Moho Forum

slowtiger wrote:That's still "in progress" if you call "search for funding" as "progress" ... The telephone sequence will be part of it.

Funny coincidence that the perspective demo is for the same project.
I was originally drawn to the projected by the combination of animation within a real world architecture.

Good luck on the funding.

slowtiger,

By the way, thanks for that tip on how to move an object in perspective. I tried it out and it works very easily.

udd

That's good to hear. I'm glad I could help a bit.

I started a second scene:

http://www.enigmation.de/qt/fon1.html

This one had two points to tackle: the handle should jump on the fork, and the dials had to turn in perspective.

The handle was easy. The fork consists of two images controlled by the same bone, the handle is between them, controlled by another bone. First I animated the fork's up and down, then let the handle get its momentum from the fork, finally added some rotation on it.

The dials where each made from two identical circles with different colours. I put each dial into its own bone layer, placed the second, darker dial with an offset so it created the rim. I created two bones with that same offset and let one control the other. Then I scaled the bone layer to get the perspective.

Fantastic.

At first I didn't consciously notice the subtle detail of the dial having the 3D thickness look, but it certainly adds to the illusion in the mind even when the phone bouncing on the hooks dominates. It perfectly captures the "disturbance of peace" mood when a phone rings.

I couldn't resist trying to emulate the 3D dials, and my skills are now better for it. I put the two dials in separate vector layers under the same bone layer, because I couldn't get bones in separate bone layers to link their angle. But I got something working with see through holes and a 3D thickness in perspective. Thanks for sharing.

I'm now appreciating your chalk look more, in comparison to the sharply defined edges in my AS emulation.

But I don't notice any sort of seams in your animations. I thought when bringing in bitmaps there was often an issue like that. For example, the forks which hold the phone handle, you had to split each in two so the upstage fork appears behind the layer with the handle, and the downstage in front.

Is there any specific technique you use to get your TVPaint bitmaps cut up and then reassembled without seams?

Nope - other than I use PNGs with an alpha channel and try to have a 1px feathered outline when I cut things by hand. As you may see earlier in this thread, I have a small problem with a light visible outline (I posted a pic) - but then it's so small that it will go unnoticed, hopefully, once the scenes are complete - there will be a human character in each.

Looks good - hey, someone's calling you in surreal-land! Does a melting ear answer the phone? Jokes.

Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together. Though if I remember correctly the previous phone was red, so, I'd be interested to see how these two link together.

Mikdog wrote: Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together. Though if I remember correctly the previous phone was red, so, I'd be interested to see how these two link together.

Probably different calls.

Putin and Commissioner Gordon make their calls on the red phone "hotline". Telemarketers, bill collectors and charities call on the regular one.

Ah...never knew that telemarketers' phone calls travelled across deserts on inner-ear shaped bones.

Mikdog wrote:Ah...never knew that telemarketers' phone calls travelled across deserts on inner-ear shaped bones.

Oh, they'll get to you...

"Hello, A1 telemarketing group. May I interest you in a melting clock? If you act now you get two for the price of one."

"Sorry, can't hear you. There's a troupe of elephants with long spindly legs marching past."

Made my day!

I'm really curious about the story line. It's much fun seeing work that's not on a well worn path.

Same scene, this time really finished.

http://www.enigmation.de/fonpan.html



I noticed some wrongness in the colours, especially a lack of contrast, so I reworked every element, painted it new in TVPaint, and put it back into AS - no trouble at all, hadn't even touched the animation. I just imported the new bitmaps, positioned them over the old ones, and layer-bound them to the same bone again, then erased the old image layers.

The character was done frame-by-frame in TVP, then imported as 2 Quicktime videos: one just for the hands in front of the left telephone. At this point I had to shift the scene to 6.1 and noticed 2 nice features:
- I now can select multiple layers and move them all in one go
- video automatically plays once, then gets invisible. There's a checkbox for looping in the "image" layer settings tab.

One problem still persists: soft borders on bright elements don't work at all. Have a look at the clouds: they should blend seamlessly into the sky, but instead they have a dark border. AS seriously is missing a "pre-multiply alpha" option during image import.

Fun!

Is you project such that you could paint right onto the sky, then position that behind the hard horizon line? It looks like you color ramp might be true vertical - so the whole sky won't look like it's panning, if you decide you need parallax.