to re-rig the main guy and see how it goes. In the meantime, the test promo for what I have is eventually a finished animated short. and Shot of the new-er main guy puppet.
As I start my latest and long suffering in the shadows documentary about the Million Year Picnic comic book store, I am rudely reminded of how difficult it is to do one of these things all by yourself. Every film has challenges, but this time I am starting with all new equipment and new formats I’ve not used in a personal project before.
For starters I am using a Canon xa10 to film things, using the 30p setting and a Zoom sound recorder which I have to admit is not so easy for me to figure out. Even with that I have got some good sound from it using my shot gun mic, keeping it close to the subject.
The biggest problems so far is getting it all together for editing in Premiere Pro CS6. I’ve been using Pluraleyes from Red Giant software to sync the video and Zoom sound, which works pretty good and very quickly. The problem after that is that .mov files are not easily processed by Premiere even though they are prepared especially for it by transcoding the MTS file to .mov using MTS converter. I experimented importing in Final Cut Pro 7 and the same issue. Oddly they play fine in quicktime and in Pluraleyes. I finally discovered I can use the XML import from Pluraleyes to get the interviews into the editing software, but it’s a time consuming and far from elegant process. I had to go back a version for that work properly, however. These thing never come easy!
The interviews went fairly well despite not really having a space to do them in. I even had to do one in a stairway! Visually they look pretty good and the sound could have much, much worse so I can’t complain too loudly. I really need an assistant or two to work devices while I interview… it really is just too hard to do them all at once. Beggars can’t be choosers so I’m doing the best I can on my own.
Next stage is to get supplementary materials, like photos, scans of ads, whatever I can get my hands on to enhance and inform the film more. I’ll also have to make several more interviews at least before summer is over. On my post production side, I’ve already made a 3D version of the store’s logo that can be animated, lower 3rds with animations and experimented with some other graphic elements. So… allons-y!
My H.P. Lovecraft animation project is slowly advancing into a stage I can start to think about animating now. I've decided to make and rig one character at a time and the sets and lighting decisions are pretty much made. learning to use Bodypaint for more advanced textures and I'm about to use Cactus Dan's C4D rigging plugins as the principle solution for the first time. Here is the old musician character with some simple facial expressions. The scar on his head (and another one) are from photos I took of my dad's table saw accident. You never know what images will come in handy some day!
They both need to be rigged, but I'll make the 3rd before i do that. I am hoping to adapt one rig to work for each and use different morphs for each head.
