London_Ranger

Echoing Swissy, like the poster a lot and looking forward to the anim when its ready
I know how tricky it can be from a CG point of view, but can only begin to imagine the work involved with a hand-drawn project
I'll definitely be standing by for this one.

I've always been a sucker for dramatic cover art
I've been watching your stuff on here for a while now - (really like the Major Europe concept btw )
Although I can't see inside your head, I can see from the drawings you've posted that you have some great compositions in mind with lots going on - exactly the kind of stuff I used to carry around in my head too

I like the Major's form in this, his build looks good, but I have to agree with Voltburn about the face. Faces are tricky, but like everything practice can overcome that, and a few 'tricks' to simplify.

I mostly do things on the PC now, but I've always pencil drawn and still doodle ideas and sketches with a 2B or 4B on cartridge paper - doodle or practice whenever you're in the mood to draw, and don't be too concerned about making a grand masterpiece ... a single figure, a masked head, or even a close up of an enraged frown can be as dramatic as anything, against a blank or shadowed background, and can maybe let you concentrate on improving a specific element, say heads, without worrying about hands and feet, or vice versa - just an example.

Back in prehistoric days there was a book called How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
I bought that as a kid and it had some very good drawing tips for 'comic-style' drawing. I have no doubt there are more up-to-date guides available now, but I found it very useful at the time, and being so old, it should be cheap or at least available from a library, so see what you think of it.

Obviously there are 'proper' art books that really get into anatomy, proportion, human musculature etc. ...but for making cool comic style drawings those things can wait till later.

Keep up the good work, and have fun doing it!

Thanks for all the comments folks, really glad you all seem to have enjoyed the vid
And same to those folks who have looked in from US Boards

Well I liked it, and it appears that I'm not in a minority
I wouldn't get caught up in 'comparing' your work to anyone else's. Everyone's different, every composition is different.
Only you can see what's in your imagination, and if you're anything like me you are probably your own harshest critic.
Have fun creating whatever you create, and never be embarassed to share it.

Yep Vango is correct (thanks for the in-game tell by the way - you got me just as I was about to log and call it a night ), music is from my soundtrack collection somewhere, so probs from a movie.

Save your nominations for someone else's work guys, but thanks for the thought anyway

Right - I'm off to bed!

*stunned silence*

War Witch stopped by?
Awesome!

W00t! Redname post

Thanks for all the comments folks

Thanks guys, really appreciate the compliments

I only get to play with these things in my spare time so I had to be pragmatic about the animated clips I rendered out of Poser. There are a fair few sections where annoying rendering artifacts show up, and some speed issues here and there but I realised - if I got too precious about everything, I'd still be re-rendering some things even now, and I was far too impatient to see how everything would look stitched together so I just used what I had, and got on with it.

Amusingly enough I only realised I'd forgotten to attach part of the costume for one of my own alts after a longish render, and really didn't wanna re-do it (not telling which alt!)

So, I won't pretend its perfect but I'm pretty happy how it turned out

@Arctic Princess & Mother's Love - you've pretty much nailed what I was hoping to do; catch a little of the excitement the game offers in allowing you to be a 'Super'

The spiel was actually going to be a bit longer, (from "Invincible", to "Defend the innocent?...Dominate the weak?") giving me an opportunity to go to town a bit more on the powers side (so much potential fun there), but it would have overrun.
Early on I chose the music and used that to set the length of the whole thing - ensuring I'd have to be short and to the point.

@Swissy - MoCap was such a timesaver where I could use it, I had to do some judicious cutting and splicing of Mocaps wherever possible
though, as I couldn't find huge variety in the stuff freely available on the net unfortunately, hence some movement inconsistencies - but yeah, when it works MoCap can really rock!


Arctic Princess I'll have to get back to you on that request - I'm all animated out at the mo
(Although I am kinda intrigued-post some screenies/links with the toons in question so I can see who we're talking about - no promises mind )

Thanks Cynic
...Sapphic Neko you may have detected his fatal weakness ....muffins?

I'm always marvelling at the player-made vids made with demo-edit. Tried it - couldn't get my head around it

Been playing around with the animator in Poser again for the last few weeks and had some fun messing about with some of the CG models I made for my comic. As I mentioned in Infurnus's thread I pulled together a few short clips to make a sort of CoX Promo for a bit of a laugh and to see how far I could stretch the tools
Lol! Got so carried away lost sight of the original idea and had to edit things down

Quite surprising what you can manage with a bit of music and Adobe Premiere to stitch it all together.

Be The Hero/Be the Villain! viewable online in a really rubbish resolution...

or if you're on broadband just download the Quicktime file here (91Mb) to watch properly

Dunno what happened to the files on the other links
Anyway, re-hosted the PDFs here, when you see the button ignore what it says, just right-click and 'Save Target As':

PDF of pages 1-11 (3.8Mb)

PDF of pages 12-21 (3.5Mb)

These links should be a bit more reliable.

Yup - definitely agree with the guys above, stoyboard is your visual skeleton of whats to come. Even if its done in stick-figure format its essential because it gives you a clear idea of how much (and what) imagery will be needed to cover the sequences you have in mind. In animation if you change your mind about something you end up throwing away scores, even hundreds of drawings at a time - solution: Storyboard first and stick to it.

I'm not that familiar with Flash so I don't know what the number frames per second of animation you can get away with to maintain the look you want but whatever that number is, multiply that by 60, and then multiply that by how many minutes of animation you want in your piece; the end figure is roughly how many individual images that will need to be produced.

There will be sub sequences in there that whatever software you use will be able to handle by itself to some degree thus speeding up the process - having a storyboard helps to plan for those areas.
But the vast majority of the animation will most likely be down to careful, careful, careful, planning and manual drawing of your moving elements.

There are many tips the guys have mentioned and certain things you can do to make the most of the work done, like clever re-use of background images, careful camera use to simplify certain compositions etc.

Again, hoping this isn't coming across as patronising at all - its good that you have your stories in place already, but the animation stage is going to be a considerable wedge of effort, particularly for a one-man band.

Definitely urge you to go down the short intro route first, maybe a 30-second "Coming Soon" clip or something, it will give a you a huge insight into what can be done and what to realisticly expect. And you'll have fun doing it

These have been around for a while, see what you make of them...
BruceTimm style templates

and here's an interesting tutorial showing how some people have used them

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A lot of action going on without being too overcrowded.

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Really love this piece
Agree with the above - its a very dynamic image that captures the action so well.

Can't offer any crit - nothing I'd do differently, loads there I wish I could do myself

Awesome!
I would love to see a JLA style CoX animation! I really loved that series, especially considering I'm generally more Marvel oriented (although storywise I kind of preferred the first 2 seasons before it went Unlimited)

Reading between the lines, I'd agree that something done Flash related might be a good bet.
Resouce-wise there are some templates available for drawing your own Bruce Timm - style characters, I can post a link if its any use for you.

ToonBoom studio is supposedly pretty good - may be worth going for a trial of that, unless you already have it.

Whatever tools you end up using for the compositing side of things (putting the animation together with the audio) will be well down the list I'd guess.

What you have got planned - full stories etc, is gonna take a lot (a hell of a lot) of time to produce. Its a lot of images to cover how ever many minutes you have in mind, at minimum 25 frames per second.

Just a thought, but maybe try out a trailer or short promo in whatever packages you think you might wanna use, just to get a feel for whether you think they're going to be easy enough/productive enough for you.

Man, I hope none of that sounds like I'm trying to put you off - really not the case
As I mentioned already I'm currently dabbling in some animation of my own so I can definitely say I'd be interested to see anything you're working on
Thumbs up from the Ranger

Yup - have to agree with Merrow on this one

Whatever mixture of methods used makes no difference - thats a great pic!

Hhmmmm.... Think I'll go browse your DA

Sounds like a really cool idea
I've been toying with a similar idea - though nothing quite as ambitious as fully animated story, just the odd short clip, or mini SG promo.

There are a lot of different programs out there, but your choices will depend on how much, if any, money you want to spend and just as importantly - how steep a learning curve you're prepared to climb.

What sort of images will you use for your animation?

Cheapest and possibly least time consuming route would be to use the game engine itself - there are lots of demo-edited movies out there that have been produced to really high standard, and all that you would require in addition would be 'Windows Movie Maker' (built-in Windows freebie), and a sound editor of which there are plenty on the internet (all it has to do is be able to record voices/music into wav or mp3 format) and then you stitch it all together in Movie maker.

If you are planning to free-hand draw any of your elements yourself, then you could look to something like this which can produce pretty reasonable results - seems to have quite some potential too, although I haven't tried it myself.

I won't go into CGI - that's a whole subject in itself, unless its of interest to you.

Going back to the 'stitching together the images and audio' side of things, if Movie Maker doesn't quite offer the functionality you need, then consider something like Adobe Premiere Elements - don't know what version they're on now, but I got a cut down version free with my mobile phone last year. Once you get used to it, it can do some really cool things

Hope that helps a little

EDIT: Oooh, just saw SoulsAsylum's post - that sounds like a really good book - nice recomendation! English Lang Link for "The Animator's Survival Kit"

Continuing the theme thats produced some cool art over the last few days, I figured I'd have a crack at one - so far not been much love for poor old Manticore so meet...

Manticora!

Been wanting to try a manga'ish look for a while.

Really impressive - nicely pencilled

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Oh, wow. That's amazing!

...didn't recognise the software. What was it you were using?

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What he said

Brilliant - keep this thing rolling!

I've really enjoyed looking at the hero art thats been cropping up here on the boards lately, certainly hope to see more
Was quite inspired by seeing the various 'Comic Cover' style pics from Political_Commis, Jenbot and others, so thought I'd have a crack at one of my own in-between fiddling around with the comic, especially since I got some more 3D stuff to play with.

Anyway here's a cover - no special story to go with it, just some old-style comic-y stuff
There are a few small flaws and inaccuracies but I'm going to plead 'artistic license'* on those


A Night in Siren's...


*translate - couldn't be bothered to postwork some of the details

Seconded - love the pic! You seem to have started something of a theme around here

I'd say you were being pretty modest there mate - really nice orchestral theme,if anything I'd say I didn't really pick up on the CoH elements, it was very original and had that kind of anthemic superhero vibe

I may not know much about music but I know what I like - 10 out of 10 sir!

Go! Go ...Synapse Girl? Lady Synapse? Ms Synapse?

Ultimate Synapse!

Nice sketch btw mate!

Nice pic

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A nice picture, and an interesting concept indeed...
Good lord, imagine a female Recluse!

Stephanie Richter is... Lady Recluse, Spider Queen of Arachnos. Marcie Cole, The Stateswoman...

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...hmmm...sounds like an idea for a thread of "alternate visions" of the signature characters maybe?