Farewell for now!

Well, this will be my last post on this blog for awhile... Recently I've been working on the LEGO faces, getting all the phonemes ready for rendering; they're looking great!

Unfortunately however, our family is about to embark on a 3 - 4 week long road trip down to a camp meeting in Washington, and will be hitting house construction fairly hard upon our return. I'm not exactly sure when I'll be able to get back onto this project, but it's looking more and more like it won't be till next fall... I want to thank all my supporters who are anxiously looking forward to this film's release (almost as much as I am), and I hope you will be able to see the finished product by this time next year!!!! (hopefully before...)

Testing...

Hey guys, this post is for the sole purpose of testing different feed settings on Facebook...

But for those of you who'd like to also hear about my progress, here's my latest: I haven't worked on it since my last post... :-/ This weekend will mark the end of DCDA's play I'm in though, and I'm hoping to do some more on this after that. Otherwise our family will be heading for Washington on vacation in a couple weeks, and I won't be able to do much with it for quite awhile...

More Pictures!

Thought you might enjoy seeing some of the things I was working on today...  First picture here is of my work space.  I was messing around with backgrounds and setting up an outdoor scene, and I decided to take a quick screen shot while I was at it.

Also, I'd like your input (you're becoming a pretty important part of this production!) on what I should have George, the father, to wear.  Here is a picture from the book, which I'm basing a lot of my characters off of.

And here are two shots of my current LEGO guy.

As you can see, the first one has "socks" on, while the second one does not.  Although socks would look great on a real character, I'm tending to think they look funny on a LEGO guy.  Which style do you like better for my LEGO character?

Facebook

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Back to it!

Well, it's back to animation! The past few weeks I haven't had ANY time to work on this project, as I have been busy with the local Christian drama association as well as studying for my GED. That being said though, I've finally been able to spend a little bit of time here and there working on backgrounds again! ;-) Right now I've got all the furniture built also, and am working on the fire... That's been fun! Not only do I have to render "particles" for the glowing flame, but I also have to add background lights to make the cabin look like a fire is flickering inside. Who knows, I might add candles also since those always give a nice touch to a cozy cabin!

But anyway, just wanted to let you know that I haven't fallen off the edge of the earth. Hopefully I'm going to have enough time to make some serious progress in the next few days, so I'd better get off now and get back to creating my homestead scene...

More Screenshots

Thought you might enjoy seeing a couple screenshots of what I'm working on right now.

Here's a test render for the outdoors; I kind of like it!  It still needs a lot of work to match colors etc., but I'm really happy with it!

A test render of the inside of my cabin...

Here's an inside shot of my workspace! ;-)  This is an actual screenshot of my computer as I was working on the furniture.

Latest Update

Sorry about the long delay between posts everyone... I've just been extremely busy lately, so I'm not having as much time for animation as I'd like... :-/ But be that as it is, I do have a couple updates I'd like to share.

First of all, I'd like to thank each one of you who contributed your thoughts on the subject of backgrounds. I've been thinking about it for the past few days (as I do everything else ;-) and I think I have a plan worked out. I tried real picture backgrounds for a couple shots, but for the forest it just wasn't working. With all the intricate detail forests posses, I was having a lot of trouble mixing my foreground (the LEGO sets) with the background. But I don't want something that looks like a 2D animation world either. You know what I'm talking about: one of those worlds where everything has distinct lines separating flamboyant colors; where trees have only 3 colors and verdant fields have one shade of green except for where there are shadows. Not very realistic looking, but it's what they had to do to keep drawing time to a minimum. On the other hand, as Nathan pointed out on my last post, I don't want to have my LEGO guy walking around on my front porch so to speak! (I've actually thought about doing that though, as a bonus feature) But for my movie, I don't want that kind of realism...

So here's what I'm planning on doing right now anyway. I'm thinking of using a program like Pencil to draw pastel looking backgrounds. Someday I might be able to use something as professional as Corel, but until I get the money for that I think Pencil will work quite nicely. I want the backgrounds to kind of fade into oblivion (not be outspokenly noticeable), while at the same time providing a boost for the foreground. So that's what I'm aiming at right now! It'll be a challenge, but I love challenges! (otherwise I wouldn't have even started this project!)

The more I've gotten into animation, the more I've realized just how much artistic ability is required in this field of media! Thankfully I didn't have to spend too much time making sure my characters looked good (no, actually I did...), because they've already been created! But even your characters take a lot of artsy effort, and then the backgrounds most people draw/paint themselves! And then of course, just as in real movie sets, it takes a good artistic eye to develop a coherent movie set that is visually pleasing.

The other thing I wanted to tell you was that we've started recording!!! I guess you could call it ADR, 'cause we're recording over the animated characters. Well, kind of. Anyway, that gives you an idea of how we're doing it! We got a couple extra parts recorded a few weeks ago, and have since recorded most of the audio with only a couple characters left to do. It's been a lot of fun, and it's exciting to finally have audio for the film! Oh, and the voice transformers have been incredible!

Now I just need to get back to drawing backgrounds... I probably won't be posting another update for awhile, as I'll be busy drawing, redrawing, etc. I want to mix the background colors with the foreground colors as much as possible, which means by the time I finish "painting" my backgrounds (which comes before my next blog post) I'll have a lot of my sets created and ready for animating. From there I'll just animate my character to match the audio, and we'll be on the go again!!!! I'm as excited to see the final product as you are, believe me! ;-)

I need your help!!!

I need your help!! For those of you who have been following my posts, you know that I'm making a LEGO animation as an educational project for my schooling (that's more of an excuse though, since I REALLY am enjoying it!!!). But I've gotten myself into quite a pickle, and I need your help on getting out of it! Here's a screen shot of my homestead model so far: (don't worry, I'll be getting a face on my guy soon and do more messing with the ground; this was only a quick screenshot)

I have a lot more tweaking to do with it, but with that primitive showpiece to stare at, I'd like to know what you would rather have: A realistic looking world like the one pictured above, or one that looks more like plastic LEGOs. I really want to hear your feed-back, so please write down your thoughts as comments on here so I can decide which way to steer. For me as the animator, I like both ways and either way would be "easy" for me to do. (just to be clear, I'm only talking about my background sets; I'm still sticking with my LEGO characters) So please be honest and tell me what you think would look best in the end. Ever wanted to be part of a film production? Now's your chance!

Here's a couple screen shots from other animation films to get you started:

The inside of a Navy ship, done with a LEGO set. (from Men O' War)

A LEGO island, done again in LEGO style. (from Men O' War)

A more "realistic" looking set, which would be the other way I could create my animated world. (from Big Buck Bunny)

Let me know what you think!

Of horses and maidens...

Sorry I haven't posted anything in quite awhile, but I've been doing a lot of modeling and re-modeling... As I said, this whole project is for my personal animation education, so I'm just taking it one thing at a time, and thoroughly mastering each step before heading to the next one. And I am happy to say that I'm to the point where I can easily model simple meshes pretty fast! I know I don't know all the tips and tricks; indeed, "the more I learn the less I know"! But I'm happy with the progress I've made over the past few months, so that is all that counts!

But now, turning to the little bit of progress I have made. I've learned that LEGO company is profusely swayed towards feminism! I know it sounds scary, but it's true. What do modern LEGO girls look like? Men with long hair, or sometimes not even that...
And what do period LEGO girls look like? I don't know. I guess they're only drawings on simple boring LEGO blocks... Looks nice in a picture, but start animating them and you will soon see how stiff and unnatural they become!
So with those two models staring me in the face, I had a decision to make regarding my female actors. I decided to chart new waters and create my very own model. The difficulties? I would have to create a dress that looks like plastic, yet still reproduces the feminine qualities of modesty that the dresses back in the early 1800's portrayed. And then there's the problem with walking. When a real young lady walks with a dress on, her legs move the dress back and forth allowing her to walk. How do you reproduce that if you're supposed to make it look like rigid plastic? After several attempts, I was finally able to create a simple yet good-looking dress style that still allows for free motion of the legs underneath. This will be one of the main things in this film that are truly of my own creation!!!
And then there's the horses. I loaded a picture I took of a LEGO horse (believe me, I've used real LEGOs as references throughout the entire modeling process!!!) and traced around it to make a 2d horse. I then extruded it into a 3d model; it was that simple! The tail was a little more difficult, because it had many tiny grooves in it which took me quite awhile to make, because of all the vertices I had to move around... But anyway, here's a quick screen shot of my horse right now, with only simple materials mapped to it. Don't worry, I'll have way more detail on the final product.
Other than that, I'm even now trying to figure out how to link my different models into one main file for the actual animating part, and then I'll start animating the actual film! But of course that won't be 'till after we record the audio...

First Animation

Well folks, hope ya'll are doing well after the holidays! Sorry I haven't posted a blog update in awhile, but I've been using my Christmas/New Year's break to do a lot of animating. I was also kind of busy writing up a medieval story for a writing contest; you can read it here. But I've made TONS of progress since my last post, and I'm really excited to be able to share them with you!

First of all, I've finally finished modeling my first LEGO guy (tweaking till past perfection is my worst pitfall...) Here's a quick close up screen shot of him so you can see the details. As far as my knowledge goes, he looks exactly like a real LEGO guy!


Secondly, I've gotten all his materials under control. I finally figured out how to paint his clothes and face, which has been wonderful! I've also got "all" the textures under control! Of course the only texture I'm using right now is the guy's face, but I'm still happy to have it figured out! I was able to draw them up in Word and them transfer them to Gimp to key out the background. Then came the hard part of duplicating and naming a face for every frame, in this case I was able to cheat and only make 184 pictures even though the animation was longer. I'll probably be doing the faces as videos from now on, since I don't have a file renamer program on my computer. But be that as it was, after I'd done all the renaming it was very easy to tell Blender to read all the pictures as an animation sequence.

And that brings me to my third thing I've done - put together a VERY SIMPLE animation video for you to see kind of what's happening in my "real" animation world. Hope you enjoy it!

First Animation from Aspen Ridge Family Media on Vimeo.

And with that I think you're pretty much up to date as to what I've been working on! Now that the holiday break is over, I'm heading back into the grind of school so I can't promise how much animating I'll be getting done each day from here on out. As soon as I get the PC computer from our neighbor (I know, I like Macs also...), I'll be able to build the background sets; cabins, forts, forests, indian camps, beautiful valleys, etc. etc. That will be very exciting!!!!