A draft for Act 1 Sequence 3 is done. This sequence introduces Captain Bill and Trot.
http://www.holmesbryant.com/files/video/scarecrow_of_oz/

WOW. That looks & sounds outstanding ! The foley, sound effects are fabulous - the ocean, water, whirlpool bubbles are all super wonderful, animation is terrific - lighting is terrific - top notch!

Goooood Job! Very impressed.

EDIT: Also meant to say that the scenes on the boat, with camera action and motion and sound all produce an appropriately ominous emotional feel

Fantastic animation! Amazing water! Blew me away. Even for a "draft" it looked great. The ocean was dead on convincing. The approaching "storm" cloud was very impressive.

I'm interested though in why there wasn't more "vocal" response to the approaching disaster? Shouldn't they have been screaming and yelling just a tiny bit? A little more emotion?

-vern

The voice actors didn't realize how terrific this scene would look (as they recorded their bits a year ago?). Otherwise I'm sure they would have been whooping it up.

Thanks alot for the compliments on the ocean. That's one of the scenes I did and I was worried about how it would look to someone else. Of course, I wanted it to look like "The Perfect Storm", "The Little Mermaid" and Hokusai's "Great Wave Off Kanagawa" all rolled into one ... but at some point I had to accept "good enough". I'm glad "good enough" is good enough

Ken created the underwater set, which I think was fantastic.

Thanks.

incredible work!

Yes I forgot to mention how terrific the cave and underwater scene looked, as well as the animation. There was just too much to rave about.

And it's all beyond "Good Enough".

Hey Holmes ....

Nice job on the water! From personal experience I know that water can be a pain in the arse to get it to work right. Lots and lots and lots ... did I mention "lots" ... of tweaking/tinkering to get to work properly. And it makes it even harder when someone or something then has to then interact with it. I know I lost a couple of hairs just watching it (I can't afford to lose any more ) ... So I feel your pain in trying to get it right.

Bruce (wedgeeguy)

p.s. Congratulations on completing "Piper"!

Yeah, that's looking good! Thanks for mentioning me.....I did the set, but the animation seems to have changed. From what I remember, I did them swirling round the whirlpool and straight into the cave from it. Rather than them stopping and consciously choosing to swim to the cave. Captain Bills line "Though why we're here I can't say" led me to that. Anywho, good work all round.

Edit: I assume in the final version, the audience will just see red eyes in the darkness at the end. It might be nice to have a noise in the background to make Trot look around (her turn should be quicker then though).

Foley for the last scene has not been submitted yet. Hopefully there will be some kind of sound there when Angelo works his magic.

Here's what I'm hoping (fingers crossed).
As I get these scenes rendered and posted:
We look at them and take note of things that need to be changed or fixed or whatever.
Whoever has a desire to change/fix something will volunteer to make the change and will commit to completing the work within one week.
When the fix is done, submitted via svn, AND I am notified via email (project.scarecrow@gmail.com) I will open up the project to make sure it will render and that there are no bizarre technical issues, and I put it on the render farm.

Here's what I need from those of you wanting to do a fix/change:
* You must be using the most current version of AM. If you open a current model/action/chor/project in an older version of AM and then save it, strange things sometimes happen and there is a chance I will have to revert the project back to a previous state. So to insure your work is not wasted, use the most current version of AM.
* Let me know what it is you are changing! Send me an email at project.scarecrow@gmail.com. I try to read the forum, but I don't always catch every post.
* When you are done,
** make VERY sure the Depth of Field, Fog and lighting is the same as the original. There have been a few scenes where the lighting was set before animation happened, and when the scene came back after animation, the lighting got changed somehow and had to be re-done.
** Or, if you change the DOF, render a test frame for every every camera angle - even those where you didn't change the DOF. DOF can be finicky and it takes a lot of futzing with.
** If you change fog, textures or lighting, check every scene that uses the same set or model to make sure your changes have been carried over to those other scenes - even if you change a lighting Action which would supposedly automatically propagate to the other scenes. I've already had issues with this.
** When you are done, send me an email telling me you are done and what you did. I will be trying to get other scenes ready for rendering, so if you just submit via SVN without letting me know you are done, I may not realize the project is ready to be checked and re-rendered.
** If you make a change that affects several scenes (such as lighting, texturing, or fog), send me an email detailing what scenes are affected and should be re-rendered.

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This might be a good time to mention that I had to do some quick and sometimes ugly hacks in some parts just because it is so much work to turn these animated choreographies into consistent, final rendered animations. So my M.O. was "How do I fix this issue in the quickest and easiest way possible.

If you notice something that got changed and want to "fix" it yourself, please follow the above steps and fix it. I am not attached to the fixes/changes I made. My main concern is trying to ensure consistency, avoiding geometry intersections and texture warping, circumventing technical issues, and getting things to render.

One notable example is the Ork's texturing. In 2_01_02 the ork makes a turn that brings its tail very close the the wall of the cave and the hair that was extending out the back of the tail looked like it was penetrating the cave wall. So instead of redoing the animation, I took off the hair on the back of the tail. Also, the ork's decals were warping in some scenes when it did certain movements, so I'm like "OK, how do I fix this in the fastest and easiest way possible" - so I added some scraggly looking feathers to hide the fact that the decals were warping. These were just quick practical fixes.

Oh yeah, one more thing.
Net render was having trouble with the linked "Master" camera. So we had to go back to using Project files for each scene (with a camera embedded in the project file). If you do any kind of fix/change to a scene that has already been rendered, please open the Project file instead of opening just the choreography. Since we went back to using project files, I didn't bother adding IBL images as invisible rotoscopes or layers in the chor (a chor will not import an image that is used *only* as an IBL image). So opening the project file instead of just the chor is pretty important.

Thanks Bruce. I enjoyed working on Piper. I think we're getting better! "Piper" may not be Wall-E quality, but then the budget for Wall-E was a couple thousand times the budget for Piper I think

Piper? Holmes can you give us a link to more Info. I like to look at it

Hi Mark, It was produced by a small studio called Spark Plug Entertainment. Me and Bruce helped with the animation. It had a super low budget, and we had to work fast and furious, but it paid and the producer is a really nice guy and he was a pleasure to work with.
http://www.sp3d.net/

I Talked to Michael Schelp from Sparkplug back when he was making the Pig movie. I was really busy with Robert and TWO at the time and decided to concentrate on TWO. John Kuepper also talked to him but we both got scared off by the contract he was asking John to sign. I was given a test scene to animate but very little Instruction on what he wanted or exespected so I backed out. Interesting I know Bruce was working with him and I thought you might have been as well. Michael might of been stressed out when I talked to him on the phone but I could never figure out how I was supposed to get 8 1/2 secounds of animation completed in one hour? Then he wanted me to pay to have someone else to finish what I could not do? Maybe I missundertod the contract? Glad it worked out well for you!