The next episode of my super-hero graphic novel with fantasy overtones is now posted. Of course, would love to hear any comments. Big project, I know, I will try to post some shorter clips.

As a disclaimer, I did not create a number of the background video textures such as clouds and fractals. They were obtained from a variety of sources including a video blocks subscription and from the web. 

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Shadoesword,

First of all the voice acting (especially the villains) is the definition of professional, and your directing them is on a Steve Spielberg level. Keeping track of all the voice, music and special effect sound files that are used in these episodes must be a task and a half, but are fantastically executed. 
Visually, great special effects, lighting and wonderful scenes and characters. 
Overall animation is excellent except for the age-old iClone sliding feet problem in some scenes and some motions could use smoother transitions. One scene that impressed me the most as far as animations skills was the character moving under the bed covers 22:50 into the episode. How did you accomplish that? Did you pin the edge of the material (covers) to keep gravity from sliding it off the bed?
All the hard work and effort you are putting into this production is well worth it and can be admired by any iClone user.
To sum up, well done sir. Looking forward to Episode 6 

Walt

Shadoesword: 

Excellent work sir!
, 
First of all, I have to agree with Walt, the voice acting was of a superb quality. Please give your actors my compliments on a job very well done.
Visuals were entertaining and provided a 'wow' factor at different points. Sets were well done. Two other things I want to mention, first  the scene with
the man descending the spiral staircase was a very gutsy thing to attempt and I thought you did very well with it. I don't know that I'd be brave enough to
attempt it. Well done. Also, I thought the discussion around the campfire was scripted and animated in a realistic manner. Dialog scenes, I feel, are the hardest
thing to pull off in a way that holds the viewers interest and you did it very well here. 

pete 


http://www.youtube.com/user/peterblood50?feature=mhee

I have to agree with Pete and Walt!! Another fantastic job by you Sir also your animating is improving and of course your voice actors are amazing!!

Gary

Home built liquid cooled AMD Ryzen 7 1800X cpu (8 core 16 thread) 4.0GHz,  rtx 3090, ASUS Crosshair VI Hero motherboard, 64 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD (Samsung 850 EVO) 6 TB HD's 4K monitor.

                                                                                                                                  

This is the very *first* I've seen of your great work ...... what can I say?
● A well written script...
● Strong sound track...
● Animation that endeavors to match your epic audio ...
● A mammoth undertaking - and very well done!...
● Would love to see a 'tad' more character to background separation (just me) - though your closeups introduced nice DOF...
● Overall - this is of a very high standard and as a critic - I can only marvel!
Tremendous achievement - did I say the 'sound track' was strong? ....... yes! .....


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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

Thanks, Walt. You put your finger on one of the most difficult few seconds in the film. I got some ideas from a tutorial made by Mark of Small W Studios. Still, I couldn't get it to work well, and spent a lot of time wrestling with that part. I have no idea how to pin the softcloth, and my efforts with weight maps were producing weird results. What I finally did was to create two big dummy boxes and give them static physics, then butt them up on either side of the blanket to keep it from sliding away. Of course they didn't render in the scene. Not an elegant solution, but I got it to work long enough to give me the few seconds I needed for that shot. Here's Mark's tutorial on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=wFhP64xBKdM

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Thank you for the detailed information and the link to the tutorial. I do appreciate it.  In my last video I had a character under the covers and tried what you accomplished but the best I got was the blanket to quiver (it seemed like it was alive), so I defaulted to static. It's amazing what we spend hours on if not days in trying to accomplish. Presently I have a character standing idle in front of a control console. I want him to turnaround and walk in the opposite direction but the turning just doesn't look natural. Today is day 3 of trying to get it right. As Captain Ahab said, "He tasks me..." 

Hey Walt_R,
why don't you use those from Mixamo:
https://www.mixamo.com/#/?page=1&query=turn&type=Motion%2CMotionPack
I use them a lot and they are very handy...



Toystorylab on Vimeo :     Crassitudes (my "Alter Ego") on Youtube: 

Thanks, toystorylab, I will check them out.  

Peter, I appreciate the comments. Regarding the spiral staircase, when I saw that in the set, I thought it would make a nice transition to have a character coming down, and kind of leading the viewer into the scene. I was fortunate to find an animation clip which matched the space between stair steps pretty closely, and that made it a lot easier. I just had to keep rotating the avatar around as he descended.  The hardest part was getting it to end at the right spot. Had to break the clip at the ending point and then try to blend it backwards into the previous clip. It didn't quite match, but seemed close enough to fool the eye.  The scene around the campfire was animated mostly through manual keyframing., since there wasn't much movement and a lot of closeups. Glad it worked for you. 

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