chillyche

Awesome! Thanks for the breakdown.

Can we just talk about your render here... This looks like a painting in a lot of ways. You've done some pretty neat rendering and lighting here. Can you talk about what kind of render passes you used, if you did any post work on it, etc?

bwa ha ha!

Talk to Hikuro. He can probably rustle up a high caliber cast for you.

Seriously?! C'mon man, that's awesome!

If there was a better Maya> Max pipeline, I'd be making requests of you. I guess there's always the old .ma > .obj > .max standby, but that doesn't preserve bones or rigging, does it?

I can't believe I didn't weigh in on this. This is awesome. Not just because it's awesome, but because stop-motion is such an art that is all but forgotten by many today. Working with practicals is rewarding in a way that CGI never is, and there is always a tangibility to the final product. Go get 'em!

A niche is a good place to be. What software did you use?

I happen to think this is rad. I love models that actually transform without any anime-magic.

Welcome back! Also, a lot of people will be very excited to hear this!

You know, I have no idea why the Gnerl Fighter Pod was not on the Aria asset list. We can certainly use one (read: many, many) in Aria, so, if you're about to tackle one, it can be leveraged for all of our projects. Yay. Community.

I like it! But, boy have you been gone for a while! I can't tell if it's just the samples from the ambient occlusion or actual dirt, but it does look a bit grainy. But I do like the scheme.

Man, back in the day, I always wanted to do more stop-motion work and stuff, and this stuff here is just inspiring. You're not ILM, but you're building dope stuff. It really is possible to do DIY stuff that looks great. Well, back to DIY CGI for me...

I feel like, ultimately, the design I'll go with will be a hybrid of the DYRL pack with some of the features that ARE visible on the M3 pack, such as vents higher on the sides, an overall smaller footprint, and the distinctive protrusion on the top. We'll see how the thing winds up looking with the rest of the suit. I'm pretty proud of my M+ pack, but I just don't feel like that's the right pack for this suit.

Making another impassioned plea... To all 2D artists of varying levels, now is the time to break out your conte crayons, your lead holders, your wacoms and cintiqs, your 2Bs or 2HBs, or whatever medium you prefer most, and contribute to the ambitious (and awesome) fan project of Macross Aria! We're still looking for just the right style for many characters, as well as new interpretations of familiar items from the Macross universe. See you soon. http://macrossaria.ning.com or PM me for information. I wanna show off more stuff here!

This is very industrious.

The last 48 hours or so have seen this thread BLOW UP!

Hmm, I guess any shots of backpacks from the other series (besides DYRL, SDFM and M+, for which I have plenty of reference) would be welcome. If anybody has any of that stuff lying around, post it up here. It will eventually be a hybrid of the stuff that looks closest I assume. Either that or it will be the same as Ranka's backpack.

Thought I'd try my hand at a color job. Hope you don't mind!

I figured as much. I was going to post a picture of a ridiculous backpack that was obviously nothing like Macross as joke, but then I figured that wasn't worth it, when I could post something better. So tonight, I will post something better in a different thread. Oh... whatever shall it be? Oh, and thanks, btw. Hearing it from somebody who has played through the game a bunch really confirms for me that there just isn't much reference from that game (and thus that time period) out there.

Okay then. When you see the totally and completely canon* pack I'm going to model, don't be alarmed.

That was meant to say: Poli -- your coloring just gets better and better, and it was already dope!

Macross Frasier is a hot show. Ha ha ha. Ebonics is fine, if it's called for. I can't think of any scenario in which it's called for in Zero, though. If we're talking about Edgar, then we know that he's American and black. That's about it. We don't know if his parents were recent immigrants and he should sport an african accent, or whether his family are descended from black america slaves, and thus have been in america for generations. I haven't been able to find what PART of America the La Salles are from, either, so that poses a bit of a challenge. A chicago accent is pretty different from an Atlanta accent which is different from Oakland or Brooklyn. Both he AND his sister have military careers, so one could begin inventing a backstory for them (as an actor would, canon or not). Claudia is portrayed as having a lot of poise and being somewhat stoic, though still having a feminine and fun side. If I were forced to invent a backstory for her, I'd say that she was raised by both parents, both of whom usually held down a job. They stressed education and were somewhat strict, though not brutal. Her parents would probably smack her if they caught her running off at the mouth with some of the more hood language out there, so she steers clear of particularly hood speech. Still, her inflection and vocal patterns tag her as having grown up in a middle class neighborhood in BK, NY. Edgar, her younger brother was something of a nerd as a kid, and didn't run with the cool kids at school, and also avoided a lot of street language, but he too has tell tale black american vernacular speech patterns. As long as we're not dealing with the Jiggabots from Transformers 2, then I'm fine.

Slang is not necessarily stereotypical. I say that research into a character's background is essential for picking the dialect, accent, and speech patterns of a given character. GOOD research rarely leads to stereotypes, since, by definition stereotypes are broadly painted generalizations, often defined not by those being generalized, but by outside observers. A thoughtful writer knows his/her characters' backstories and can make choices about how the characters will speak, and a serious actor explores this information and delves deeper, providing the heart to that language, and embellishing it as necessary to bring a collection of lines to life as a character. I'm actually against making all characters speak in the "king's english" because it then sounds like a dictionary wrote the thing. We know Roy Fokker's character, we know he wouldn't speak in perfect king's english. He's a drunken, womanizing flyboy who is prone to speak in colloquialisms, slur words, and drag proper speech through the mud. Unless it's a character trait -- such as a character who learned english in the UK or a non-english speaking country, where they actually follow the rules of the language -- it wouldn't make much sense for characters speak in the king's english. Certainly very few do that around here (with here being the United States). In the case of Frontier, it would be hilarious to have a bunch of high school students speaking perfect king's or queen's english. Of course, neither do I suggest trying to "totally teen-ify" it with lame fad words. I think dubbing a script is more than just speaking the translated words. It's about maintaining a balance between the original language of the script and creating the same dramatic tension and natural flow in a new language. If I want the words to be exactly the same as the original, I watch a subtitled version, or learn the original language. A dub is so that it makes sense to my english-listening ears.

I was going to mention the Frontier examples, also, even though those are cliches confined to the Macross universe, it's still clear that the show creators had fun playing with conventions. Particularly the Ozma episode which has several red herrings in it.