My partner and I have posted a new animation using Carrara 5Pro (with Eric Winemiller's excellent toon!pro plug), Poser 6, AfterEffects, Apple Logic Express, Apple Motion and Final Cut Pro.  That's a lot of software to cram into a 48 second cartoon style clip, but it comes together nicely.

The clip is what we're calling a "promosode" for our upcoming animated series called Applesauce.  It's a litle esoteric and we've often gotten "WTF?!?" as the response to it, but if you know your Yeats poetry, it'll make more sense! 

You can check out the YouTube version here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIwzp581y9w

You can also download the enormous 1080P 24FPS file (all 259 megabytes of it) at the internet archive, here:  http://www.archive.org/details/golden_applesauce_1

The 1080P file is a quicktime compressed with the Apple Intermediate Codec.  I don't know if there's a version of that available for Windows, so you PC folks may be out of luck on the HD front on this one....  Even with the AIC, though, it will choke my old G4 PowerBook.  It plays just fine on the QuadCore G5 and on the Intel dual-core Mac Mini.

Let me know what you think!  Critiques are always welcome and appreciated; what can we do better on the next one?  These "promosodes" are both promotional material for the series, as well as an opportunity for us to work the bugs out of the animation process.

Thanks!

 Dex
www.dexfx.com

Nice work gents! :D

That was fantastic.

thats pretty cool

Five stars, three cheers and two thumbs up.  Stand tall and be proud!

Excellent! Bravo!

Could you tell us what software is used for each part? For example did you use Talk Designer for the lip sync? How about the explosion? Particle effects in Carrara or composited in After Effects? I'm always interested in why people use each application. Thanks for sharing.

~jr

Hi, all --

Thanks for the compliments.  We're working on "promosode" 2 currently and I'll post it when it's done, probably in a few weeks.

JohnnyRoy, let's see..... 

Figures -- Unity and Identity are Michael 3 while the Celtic god is the Freak from DAZ.  We used the excellent morphs available for Michael to create the unique faces for the characters.  They're clothed with stock items available on DAZ.  I created their hair in Carrara 5 Pro, with an eye to making sure the hair would render well as a cartoon object.  Their cel-shaded look comes from the toon shader included in Digital Carvers' Guild's toon!pro plug-in.

We recorded dialogue using GarageBand.  Lip synch was done with DAZ's Mimic Pro.  We're working with Poser 6 because, while we bought P7, it's frustrating in that many of 7's features won't work with Carrara and Transposer. 

Once the pose-to-pose animation and lip synch were done in P6, we brought the characters into C5P to render using toon!pro.  We rendered each character as an independent element on an alpha channel and composited the elements together in AfterEffects 6.5.  We also added a heavier outline to the characters in AE to give them a bit more separation from the background and enhance the cartoon look.  Finally, we did some cleanup in AE on the animation where shadows looked strange or when geometry under the clothing would poke through.

The ultra-fast flight through the starfield was done in AfterEffects, using Particle Playground to create the stars and a 3D camera to whip through space.  The planets we whip past were just quickie paintings in Photoshop.  (We use Elements on the Mac.)

The sun is a number of elements.  A base image painted in Photoshop.  Particle effects from Apple Motion for the dancing corona.  Extra glows and such added in After Effects.  When the sun goes nova, it's some additional particle effects from Motion and some fractal noise with a vector blur from After Effects distorted to give a hint of spherical expansion to it.  All of these elements are layered together in AfterEffects using different transfer modes to get the luminous effect while still allowing for some detail to be seen in the expanding gaseous cloud.

The sequence was edited together in Final Cut Pro, which is also where I laid in all of the sound effects.  I composed the score using Apple Logic Express 7 and put that on the timeline in FCP. 

I intend to put together a behind-the-scenes thing on my website (www.dexfx.com) eventually showing some detail about how it comes together.  (Of course, to do that takes away from the time that I'm working on the actual project, so it's a strange balance of priorities!)  But if you have any specific questions, fire away; I'm happy to answer what I can!

 - Dex
www.dexfx.com

Dex,

That was a great behind-the-scenes look right there. I appreciate your replying with such detail. There are so many overlapping ways to achieve the same thing in several tools it's good to understand which tool people are using. Thanks and I look forward to the real behind-the-scenes section on your web site. Keep up the good work.

~jr