Author: Greg2B

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Despicable Me Minion Tuts+ App

I was looking on twitter and I saw a post from some one about the aetuts+ contest which some how escapsed my normal look through of my feeds. So this prompted me to think if I should make something real quick just to do something.

I decided to pick a psd tut to do for it. I picked the Despicable Me tut by Mirko Santangelo. My quick idea was to do something using this character to show of the tuts+ network based on the site that I use the most. I’m thinking of using the puppet but I may break it apart some how after I customize my minion.

So I made my despicable character base of the tut, which is nice but the tut was excellent so of course the result would be pretty good automatically. But I wanted to submit more than just a tut result so I finished setting up the app inventor for android which I started a few days ago.

I wound up design a mini interface for my fav tuts+ site with the minion characters. It’s pretty simple overall, I just took the logos from each side and made and put them on a background from the tuts+ sites.

The app doesn’t do too much, pretty my much the same as the hellopurr tut they have but mine will link to a tutsplus+ hub when you click the image and if you shake your phone you hear the minions laughing.

If anyone want to check it out I’ve included a zip file with the source and my apk file.

 

MinionTuts

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Daily 365

NYC Color Correction

NYC Time Lapse Color Correction/Grading

Today I went into NYC for aeny and in addition to learning some cool techniques and other industry news I won a color correction book  by alexisvanhurkman.

This is actually pretty good timing since I’m working on color correcting some footage of video for my father’s client they have recorded. I browse through it on the train ride home and wanted try out some of the things he talked about in the book about changing the mood through color.

So I look to through my stock(bad/dirty word(semi-inside AENY/Industry taboo) footage and found the NYC time-lapse footage I have from pond5.

Original Footage(minus text)

The original image you can see below is more red overall I shifted the color to more blue tones attempting to give it a more cool feeling. Looking at it now I think I should focus or maybe mask out the middle road and adjust that area separately to tone it down as well.

I used Color Finesse plugin in AE to do the coloring although I could have done it just in AE using curves. But then I wouldn’t get all of the scopes and I wouldn’t feel like a real (fake in my case) colorist.

I added the text in just because I wanted to have some animation in it. It’s kind of hard to read due to the angle. I wanted to bring it out more but if you push it to far then it looks even more obvious that it shouldn’t be there.

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Daily 365

Avtocompany Logo 2D-3D WIP 2

This is my second attempt at animating the logo design above. This time I tried to use the tracer object as an alternative to spline warp. This allowed me to keep the front of the truck proportions correct minus the FFD effector I applied. The issue with this is the alignment of the tracer spline object in relation to the back of the truck.

I create a spline from the  back edge using the nifty edge to spline button under the structure menu under edit spline. This made a perfect copy of the back edge for the tracer but if you move the beizer curves on the last point of the spline it looks bad.

I havent figure out a way to fix this yet. I thought of constraint tag but it didn’t do anything. I’ll have to look for another way to align the back or another way of spline warp/follow.

 

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Golfers Are Cool

Revisiting a logo animation for a logo I found on seeklogo.com/. I started this a while ago and posted I believe one render and animation preview of it. This is my finished version that I have completed.

I re did the lightning using some of the techniques talked about by the gorilla in a Chicago mograph meet up.

Presentation – Lighting In Cinema 4D

A lot of the stuff he talked about is already in my work flow from his other talks or what I learned in school/ have figure out. One thing I don’t do all the time is factor in scale, I usually just go for what looks right. Sometimes I scale up, other time not. I choose to this time and I think the results look fairly good.

Animation wise I think it’s ok. I took me a bit to get the rolling of the ball to look decent. Which in the viewer always looks off. I think the hit with the cool and golfer could use some work but it’s ok for now. I forgot trophy 2000 so I did a quick hack and added it on at the end

Apparently I forgot to render to save file and cinema doesn’t like to output an alpha channel when you save from render viewer, so no cool background.

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Daily 365

Avtocompany Logo 2D-3D

I found this cool logo on seeklogos.com and thought it would be cool to try and convert it to 3d and animate it somehow. The logo is of a Passenger transport services, passenger carrier company in the Ukraine.

I took  a while to model the front body practicing some of the tips they gave last week on Cineversity.  The q key to toggle hyper nurbs is a very usefull thing, even though in the end I didn’t use it on this model.

I applied it on a spline warp effector. The front part by the wheels is squished due to the placement of the points I believe. Some thing that I need to fix, along with adding the little roads.

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Starwars Iconoscope Animation Part 3 Final

The final version of the Starwars Iconoscope Animation. Technically I’m late with this post…I feel asleep while waiting to render…but this will count for yesterday’s post. The animation part didn’t take that long but doing the sound took a little bit to do, but too much after I got the flow of using sound booth.

It worked fairly well and it definitely was a lot easier than doing audio in after effects, it does have some odd quirks though which I’m sure you could tweak in the settings. One that was annoying that I didn’t figure out yet is this green line one the side of the video. I’m guessing it’s for audio levels, but I didn’t see an quick obvious way to take it off. I wound up just cropping it out of the frame, which apparently didn’t work on youtube…

My goal with the sound was to have an effect for every “real” motion item that wasn’t associated with a human. So the targets, ships, X’s (on non-humans), and maybe some other items have sounds.

The Background audio transitions from different track that some what go with the movie. I suppose if you’re a true fan you may recognize the songs, although I can say that I would but the listing is below.

2. Main Title/Rebel Blockade Runner
7. The Trash Compactor
9. Ben Kenobi’s Death/Tie Fighter Attack
3. Imperial Attack
11. The Throne Room/End Title
I’m not 100% sure if 03 goes where I put it but it sounded ok.
I can tell some parts need to be worked on a bit more but I have to out put this. I may go back and tweak some audio since I wish I had some better sounds. Well see.
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Daily 365

Starwars Iconoscope Animation Part 2

This is part 2 of the Starwars Iconoscope animation. It’s getting long, 3:11 right now and I’m on scene 23. However the animation went a lot quicker then the previous part, probably because I knew more of what I was doing. I think the timing on some parts still need to be improved though.

The hardest part of this one was first scene for this part, 11. The rope swing was hard to get it to look right and I still think it is off a bit. I looked at the movie for reference, but of course Luke legs are bent up and Leia is horizontal holding on to him. Just a little bit hard to duplicate in Icon format.

I think I’m going to do the sound in sound both so I have some more control. This should allow me to add more little sfx without having a bunch of layers in AE. I’ve only used it once before since it use to freeze up for some reason, so it should be good to learn it again.

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Daily 365

Starwars Iconoscope Animation Part 1

This is the official part one of the Iconosope animation. I did 10 scenes so pretty much 1/3.  I fix some timing in the first two I had done and notice some other areas I need to improve. Although there not to much “actual” animation there is a lot of timing that is involved in it.

I’m trying to have the icons come up in the same patter as a normal speech. So some parts I sped up and other are slow. I also added some cheesy light saber effect for the transitions to the next set of scenes.

I’m thinking for the music I should either mix the whole sound track into one big mix. Maybe 15 or 30 seconds a song or just pick my fav and mix those few. I need to add some more sfx as well.

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Starwars Iconoscope Animation Wip

This is a work in progrss animation for my new weekend/early next week project. Its an animated version of Star Wars IV via Iconoscope. The original design that every linked to is down. Apparently Wayne Dorrington got the lifehacker effect or digg effect or name a big social link site+effect after it when viral and his site went down. But he has a new site, where you can find it. He has a bunch of other cool graphics as well.

I found out about it after the Kickawesomeshow (fun nonsense web, design, music, tech show) talk about it on there show. I thought it would be cool to animate.

I only have the first 10 lines extracted since I wanted to work on this one in parts, unlike the woot animation where I had every thing setup at one. My goal with this animation is basically to tell the story sequentially with some added movement, maybe one or two full animation movements per line.

This whole animation will be about pacing an timing so that it can be read or understood while not being to stale, which I think was an issue in my woot animation. I need to fix some things in this version already.

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Jitters

Today I was working on a design and I needed the color of a manila folder. So google lead me to http://www.colourlovers.com where I found the manila color . Some how I ended up on a pattern page page of the image below.

Originally I though thats cool, I should animate it. Its a bunch of sliders and knobs it would look cool. Then I found out you could easily make patterns your self.

Then I remembered a cool font I wanted to 3Dify* that Brad Chmielewski listed for type tuesday called Stereofidelic.  So I put the two together and came up with the image above.

My subject was Jitters, a really good pizza, sandwich, stuff to eat place in Rochester, NY where I went to college. So using their website/logo colors I created my image in Photoshop and Cinema 4D for the type. Originally I was going to use sketch and toon and export to Illustrator, but I couldn’t get the right look.

I tried to create the type room pattern wall thing while trying to make the text look like it was shaded that way