Right in the middle of working on my little movie, I decided to take a break and watch a movie. A friend hands me a DVD of Disney's "Tangled". Aside from the overly-huge eyes on the lead character and her mother, the animation was so incredible. The lip-sync was spot on perfect, and the overall 3D-like atomosphere was awe inspiring.

Now I am put off because there is no way I can reproduce that. I know better than to think I can, but if "Shrek" was a benchmark, this animation was miles above it.

And I want so bad to just get close to "Shrek"... Sigh... when will I ever learn...

Aside from that, I am happy with the way things are turning out for me. I am going into script now, and will soon be working on the first draft. I want a full 110-120 minute film, and I am in story development now...

It's good to feel inspired by something like that, but don't let it get you discouraged.  You are only one person, working toward a personal vision.  They were surely dozens of people, with a huge budget and custom in-house animation software.  Do your best and keep trying to perfect your art and craft.

I was looking around me in the real world yesterday, outside in a location with many reflective chrome surfaces nearby.  I'll never be able to get reflections like that, and so fast!  I thought.  Which probably isn't at all like your point, but I've not been getting enough sleep recently, beg y'r pardon.  :lol:

Yeah, just don't let it get you down.  If we did that, all of us would have quit this stuff ages & ages ago.  :lol:

Disney studios, lots of people, buckets of money.

You, one person, limited resources

If you can find it look at some of the stuff like the first couple of Trippin the Rift.

Its amazing what people can accomplish on home computers, and its to your credit that you are actually doing it.

Yeah, thanks. I have the first 2 seasons of Tripping The Rift on DVD somewhere. I haven't watched it in ages. I might have to revisit it, if I can find it... :lol:

Whenever I start to feel that way,  I try to think of a short film called "Father and Daughter".  Very simple and very moving.

 Link To Youtube

 take care

Tangled was the 2nd most expensive movie EVER made (200 million dollars), they had to write brand new software just to handle the hair dynamics and to achieve the specific style of the animation. Try to be inspired by it, but you might not want to try too hard to duplicate it.   :)

SnowS

Strange... I don't really do animation (no patience for it), but I actually do go out of my way to eyeball better artwork than what I can make.

It doesn't really disappoint me, because I

1. admire the beauty, and

2. look for signs of techniques that I can put to use myself. 

It's like Pablo Picasso (probably) said: "Good artists borrow, but great artists steal". Mind you, he didn't mean simply aping the techniques or the 'look', but actually learning and internalizing them - then improving on them.

Oh of course, I only meant that it's not realistic for him or any of us to think that we can come close to recreating the look and quality of a $200 million movie on our own.  :)  Try to do your best and improve, just like Penguinisto says.

Yeah , whole intent in starting this thread was to state that I know I can't get those results because

a) I don't have the software and money to put into it that they did.

b) I am still clueless on a lot of the aspects of the software I do have.

But I am inspired to do better with what I have, and I know that a good animation/render is something that you can't rush and expect to see good results. I am learning the animation pallette now. Pretty cool little tool there. It's much easier to tweak the animation frame by frame and part by part for me right now, but I will learn this thing if it kills my pc...

a) Money? Bah. You're looking at a very cheap bastard here. I spend only on what I have to, really. I've gotten by on DS3 (the free version), GIMP instead of Photoshop, an old copy of Rhino3 (which I bought way back in 2004-5 or so), and even older copy of Vue d' Esprit 5 (bought that in 2004).   Hardware? I only recently bothered to move my main CG bits from a 2004 Mac Dual G5, and a cobbled-together 2007-vintage Core Duo Hackintosh... to a brand new Core i7 laptop that I saved for over six months to get. Meanwhile, Wings is still a decent free modeler, Blender is even better (also free, but frustrating), and there are mountains of free figures, morph kits, scenes, and etc for your rendering pleasure.

b) spend some time with what you do have - I think you'll suprise yourself. In spite of literally knowing the underlying code, I've only recently gotten around to playing with shaders in D|S (and damn it's fun!) I see you've begun to do much the same thing (this is a good thing, y'know? :) )

PS: See that ugly-assed chap to your left? Mike 2, a freebie hair kit ("Kabuki hair" if memory serves), a free clown face texture that I modified the hell out of in GIMP, and an ancient "subdivided surfaces" freebie body texture kit with a home-grown texture ground out in GIMP. The rest is render settings in D|S and a quickie background whomped out in GIMP (I know, like the umpteenth time I said that name, huh? :) )

Quote - a) Money? Bah. You're looking at a very cheap bastard here. I spend only on what I have to, really. I've gotten by on DS3 (the free version), GIMP instead of Photoshop, an old copy of Rhino3 (which I bought way back in 2004-5 or so), and even older copy of Vue d' Esprit 5 (bought that in 2004).   Hardware? I only recently bothered to move my main CG bits from a 2004 Mac Dual G5, and a cobbled-together 2007-vintage Core Duo Hackintosh... to a brand new Core i7 laptop that I saved for over six months to get. Meanwhile, Wings is still a decent free modeler, Blender is even better (also free, but frustrating), and there are mountains of free figures, morph kits, scenes, and etc for your rendering pleasure.

 

b) spend some time with what you do have - I think you'll suprise yourself. In spite of literally knowing the underlying code, I've only recently gotten around to playing with shaders in D|S (and damn it's fun!) I see you've begun to do much the same thing (this is a good thing, y'know? :) )

 

PS: See that ugly-assed chap to your left? Mike 2, a freebie hair kit ("Kabuki hair" if memory serves), a free clown face texture that I modified the hell out of in GIMP, and an ancient "subdivided surfaces" freebie body texture kit with a home-grown texture ground out in GIMP. The rest is render settings in D|S and a quickie background whomped out in GIMP (I know, like the umpteenth time I said that name, huh? :) )

 

I own Poser 8. I am retired Navy and bought it at the Navy Exchange for $90, with no sales tax ( a perk of the Exchange). I have GIMP 2.6, Blender and Magix Movie Edit Pro 16, which I also bought at the Navy Exchange for $60.

All in all, I am running dirt cheap with what I am doing. I know you can get good results if you work at it. I am working at it. As you stated, I am messing with shaders and nodes now, I actually created a prop using the morph tool (I made a surf board and used Ryan DEV as silver surfer once). But I have miles ahead of me to cover. I have barely scratched the surface with Blender. I may try Wings later if I can't get Blender right away. At least then I will be doing something to work toward my goal.

I have set myself the ultimate goal of making my own movie, with several smaller goals along the way. I bypassed the first one out of frustration (learn lighting), but I am going to go back to it before I go any further with Poser. But I met others, such as learning to pose, learning to animate, walk designer, talk designer, materials room, cloth room, and hair room. My next big thing is Blender. I want to start creating my own characters and using them along with the Poser 7 and 8 characters for this movie.

And at the same time, I am devoting an hour per day to developing the story. Goals for that are creating the backstory for my 5 main characters, back story for any other characters that may interact with the main characters, time lining the main story I am going to tell, and the first 10 pages of script. Once I get that far, then it's on to finishing the script, and the rewrites.

I have a plan in place and in action. So once I start heavy into script, no more movies. I already don't watch tv. All there is there is the same old news and reality (sic) shows. So I will be learning Blender, aquiring Wings3D, and script writing each day. Having the job that I do makes this a bit easier to accomplish, since I am either at sea, or sitting in a hall all day long with nothing to do but my own personal business... as long as I stay put.

So with all that... I am not so discouraged, because the pros have set the benchmark. I just have to get close, not on the money...

I am downloading Wings3D right now. I will probably be on here with a million questions later on. I am going to go install it now. I saw the screenshots on the official website, and it looks like a fairly user-friendly program. But we will see.

Woot! Wings looks really cool. I may have to alter my timeline and really get into it. I went through the manual up to the first tutorial. I like it. I realize it's not as powerful as Blender, but isn't there a lot of content on here made with Wings?