chillyche

Digging in the crates. Are you a DJ or what? Anyway, that WWII era plane made me wonder if anybody's ever done an alternate universe Macross set in that era? Did anybody ever see those 1800s Transformers they ran a comic book for? Really cool design work and stuff. In fact, a late 1800s, early 1900s Macross might be awesome too, you know, with sort of an HG Wells, Jules Verne kinda flavor to it? Almost steampunky.

yeah, I just did a test. Took about 10 minutes. Created a reasonable approximation of the effect. It would take me a bit longer to get it just right. I didn't bother adding any star filters to really get the glittery look on the glowing particle trails. You could also, rather than using a particular solid color for the particle systems, use an already animated layer -- a gently moving background -- and that would add more variety to the particles. You could even use one of the AE preset animated backgrounds and just adjust the color to your liking. You could also precompose together big and small particles (like in that tutorial I linked you to) and use that precomp as a matte for an animated texture layer or something. I think you're definitely gonna want some kinda lens effect, star filter, glow, applied on there, but not uniformly. I can send you my project file if you want. I'm using AE CS3. PM me with your email.

Think about it like this. WMM is like a big fat crayon, and Premiere is like a full set of prismacolor colored pencils, a couple technical pens, and a decent lead-holder. By that token, then, Final Cut and Avid are like the full prismacolor pencil set, WITH the marker set, a bunch of quill tips in addition to the tech pens, an adjustable light table/drawing table, a couple of assistants, and full stipend. While anybody can pick up the crayon and make some marks, it's clumsy and not really suited for detail work. The latter tools clearly offer more range, flexibility and quality. There's no probably about it, I am right. Insert goofy internet smiley HERE. At least on a technical level; everybody's got their own preferences.

You definitely do not want to move backwards from Premiere to Movie Maker. Stay using your Adobe products and you'll be golden.

Animate stop motion at 24 fps? Dag man, most illustrated animations are still on the twos at the most, often on the threes when they can get away with it. I would say just do some frame blending on the off frames to give a little more smooth appearance, or integrate some motion blur. I'm pretty wowed by the whole thing, though.

You're going to want to use a particle system effect, such as CC particle world or, if you have it, Particular. Here's a good tutorial for how to do wild stuff with particle world: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/soul_removal/ You'll have to adapt it to the proper look. Feel free to use the Add transfer mode (ink mode), glows, and any combination of star filters you want. If you have any of the Trapcode plugins, you're gonna be golden with this.

Post a still of the effect you're refering to, and I'll tell you the best way I know how to do it in AE. I've got 9 years experience with the program. And have recently turned my attention to making Macross-y things.

Hey, Wongster's back. I checked out your website about a year ago. Cool stuff.

Did you rig these guys with a skeleton? Are they FK/IK rigs? I'm so curious.

Well, we were hoping to populate the distant background with some lower-poly models. We are working on some nice smooth hi-poly ships for detail shots, but for background elements we could really work with low-poly models. We could also build some medium poly ships around low-poly models. Chthonic -- would the best way to contact Turbine and Chrono be through their MW accounts, do you think?

I, for one, will continue to watch even if characters are replaced. We don't have much alternative, and though it may be hard to get used to a new voice, a good actor can sell it. I got used to the new Dumbledore. I never got used to the Ranma voice when VIZ switched VAs. If I could get my hands on the rest of the series would I watch it anyway? Hells to the yizeah.

Any chance the Aria team can use those Zent and UN Spacy cap ships? Looking at that Zentraedi fleet video had me imagining big things.

In principle, at least.

He SHOULD make a profit for his work, but that whole pesky intellectual property law thing gets in the way sometimes. I'm sure Shoji Kawamori is somewhere thinking HE should make a profit on this thing.

Wow. Drool.

Although, we could definitely use some of those Bothec models as placeholders and low-poly stuff until the final models are finished.

Brian -- 3ds Max, eh...?

Yeah, using layers is also really easy to understand, especially if you leave the work and come back a long time later. two years ago, though, around this time, I did an 8 page comic for a friend, and page 1 and 2 I did using layers, and pages 3 - 8 I did with flats, and they took me between half and a quarter of the time, a lot of the time saved being just from the computer lagging less. Blew my mind. It's also a technique that works with any level of shading design, be it toon shading, Battlechasers shading, or photorealistic. I haven't really done much coloring since then, though.

Looks awesome.

Have you ever heard of "flatting"? I used to do all my old coloring jobs like you've descibed, with layers, but then I discovered the technique of using flats. The idea is that you basically create an extra channel in your RGB/A channels with "flats" -- that is, blocked in versions of where the different colors will be. And... er... I suck at explaining this... lemme find a link... http://www.polykarbon.com/tutorials/html/channels2.html Not the best tutorial on the topic, but should give you the basic idea. The end results will be indistinguishable, but your filesizes will be drastically reduced, as rather than multiple layers, you only need one layer and one extra channel.

Yeah, I couldn't unzip it either. Oh well, I have the WMV, that'll do for me.

Rodavan is in the upper echelons of MacrossWorld modeling. He has kindly contributed to Aria. Rodavan -- if you keep making models we need in Aria, I'm going to have to offer you an official position! I always just assumed you were too busy.

Wow.

Totally honestly, the art conveys the story. Some of the pictures are funny. It's obviously not the most refined line art I've ever seen, but you're not attempting to deliver that. As long as the story remains interesting, I would probably continue to read this. Simplistic art, also, can be powerful. Not that I'm suggesting that you are making digital equivalents of Mike Avon Oeming's work, but I was first attracted to the excellent comic POWERS because of Oeming's simple artistic style. I only later discovered that Brian Michael Bendis was a talented writer, and as POWERS developed, I also learned to appreciate the nuance in Oeming's art. Off topic. Sorry. My point being, if you tell a good story, the simple art won't necessarily HURT it. If you really worked with the composition of the shots a bit, you might be on to something. In fact, even though the art is frankly not something I personally would write home about, I would prefer to read this in comic form than illustrated novella form. Some people read webcomics that are made from only a small palette of panels. Think about that Dinosaur one (I don't know the name) where the panels are the same pictures EVERY TIME, but with different text. That's effective. At the same time, if you can do better with hand-drawn art, I would love to see that stuff. Ultimately, you've created a story which has intrigue (even if it may mess with canon a bit), so, I'm still interested in what you present next. But, my honest assessment is that if the story lags, the character aren't won't pull us through. But, I'm such a stickler for story that when I read J. Scott Campbell's "Wildsiderz" even HIS art couldn't get me past a single issue. So. THat's where I stand.

I concur with Vinnie and Hikuro. Though, I'd really prefer to keep my jeans out of the equation.