HAH! You thought I wasn't lookin'!!!

Yes. I am still on the Batman thang.
This past week I did little of nothing but edit for the Maury Show. However just before the editing onlslaught I started working on the open for the piece.

I learned that animating is going to be slightly more difficult than I had bargained for because of mesh complications. I made 3 animations of Bats doing his move into the Cover Pose but I am happy with none of them.

So the forced backing off I had to do thanks to RL was probably good. I shall return to that animation ASAP.

Got inspired by watching a cartoon called NARUTO on CN this weekend. Looks really good. I kinda liked the story too- even though it had your typical- verbate everything that is happening- anime style, I was into it.

I'm going to start using that technique in my everyday life as well.

"I will not sit here and ponder this move any longer! I will render this scene with all my power!" *hits render button*
"Hahahahahahahaha! Watch me animate, FOOL!"

The first 60...

This is a letter I sent to Dave Simmons (my partner in more than a few crimes) about 10 seconds ago titled: "The Dead Have A-Risen"

That's right- I actually have a "clip". Well, not so much a clip as it is 60 frames.
Lemme tell ya 'bout it first.

I got the bones goin' and linked them to a Character Studio skeleton- just like I said I would.

Took me a lil' bit but I did learn how to quickly get my vertices mapped to bones correctly (MAX has a paint feature now where I can paint which points are controled by what) the problem was that being a perfectionist could lead to me spending unecessary hours bouncing between this bone and that bone with a certain set of points.

When I was finally satisfied with the skinning- I made up a punch move that I will have to use later and came up with the animation I've attached here.

I did this in 30 fps. Which is ridiculous really. I know we have talked about this before and I will go with 15 fps that will convert to 30 easily enough.

The final for this project will most likely be an AVI as I will use AVID and After Effects when the time comes to finalize so I'm working with this in mind.

To get the drawn look I used a cartoon filter- with shadows- I then took the frames into FLASH and used Trace Bitmap on each one to make that flat look even sharper-

Then I went through and cleaned up the anomalies that come from my shoddy skinning and poor modeling (remember this is really so that I don't have to out and out draw every panel).
This is also the stage at which I will draw facial expressions and the like (vis-a-vie the Breakfast Monster's eyes on my site).

The technique is tedious but I like the outcome. The animation itself leaves a little to be desired- The punch is supposed to be slow at the top and then fast when the hit comes in and I think that's reflected- BUT it's not supposed to have that camera jerk in there. I don't know how that happened.

I also need to revisit the skinning on the hands because his thumbs won't go down plus his fingers seem a little thin. I will do that but I don't know how much it matters for this little clip here- there will be a LOT of other things going on-

Superman taking the blow. Batman's cape blowing behind him (I'm debating drawing it or having MAX's new Cloth feature do a little something something first- You know I have to at least TRY that :)...) Snow will be falling. AND I have to do something with the background.
I also need to animate a mouth for my man, Bats to give it a little more feeling and not seem as robotic.

Animation-wise I could do some more squashing and stretching too- but I haven't decided how far from reality I want to go- seeing as this IS a cartoon. I should go VERY far but then again I kind of like how this is looking- It's just a TON better than what I had for Stems and Seeds. Which I was VERY limited by how big the final file could be (2mg). It's just great to be able to use so many frames to do a move- still...I should be careful of file size.

I know I want to letterbox the final too. So I need to think on that as well.../sigh.

Next I will work on one of two things:

The open sequence- which I need to replot sorta but it only has Batman, lightning and the title- possibly some building but that remains to be seen.
Using MAX to make that cape work.
I'm leaning towards 1 but 2 would help with 1 considerably... decisions, decisions.
Well. there it is...

Oh yeah, I think this letter just became my latest entry to my blog!

If you wanna see the file that I sent with it go to:
www.kimmygorden.com/batman_punch_Scene_1.swf