United3dArtists Archive

So, let me open the first thread here and show my first (really) short movie. It is created with TrueSpace 6.6 and MotionStudio. I won with that the latest contest from caligari corporation in March 2009. Now where we can here include YouTube videos directly i created my own account - formerly Mr. Bones had showed the video for me.

here the Video


and here a small making of


If you have any questions - feel free to ask.

I really like what you did with the making of video. It's always cool to see what goes into these kind of animated shorts!

THis was amazing... CHeers

Once again, really nice work. Very cool animation. I'm working with motion studio as well in 6.6 and your animation blows my stuff out of the water. I do have a question. I noticed in your behind the scenes video that certain body parts change color in wireframe mode... the head starts off as a red wireframe that changes color after it pops into place, and the "pants" turn red right before falling down. Why is this? I'm guessing that you're making static (as in, ones attached via motion studio to the main model) layers invisible or visible and doing the same for copied components of the model that are doing the action (such as the pants falling down... switching from MS rigged lower torso to a copy of this for the animation of it falling to the floor). Sorry if I'm not being clear about what I mean here... it's 6 Am as I write this (hehe). Also, any insights on how you did the torch cutting gag? Did you use physics for the seperation of the two egg halves?
Once again, amazingly well done animation.
~Brad

Your are absolutly right. I used a copy of the head and also for the lower egg. The objects are in different layers - thats why the colors are different. For the head i have done this to scale the head and blowing him up before i make him invisible. In the same frame i make the original head visible which is attached to the skeleton.

For the lower egg i used the same method. Normaly the egg is attached to the skeleton but when it is falling down i used the copy.

To the egghull. I tried this with physics but the result was to lazy. So i animated it from hand seperatly for both halvs.

The "torch cutting gag"

Well this was the hardest part and it is difficult to explain. I had long to test to find the right particles and also to find a method for the burned line. Somebody from the german forum gives me the right tip how it could work.

"the burned line":
I used a 2 layer texture. The first layer is a static texture without the black burned line. The second is the same static texture WITH the burned line. Added to this layer is a ANIMATED transparency layer, that means a short video, which includes a black to white animation (black slides over white). I created this with the video editor which is use to postprocess my animation. This transparancy animation makes the burned line visible while the particle flows over it.

I hope that helps, otherwise i can make a small tutorial about that.

Cool. So, basically for the torch cut, the animated mask served the same purpose as, say, a wipe in an editing program.
This is one of the things I like most about doing my own projects... the whole act of experimenting and discovery. I think I understand your explainations.
again, really, REALLY nice work.
~Brad

Yap, exactly - like a wipe transition. All what you need, or what i needed, was an video editing programm what can do this transistion with a precisly amount of frames because the amount of frames for my animation was given be the length of the scene and also thrue the animation of the particles.

One tip as last. Create these video as a uncompressed AVI. I know these files are really big, but trueSpace has sometimes problems to use compressed avi files as textures and crashes all the way.