CApruzzese

I am working on a new gothic animation, not Lovecraft this time. I thought I should give him a rest. So I am working on Staley Fleming's Hallucination by Ambrose Bierce. It's taking aw while. I am taking a break from learning Blender to do this little project in C4D. Starting with some props. The bed and table are all me but the chair is part me but mostly an office chair model I had modified. The character will be hard as usual, but i think I have a workflow to get them done that is improving each film. This will mostly take place in one room ( a bedroom) so I am putting extra attention into the props.

I am a fairly good artist... but with cartoons. I just can't "see" things that way to draw them. I ask friends to draw out things for me but that gets tired, for them, and I have found if I want to get something done I have to do it all in the end. You have 100% the right idea to draw them out first. In lieu of that I start from a remade model and pull and push things to where I hope they need to be. I have a super simple rig set up I have been using for these since they won't really move all that much after they are posed. At least for now. I will be working on a science video soon and some of these guys will be in it.

that is a very good list, it's all seems so obvious until you get into working on something then it's pretty easy to get lost in what you are doing and forget certain things.

one more taking some of the suggestions into account . I made the hands smaller and more delicate on thisnne for example. As for my characters, some of them looking ill, that's possible. I am still experimenting with good skin tones , it aint easy. And they look different on different monitors as well. The colours I am using are mostly temporary until the character is needed for a project then I'll re-evaluate everything for sure.

If anyone can do it, it's you!

that is more what I should be doing, But I'll be glad to have you do it instead :) That is a HUGE task to accomplish. In the end you can mix and match any number of characters in a hurry which is more my need at this point. I spent 5 years trying to get my first lovecraft animation to work and in the end wasn't super happy with the people anyway. REALLY? OMG here it's the peace sign! I might rethink that pose...

That is what it is, the middle two fingers are down, the outer fingers are up! The insult, here in canada at least is only the middle finger up. I thought that was universal! LOl

Cebera: she does look weird, I think the jawline is something I will need to work in future. the hands bother me less as I was researching lots of 3d children's shows to see how they dealt having multiple characters that look similar but not the same and noticed hands and feet were often the same, Still this model had some big hands to work with! That's the Heavy metal hand thing, not flipping someone off! Hmm... still not exactly a warm gesture... LOL Vector: I agree 200%, after 2 decades of trying to make characters, I'm just not getting there. I can't do everything apparently. Your kitbag idea is a more elaborate and better thought idea than mine but similar in that it will make characters faster and easier to do without reinventing the wheel each time. I may try that in fact. Work on types of hands, body shapes, accessories etc. I only recently worked out a good way to join objects made separately into one. I've actually learned a lot doing this, more than I thought I would.

I have been hoping to get to this point for a while. The point where i can create more easily a growing set of cartoon characters, simply rigged, to have on hand for clients or personal projects since making and rigging them is the biggest log jam in my workflow. I bought a generic doctor character on turbo squid since I am just not getting the hang of modelling characters from scratch and then modified him to all these guys, then rigged mostly with cactus dan's tools. I made 7 characters in all so far in 2 weeks. Not the best in the world but if we all waited to be the best in the world nothing would ever get done! I think I can get a few more done in the next week or so, but then I need to get back to work animating.. something!

wow, I don't know how I missed these before but they are really cool looking.

I was hoping to see more of this project , I think it's amazing work.

I am always impressed how smooth and clean the lines are in your work. you really get the most out of the geometry and simply texturing you do really works.

only time and practice can help you with that!

I have been doing ti a long time. I actually started with short animations on film, all lost now sadly. I am not a good cartoonist but manipulating objects as characters is fairly easy to me so 3D seemed a good fit when it became possible to do at home, for me that was the late 80s. I am TERRBLE are making characters, getting better at rigging them but has little trouble animating them. So if I had someone to make them I'd do a lot more work. One thing I find really helpful is to watch old cartoons from the 30s mostly.. they have the best, fullest movement and timing. I also just watch people all the time and sort of file away in my head the gestures they make while talking, yelling, laughing thinking Ill use them later in a project. I am pretty familiar with the cat robot I animate for a TV and now I don't even have to think about counting frames to get the timing right, t's very natural to me. New characters take a wile to work out and I try and practice all the time with some characters I've made just to play around with. My first lovecraft film took 5 years to do, out;y becuase I couldn't get the characters to look even close to right. Hope that isn't too rambling a response!

I only recently found you you could make it editable, so that is something Ill try. I just got frustrated using the autorig and I was more than happy using Cactus Dan's tools to rig so I didn't put much effort into it. I have a new character to make for a project i work on time to time and I think I'll use the character rig this time and see how far I get.

yup that is what I mean. I just have problems figuring out what's what and where. I do think I need to work it out though to get further with what I want to do in future.

you select them in the viewport , then chose what you want from the controls tab . I heavily rely on the character tag to select things when animating, it's by far my preferred way to animate and organize my character, I just haven't found a good way to integrate that with the autorig. But I'll have to look into it.

I also forgot to mention, and almost forgot Idid this, but I often change the display from garamond to quick etc when animating. Often for the speed up in display but also i find it easier to see details like eyes with all the bells and whistles turned off.

I am going to look at that now, merci! (for the comment and the video). My choice of rigging tools might be slowing things down too i guess! I use joint rigging and Cactus Dan's tool rig but I might switch to the character object which I have never been able to get my head around in term of finding the controllers when I animate. I also has a problem with one of the thumbs bending in the wrong direction with the biped rig. Now that Dan is gone, I should try and use other tools but I LOVE to rig hands with his tools and the hand pose tag is just genius.

You certainly inspire me to keep trying to get better.

so funny and well done!

I have High end iMac. 3,5 ghz i& and 32 gigs of ram with Nividia geforce gtx 4 gig but i do get lag with more than two characters often. I am going to learn Blender soon I hope and I here that is pretty responsive, I hear the new MAYA is real time for just about everything even some simulations but that is WAY out of my price point. I don't have Octane. At least not yet!

response was not bad, but the sets were somewhat complicated and I was surprised how little problem I had. My first and second Lovecraft shorts I had to shut off most of the set to animate the characters efficiently. For the smoke and water effects, I cached the simulations so they did not get in the way.

So I finished and , for now, last film in my Lovecraft trilogy. Positives I did get further in my modelling and rigging but not enough. I am still repurposing the humans from a basic model and that has limits. I think I understand much more how to use X-particles and Turbulence FD in a project. I used colour toning in Final Cut X in the animation, which I used for live actin, but not animation and I like the results. Using mograph and dynamics, I found a simple way to do the ice floating in the tub. the ice was long to render but the movement is what I wanted completely. Negatives The biggest issue was the lab coat, which I worked on for a month and got nowhere. I really wanted to use cloth but it just kept messing up and in the end wasn't worth putting more time into. I am still having Bodypaint issues, but adding 3D Coat helped a lot. I look forward to getting more done in that. Not sure what I will do next... something funny I hope.