perfect work!!!
The mini movie is GREAT Rick!!! Showed the band!!! 
Inspirational, as always. Timing looked spot-on to me. 27 seconds to d/l the file to the UK (cable). Thank you.
I luvvit!
Hi Rick,
That’s a great animation. Mind sharing the procedure in Lightwave?
CMD
Hi ,wow that was more of a response that I figured this cruddy animation would get. I figured only a couple of the other old guys would get a kick out of it.
Voodoo,well the first step is to animate it poorly. Then I took my animation into After Effects and time stretched it to about twice the length so basically it was doubled framed. Next I remapped the time ,basically moving back and forth in time to make it look a little more stop motion like. I adjusted the levels up and down to add more flicker and just kept doing junk too it until it looked like this.
The hair was done in LW using SasLite, which was a little tricky considering It’s the lite version and has limited capabilities . I would have liked to add a fey more colors and textures but I reached the limit. I guess I should break down and get the full version.
SS810, I really wanted to use LW9 and take advantage of the Displacement maps and sss so I was disappointed when I couldn’t get it to work. I have had trouble on my MAC with LW9 . though 8.5 works fine .
Womball yah the aging was a bit over done , I guess there are filters to do that but I don’t have them I just made some stuff in PS that I applied in AE, I suppose I should have looked at some old screwed up film first. And I was going for an old Kong look.
Gorilla, figured you would like it
Moochie 27sec! I’m Jealous It took 5min on my computer when I tested it.
Catman Dude,Hi buddy how are you? Well let’s see I still haven’t caught on to the whole rigging process so I separated the head from the shoulders figuring that the hair would cover the join. I relocated the pivots on the head , shoulders, teeth ,and eyes to the place where I thought that they should pivot. I created 37 morph maps in Modo, though I only used as few of them in this animation, In LW I used morph mixer to morph between them and basically just rotated the other bits on their pivot points .I’m by no meens an expert but I would be happy to show you in person some time if you would like.
Thanks everyone
I have heard that LW 9 is buggy. Its doesn’t seem odd to have problems with that. Although displacement maps always seem to be hard to control. I wonder if normal maps could work instead? 37 morph targets is crazy! Do you have a render of all of them in a sequence?
GAH!!!
thats great!
God I love stop motion… : )
Serously tho MM, this is really neat.
I know you are a Lightwave user but in Maya one way to make animation look more like stopmo is to change the curves between the keyframes to step or linear insted of spline.
I havent used LW in a long time but I am pretty sure there is a curve based animaton editor in there. I have also used script to remove every 3rd or 4th frame from a sequence after it was rendered.
I think the post process you did looks great too. Thoe plugins tend to look like…well, plugins.
Scott
Clash of the Titans was my 7th voyage of Sinbad.
Rick, That’s a heck of a Willis O’Brien tribute… Imagine what he would have done if he had the tools we do today.
You really got a lot of miles from that SasLite hair. It looks quite realistic. The full version must rock bigtime. I really like the eyeballs also. They sparkle nicely.
Hope you and yours have a happy holiday,
Dickie
it’s alive ! ti’s aliVE !!
nice rick i love the old movie touch 
Nice to see him animated. . .I agree it looks fantastic. Although I do think you went a tad overboard with the noise etc.
Keep it up Monstermaker
Hi Guys,Thought that you might like to see what he looks like in color animated. Too bad the animation isn’t better ,but it’s color.
I should have spent a little more time and modeled a proper body and put at least a simple rig in it instead of just moving the whole shoulder area as one big unit on it’s pivot.
Again more than anything I was wanting to see how the face morphs worked.
I guess that is enough excuses.
http://www.monsterbaker.com/monsterstuff//apehdrcomp.mov.zip
Great to see your progression in 3d. Once you can make the software do what you want I think we will all be in for a treat. Keep it up!
Hi,
good to see you continuing with him.
Since i don´t know anything about Lightwave or so i´d like to
know what´s the reason for the sharp transition between the fur
and the skin? And is there a technical reason for the "additional
joint" in his jaws? Just curious .
J.
It’s a very cool animation!!!
I love his expression.
This is your style.
How to made Hair of Gorilla?
Shinichi Wakasa
Looking great dude! I really like the morph shapes.
One thing you might want to play with is a slightly different way of animating the eyeballs rotation. One thing that used to frustrate me when I was doing animatronics was eye line focus, you can tell when a character does not “lock” on to something with its eyes, when the head moves the eye stays locked on its target. This is almost impossible to puppeteer correctly, because it has to in 100% sync with the head. So no matter how hard I tried I felt they always lacked a spark of life.
What you can do in the CG world is use a direction constraint ( or look at constraint) to point the eyes at an object, animate that object from place to place and the eyes will follow. SO like when the head leans back the eyes can stay locked on the viewer for example. Its amazing what this one little thing can do for a characters believe-ability.
I wished you used xsi, I could hook you up with a sweet monkey rig.
I am really getting a kick out of your tests. Keep it up dude!
Greg
What an awesome display of talent mostermaker. Keep it up.
The morph targets look great. . .nice transitions between them. Is he going to talk too?
Can’t wait to see more.
Big Bucks yah how long is it going to take to get the software to do what I want. I guess it’s just a matter of learning how to use the softwares properly and for me trying to figure it out on my one has been a slow process. But fun.
jmeyer, the problem is that I don’t know anything about LightWave either. this is the first time I tried to put hair on a character using the plug in that came with LW called saslite. It’s a limited version of sasquatch and only allows for a few instances of hair and on a limited number of polys. And basically I don’t know how to use it. I didn’t know that I put an additional joint in his jaw but I am assuming that you think that by the way the jaw distorts when opening and again I say it’s because I don’t know what I am doing and just trying to learn the softwares.
Monsters , Sas lite see above
Greg ,yes that would involve some sort of rig and I was just moving each eye on it’s pivot but I hear what you are saying.
mrjAnim, I don’t think he will talk. I did some lip-sync with my troll in LW and found it very hard without any additional plugins .And besides I don’t see him speaking
Thanks for looking I think it’s time to move on to something else
Nice animation!
Sas Lite is hard to get variations in density. There’s no controlling it with alphas. The only way to do it is to add the plugin a few times to your model and set them differently. You can only add so many “layers” of Saslite materials before you reach a maximum allowed. But you did awesome with what you had there. SasLite never looked so good!
I’ve tried on a few different models to created a gradual decrease in density and it is extremely difficult.
Here’s a link to Newtek’s eye rigging tutorial. Maybe you’ve already seen it. It basically shows how to do just what punchatz said. A few easy steps and you can animate a null point which the eyes focus on. Pretty handy.
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/animation/eyes/index.html