tvining opened this issue on Nov 22, 2006 ยท 23 posts
tvining posted Fri, 24 November 2006 at 2:52 PM
Thanks, all! I'm glad you enjoyed it. As for the challenges of this project, I've found that you never know what's going to be difficult--what seems like it's going to be hard, like showing somebody floating in zero gravity turns out to be easy, then you kill yourself trying to make a character convincingly bend over for 2 seconds. Software-wise, the workflow was a little complicated by the fact that I'm working on a Mac and rendering in Cinema 4D, and the only Poser Mac plugin for Cinema 4D* that honors IK and Point At (which I use for where the eyes are looking) is an old OS9 plugin that has never been updated, so my basic workflow for animating characters (Daz V3 and M3) was: 1. Record voice using a decent microphone (M-Audio Nova mic, Mobile Pre preamp, Apple Soundtrack); 2. Create mouth/head moves in Mimic; 3. Open Mimic file in Poser 5 (Poser 6 gave me problems with the old C4D plugin); 4. Animate character body movements/adjust head movements (head turns, blinking, etc.); 5. Boot into OS9, open Poser file into Cinema 4D environment and render it to TIFF files; 6. Go back to OSX, create .mov file from TIFFs, save; 7. Import .mov file into Final Cut Pro, edit into animation; 8. Add voice file/sound effects. Other programs used: Photoshop, Illustrator. It has been suggested to me that I ought to post on my site a section on the "making of" and I may do that at some point. *Kuroyume's new Cinema 4D Plugin "Interposer Pro" has been extremely useful--it doesn't honor IK and Point At yet, but as it is I would suggest anyone who owns Poser and Cinema 4D to get it--it's very stable, and works great. I used it extensively on the dockside scene for the scene objects and the secondary characters where IK and Look At weren't essential. --Tim