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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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In keeping with my pledge to share some of my animated works in progress, I am sharing a few stills from my open love letter to Ray Harryhausen, 80's Slasher Movies and the Rankin & Bass picture "Mad Monster Party". I'm actually almost done with this project and it will be the first film I submit for Reallusion TV, it's just been a bit of a challange to compose the camera work to look as close to old school stop motion animation as humanly possible, while also attempting to emulate the cartoonish style of Pixar animated films. Should be done in the next few weeks and then you guys can be the judge of my success rate, but in the interim, here are a few stills...
 
 
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By toystorylab - 4 Years Ago
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Sounds interesting, nice characters.
I'm a big Harryhausen fan 
I have a little stop-motion studio:
www.toystorylab.com
As a one man band, making movies that way is elaborate.So, since I started with iClone 4 years ago, the main thing I do in the studio is stop-motion workshops...
They run quite good and pay the rent of the studio.
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By animagic - 4 Years Ago
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toystorylab (2/8/2020)
As a one man band, making movies that way is elaborate. So, since I started with iClone 4 years ago, the main thing I do in the studio is stop-motion workshops... They run quite good and pay the rent of the studio.
Now there is a clever idea!
Years ago I did the music for someone who did stop motion with clay figures. It took him four years to finish his 10-minute movie... Of course, he was distracted occasionally and didn't work on it all the time.
@Lord_Dreadmoor: Nice characters. I look forward to what you'll come up with.
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By kungphu - 4 Years Ago
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Nice use of Joe Quick’s Daz work. Looks great! Is that clothing from Daz base or is it from CC3 base? Great work!
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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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kungphu (2/9/2020)
Nice use of Joe Quick’s Daz work. Looks great! Is that clothing from Daz base or is it from CC3 base? Great work!
Thanks mate. I used the Joe Quick toon morph sets (I love his sets, and use a ton of them in my work) combined with a multitude of other morphs, added detail in Blender, then imported into CC3 for final tweaks. The skin shaders are a combination of Daz and CC3 and the clothes are almost all CC3 base with textures customized in Photoshop. The guys' hair is all Daz based and the girls' hair is all CC3 based.
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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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Dear Reallusion.... if there is one thing I would literally trade a body part for, it would be a render engine that would allow me to render png sequences in Iray and not have it take 10,000 years of my life to complete. Sincerely, THIS GUY!
Shame too, the quality of image I get when I render in Iray is phenomenal...
So animate and render in Unreal Engine it is then. A bit time consuming on the setup end, especially since I have to keyframe animate all of the facial expressions using morph targets in order to match the silly dynamic expressiveness of facial expression animation in Pixar films. Other than that I am still experimenting with Ray Tracing in order to get the best results humanly possible. I've been showing some serious promise with the results, so I'm pretty jazzed. I'll keep you lot updated and look forward to ahring the finished piece with you all.
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By kungphu - 4 Years Ago
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Yeah man! Those still look fantastic! Feel free to share an Unreal tips and tricks. I’m about to post my Unreal 9min short. The thing is, it’s isn’t oh wow that’s Unreal! It’s more like meh, almost coulda done that in iclone minus the subtle reflections. I love that Unreal LL is free now so we all can share our experiences and tips etc. Very interested to follow your work! And agreed, JoeQuick’s stick is fantastic! 
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By Colonel_Klink - 4 Years Ago
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Excellent work m'lord.
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By rogyru - 4 Years Ago
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Some nice renders be good to see them animated
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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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So I'm very close to being done with the preliminary animation for this short and there are a few things I discovered while working in Unreal Engine that I thought others in the group might find helpful. Obviously working in UE4 is a lot of trial and error, but one thing I had to learn the hard way after hours and hours of trying to find a workaround, is that there is an issue with fibermesh eyebrows and beards when you bring them over from Daz Studio, into CC3 and then export a character to UE4. There are obviously tricks to get your fibermesh facial hairs to attach to your CC3 characters and even to get them to work in iClone 7, but for some reason they don't work for shit once you export them to UE4. Sure, they are attached to the characters and all, but when you go to do any kind of real facial animation, they don't behave as if they are a part of the skin, more like an accessory that is attached at a stationary point and in a stationary shape. They work fine in iClone 7, with the proper skin weights, just not in UE4. It is what it is. I'm sure I can find a solution with several hours of further experimentation, but truthfully I'm way too close to be able to finish this piece, so I opted to simply reskin my character models with textures that cause less of a headache and still look good with the lighting and environments like I need them to. There are only 7 characters in the piece and a few animals, so it wasn't a total hardship. This project is supposed to have a hybrid toon, mixed with surreal world feel to it, so everything has to look good under the lighting I have set up. Anyway, here are the renders of the finalized character designs (They look fantastic in Unreal Engine by the way). I should have a final rendered animation pretty soon if there are no more snafus... fingers crossed...
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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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Quick and brief update on this project. I have been diving deep into the character rigging and animation, trying to get the movement as smooth as humanly possible to avoid a lot of that rather jerky animation you sometimes see when animating in iClone. I wanted experiment with lighting too to see if I could get even better results from the shaders and such. Here is one of the early tests.
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By JoeLoXYungChuang - 4 Years Ago
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Nice!Impressive
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By Lord_Dreadmoor - 4 Years Ago
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Went back and polished the skin texture on the Old shop Keeper. I wanted him to look more like a cross between Fred Gwynne in Pet Cemetery and Dick Van Dyke in Night at the Museum...
Gave the Native a complete overhaul as well. The character is a cross between Akecheta from Westworld and Jeff Lubowski, so the face had to be way expressive...
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