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I am planning on doing a short film and I wanted to ask for your help

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#1

Here 's the thing: I am planning a Miyazaki style (pretty stylized, like in Spirited Away) 3D short film. I am planning on doing this 5 minutes piece in a year.

I am a good illustrator and have experience lighting and rendering in 3dStudio Max.

I am starting to use Zbrush for modelling but I have NO experience in animating and I just don’t know what I have to do with the finished model.

I am just asking for the general guidelines for animating a human model and what programs and workflow would you recommend.

Any help in any form will be very welcome.

I thank you in advance and I expect to keep you up-to-date with my progresses.

#2

MotionBuilder. Enjoy. :wink:

#3

what programs and workflow would you recommend
No other way to put this; how much you got to spend?

#4

Hmmm, I am watching the Motionbuilder vids at Autodesk and it really looks amazing…

Do you build the rig or skeleton there in MotionBuilder?

#5

I’d look at Max’s “Character Studio” it’s great for animating bipeds. A 5 min. animated piece is going to be a lot of work (a year sounds about right!). Gather as much info as you can about methods others have used doing similar projects in max. Since you’re an artist, you already know the value of doing lots and lots of RnD and prep. I’d also suggest trying to make your project as non-linear as possible. By this I mean, don’t finish your models, texturing etc. before you start animating and rendering etc… You’ll have lots of great ideas during the process, and if your pipeline is flexible, you can more easily incorporate them. For example, and not to offend anyone here, but (if you don’t already know) you’ll find that lighting and animation (acting) is going to be much more important than models and textures. It’s more fun and fresh to work this way too. Max and Character Studio are good for that…

Good luck!

Allan

#6

Only heard good things about this:
http://www.catoolkit.com/home.asp
But I never saw it. I have XSI… And that has no tools in that direction.
Lemo

#7

Hmmm, that’s cool. Thx a lot alnh and lemonnado…

I haven’t have used Max for a couple of years and that’s a LOT of time in computer time… I hear that the last versions of 3dsmax are pretty good and have included radiosity rendering, soft lights and so on… I used to render in brazil but I don’t know if that’s is necessary at this point.

I’ve read as well that discreet has acquired Maya and right now I don’t know what the adventages of Maya vs. 3dsmax are.

#8

All I can say is that it is extremely confusing right now. XSI is superior to the other packages regarding animation. But then, it’s more a 3D CG production solution platform. It is ‘deep’ and geared towards character animation, large scenes, complex renders. One might be more happy with Max and VRay. On the other hand, there are those cool plugins and the broad base of 3rd party apps for Maya. THEN… there is C4D which has grown by bounds and leaps during the past couple of years. It has a lot of cool plugins and addons and is the cheapest package when you wish to include hair and a cool particle system. So, you see, if you nail your requirements down, then you can match it against features in packages. Due to the fact that all of them are available as trial versions you can see how well you can work with each of them. Whatever you like to do, you can do it in Maya as well as in 3dMax, as well as in XSI, as well as in LightWave… The only difference is comfort regarding one or the other section (render, modeling, texturing, animation). Price wise, nothing beats the combo of XSI Foundation and ZBrush. Both together cover you verry well.

Good luck and don’t get to confused.
Lemo

PS:Throw in corporate politics into your selection process and you will never be able to make a decision regarding your tools.

PPS: Another alternative is to build your own 3d package with a separate modeler, renderer, texturing package… e.g. Modo 201 and Project Messiah… But there you go an adventurous way… At the end of the day you have to upgrade./maintain a BUNCH of apps…