Playtime

A little something I've been working on this week for the hairloss.com comp and a quick reminder of how great IClone is at creating stills and screenies but how frustrating the animating process can be.  The toy man below has been cloneboned and can be animated similar to any other character except for the fact that the legs and arms are one piece instead of 2 and therefore cannot bend.  Not the end of the world but the legs had to be connected to the hips and the clonebone character will not allow you to get rid of the lower leg section nor the feet.  I shrank them as much as possible but they still exist and therefore toy man walks a few feet above the surface.  No problem, I'll just adjust the transform key and...well, he bobs up and down like a corpse in the Hudson when he starts walking.  Its a problem.  I havent found any keys in the timeline that are causing this so I might just have to figure a workaround.  Still the screenies look nice and I like all the new lighting features and the ease of giving this a washed out super bright look.  

Ive been thinking about the wisdom of posting so many screens of whatever Im working on at the moment.  Does it dull the surprise for the 4 people who happen to see it?  Maybe but my third point overrides this one.

Does it create higher expectations than the project can/will deliver?  Probably.  I see so many great screenies from Iclone projects where the animation ends up stilted and lacking compared to how my imagination spun things upon seeing the shot.  This is probably the case with the screenies I put up but I already know about my shoddy animation skills so no suprises for me..hehe.

I think the real reason I put up so many screenies is because it allows me to think about what I'm doing compared with the visions in my head and to help guide me through the process.  And all this while not cloning about.  For instance, I really like the low camera angle on that second shot.  Makes things look a bit more grandiose.  This is something I will probably be playing around with.  And then I notice that the ball shown in the screenie is the same color of the toy horn squeezie and should be changed.  See, its already worth its weight in screenie gold.   Just sayin.


And since you've put up with my rambles, heres an excellent bathing beauty from Shorpy.com.  Kay Laurell, A Zigfield Follies girl and actress of the silver screen.  Died 5 years after this shot of pnemonia.  Not sure if she's on the banks of the Potomac (note the Washington Monument in the background) or what but those one pieces are excellent.  Or perhaps its that hat.  Eh, either way.