since we used this thread to work on this movie, i'll use it to announce that the Voyages of the Sojourner (now a trilogy) will premier this week. Part 1 in HD will be available at Vimeo later this evening with Parts 2 and 3 coming in the next few weeks

A special screening of the draft of the trilogy will be aired tonight only at www.TMUTHEATER.com
at 8 pm PST/11 pm EST/4 am UK

sorry i missed this earlier thebiz- yep having 20 videos can be resource hungry depending on the video you use - if you are going to use them a distance away from the camera, low res video is ok as long as the resolution matches your project

Hey Gabe, Great stuff here. Particularly liked the clonecloth and video idea for characters. I am curious as to how computer workload intensive it would be to use 20 different videos of characters instead of say 2 or 3 mixed up on 20 different instances. Thoughts?

93% of original size (was 539x16) - Click to enlarge93% of original size (was 539x16) - Click to enlarge

Cheers Gabe

Your still shot looks good . Apologies for the time I took to reply I was FSXing over Russia and got carried away.

"Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with the tongue will not hesitate to do the same with the pen"

System Specs:

Apple Core with Banana Bits + 4 strings
Double Whopper with triple cheeseboard
1 x Mega huge Ram and a couple of sheep
HDD 2 x TerrraBurgers

thanks Tom, will check out the best way to put it together

in the meantime - here's a shot from my next project The Bard

I am finding this very useful Gabe. Is there any way you could have it all in a oner as a downloadable PDF so I can have it to refer to on my desktop. Thanks again for posting this as it does help duffers like me a fair bit.

"Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with the tongue will not hesitate to do the same with the pen"

System Specs:

Apple Core with Banana Bits + 4 strings
Double Whopper with triple cheeseboard
1 x Mega huge Ram and a couple of sheep
HDD 2 x TerrraBurgers

Absolutely.

RL's paired sequences can currently be found in The Wedding Planner series, the horse-human interactions in the Horse and Tack collection, and a few nice conversation pairings in the Perform motions supplied with iClone 4.

Can I also assume that some of the fighting sequences available in BackStage are paired?

More paired motions are essential, but especially for common(everyday) dramatic situations.

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

Thanks again for sharing these great tips. very cool ! :cool:

Thanks once again aknzrdude. Great knowledge. Thats two more things to try out. I also agree about your wishfull feature of paired fight (sword and others), motions. That would be a tremendous boon. I'm working on one now and it 'aint easy'.

:cool: gizmo

this next tutorial makes use of the BLEND material channel
my scene is a couple of guys fighting, one guy grabs a spear and hits the other guy with it - i wanted to show that both combatants start off with clean costumes, and the guy that get's hit with the spear shows a bloody costume - but i wanted in one continous take - so here's how i did it

first watch the video of the effect here - notice the relatively clean armor, he turns away and a spear hits him in the back, blood is splattered all over his armor

to do this is fairly simple - we will use the BLEND material channel and the TIMELINE
1) go to UPPER - MODIFY - click on the OPEN icon for the BLEND material channel
load a bloody texture - the way this channel works is anything white becomes transparent and the colored items get's applied (using Multiply blend mode)

2) once loaded, set the material STRENGTH to 0

here's the guy as he turns to run away - clean armor


make sure the blend material strength is set to zero up until the point where the spear hits him, then adjust the material strength to 100 - use the timeline for more accuracy of placement

so for example, of the spear hits him at frame 150, make sure frame 0 is at zero strenght and frame 149 is at zero strenght, then a frame 150, adjust the strenght to 100

so here's our character with a spear stuck on his back, blend material strength set to 100 at the appropriate keyframe



so there you are - a simple way to show injury using the blend channel - you can use this effect for houses. show them clean then as fire ravages them, slowly turn dark