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Posts Tagged ‘Filmmaking’

Tips for Poser Animators: The Best Free Film School

Monday, September 21st, 2009

When we’re starting out with character animation, we tend to rejoice when we finish a single render. But for every animator, there is the desire to do more, to actually combine the individual renders into a single, cohesive story. The problem is that for many of us, it’s a whole new level of complexity when we start looking at going beyond an animated clip and into the realm of film. Film is a new language to learn, and while there are many very reputable film schools scattered around the world, there are several free film schools available to those who seek them out.

Now, we’re going to talk a lot about the craft of filmmaking in this article, and everywhere you read filmmaking just substitute it with Poser Animation. For our purposes, the two are indistinguishable. The techniques may be different, but the language of film is the same as the language of animating with Poser or Daz|Studio.

So, what are these film schools? They are the Public Library, Film Festivals, and the Internet.

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You know, you really should subscribe to our mailing list…

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

By now, you probably know that our store is open, and our first motion-captured animated pose packs for Poser and Daz|Studio are for sale. But, did you know that our mailing list subscribers get a few extra benefits, just for subscribing to our mailing list?

For example, our mailing list subscribers this month get a coupon entitles them to a 10% discount on any purchases they make in the store from now until November 15, 2008.  They also get the chance to download, for free, a solo move (animated pose) for Michael 3.  And, they also get an idea as to what’s coming down the pipeline from PoserMocap.com.  And believe me, there’s some interesting stuff that we’ve got in the works.

And they get benefits like this each and every month.

Now, if you are anything at all like us, you’re not a big fan of mailing lists.  That’s one reason why we chose to make this mailing list as painless as possible.

First, we do not sell or give away your mailing address to anybody.  Ever.  Period.

Second, we limit our e-mails to you to one big e-mail newsletter in the month, and no more than one small product announcement in the rest of the month.

Third, you get benefits that you can use from our mailing list.  Discounts, free stuff, and a lot more are planned for future e-mail newsletters.

So how does that work for you? You can subscribe today by filling in your name and e-mail in a box in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

You’ll be glad you did.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 9

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Scene 18:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Though it has been awhile, we have updated Officer Murphy, here is a look at mocapped animation used to create the shot of Murphy walking through the deserted graveyard. We’ve uploaded the video to Youtube, but we’ll try to get a much higher-resolution video uploaded to the site in the next day or so.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 8

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

We’ve had to re-render one scene in Vue a few times to eliminate texture crawling. Unfortunately, the solution of increasing texture sampling pushed the render times upwards dramatically. We still have 36 hours to go on the render farm as of this writing.

Fortunately, we can keep working on other stuff as this renders in the background across our render farm. So, tomorrow, we’ll be working on Poser animations from the motion capture data we grabbed earlier this week.

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Art of the Title Sequence

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Art of the Title was brought to our attention today. It contains opening sequences from several movies and television shows and is an excellent resource of ideas for filmmakers who want to figure out how to get the best start for their film.

Hat tip to Video Copilot.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 7

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Day 7 of the Officer Murphy Project was spent animating the second scene of the project, which is still cooking away on the render farm. We’re still in Vue 6, working on creating a shot of the moon as we move through the Bayou trees and Spanish Moss. It’s a nice, moody establishing shot that, unfortunately, needs to be rendered all the way through. No time-saving tricks like yesterday, sadly.

We also spent some time in the Motion Capture studio, and we managed to capture motions for Murphy and Kowalski for three separate scenes. We’ll be doing a few more days of Mocap for this project before we get right into the character animation in Poser.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 6

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Scene 1:

First Look at the Bayou

We put in some time today working on what will be the first scene of the film. This is an opening shot of the Bayou where Officer Murphy has his very bad day.

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Advice to a Young Artist

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with a starting multimedia student. You see, a short interview with a person in the industry was an admissions requirement for her multimedia program.

Yeah, it was flattering. But we didn’t let it go to our heads too much. :)

However, the closing interview question started a discussion that we felt should be shared with our readers here on Posermocap.com. It was an inocuous enough question–”do you have any closing advice or comments?” but it opened up two interesting threads.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 5

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Officer Kowalski Reporting!

Officer Kowalski Ready for Action!

Today, we were able to complete the texturing of Officer Murphy’s co-star, Officer Kowalski. We used Daz’s Victoria 3 as the foundation for Kowalski and used the Real World Heroes – Police for the uniform. Both of these are available from Daz3d.

Although the uniform itself is only available for Michael 3 and David 3, this was easily addressed by using PhilC’s Wardrobe Wizard 2.0. The clothing conversion proved to be very straightforward.

The one hitch which did occur was in the conversion of the Utility Belt. To ensure that the holsters and pouches were consistent with Officer Murphy’s, we ran the Wardrobe Wizard conversion on the Utility Belt itself and then used Modo to re-position duplicate holsters from Murphy’s belt. It took us a few tries to get it, but as you can see, it looks just fine on Kowalski.

We also took the opportunity to change the shading style we’ll be using on our characters. Rather than using the tri-tone celshading style we used on Murphy yesterday, we’ll be going with a soft-edged duo-tone shading style for the production. Ordinarily, this would mean another half-day spent retexturing Murphy to the new shading style, but one of the nice features of Unimesh figures like Daz’s Michael 3 and Victoria 3 is that they share surfacing data. One figure’s material sets can be applied to another’s with just a click of the mouse. And since we used Wardrobe Wizard to convert the uniforms, those share surfacing data as well–another click or two to convert Murphy’s uniform to match Kowalski’s and we’re set.

So far, we’ve used standard poses to show off Murphy and Kowalski. Next week, we’ll animate them using motion-capture-driven animations.

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Officer Murphy’s Bad Day – Day 4

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Officer Murphy Revealed!

First Look at Officer Murphy.

Day 4 was spent finalizing the texturing on our lead character, Officer Murphy. We decided right from the onset of the project that we would be going for a Non-Photorealistic look to the film for two reasons.

First, NPR allows you to really accelerate production by simplifying your lighting rig for each shot. With less lights to worry about, you can get your scenes set up and rendering faster.

Second, we really like the “toon” look. We’ve used a combination of shaders, textures, and post-processing techniques to get a look that replicates the cel-shaded stylings of anime and cartoons.

Officer Murphy is based upon the Daz Michael 3 character, with the Real World Heroes – Police clothing and props set.

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