Yeah. Made that shit back in 2002. And since (obviously) I didn’t go to animation school, that was early learning (and a bit hard to watch now). The goal now is speed. My first commercial took 4 months to complete and 450 hours to render. Now start at 11 PM with script and have vid ready to upload by 3:30 AM.
You seem to come out with these fairly rapidly. I have always seen 3-D animation as a tortuously slow medium to work in. How far has the software for this type of thing come along?
I messed around with 3-D software in the 90s and the learning curve seemed so steep that I never got past just doing static illustrations with X Y and Z axes, much less animating anything with it. Then I stayed away so long, I forgot what little I even learned then. I noticed some other posters on other boards creating a frequent output of 3-D animated skits lately though, and it piqued my interest about how maybe faster processors and shorter rendering times, along with more user-friendly interfaces may have lessened the arduous process of creating 3-D animation.
Has it? Or is it just easy if you are extremely skilled and willing to put in the hours to actually read the manual and do the tutorials? I just got a program for Mac called Kinemac that seems promising, but have not spent time with doing anything other than twirling around a 3-D package design.
Believe it or not (or whatever) I’m using a real old version of LightWave on PC. The thing I hate about upgrades is the readjusting. Especially when manufacturer is trying to gravitate towards imitating someone else’s software. I mean, a carpenter isn’t having to relearn how to use his hammer every 6 freakin’ months! From the commercial side, I figured there were plenty of super high-end animation houses out there charging an arm and a leg for commercials. I wanted to be able to give quality product to local businesses. To make that happen, I needed to streamline the animation production without making it suck. I’m probably used in animation schools as a good example of bad animation. But ya can’t break the rules if ya don’t know what they are!
If Stanley™ thought they could get people to buy a new hammer every year by making the handle a different color and no longer having it work with any of the existing nails that were on the market, I’m sure they would do that.
I told them them that hugs are better than drugs, but then found out that they were talking about Hash, Inc. and some software called “Animation Master:’
I know when it came out it was an awesome break from the other programs, much more user friendly. I only saw it in passing, just like the others. LightWave has a couple of real advantages: the best render engine in the business, boat load of plugins that come with it, and (if you’re into character animation) a far more organic modeler. Kinda like f’d up playdough rather than mechanical cad format. It’s flawed, but I found that if ya got used to the process, and watched a couple a tutorials, you’d fall in love with it.
