Forums » Smalltalk » AMA - 3D Animation and Epic Week Videos

Since 2011 I've been making animated videos for the RPR, initially to help promote the site and then to celebrate special occasions, such as major updates and of course, Epic Week.

And when I'm not working on videos for Kim, I have a number of original and Star Wars fanfilm projects on the go. The latter being my focus this year with Heir to the Empire.

So, what would you like to know?

How did you get into animation? What sort of resources would you recommend for someone looking to pursue it as an interest?

HEY DARTH why are you so cool and generous to the RPR with your animations?

I wanted to make a Star Wars fanfilm, but I lacked a camera, people to be infront of the camera and a big story idea that would have been beyond the budget of any fanfilm. Probably even now. Animation seemed like the answer, so I experimented with various forms of animation (stop motion with Lego, 2D and so on) before finding that 3D animation was the style that best suited me.

For anyone wanting to get into animation, I'd suggest experimenting with different forms of animation, see what works for them. If it's 3D computer animation, I'd recommend the software I use, iClone. The same people also have a 2D animation software package, that while I've not tried myself, I've heard good things. Both can be found here: https://www.reallusion.com/



That's an easy one, because you're my favourite person to work with ever

Were you approached by Kim about making the promotional vids or did you offer to make them? Also those vids are great by the by.

Gwaa, cool. How do you design your characters, usually? Also what's the hardest thing you've ever had to animate? Also also, are bloopers a thing in animation? "'

It goes back to watching Tangled and really enjoying that movie. I kept thinking, what if those characters updated their character sheets after their adventure was over. I approached Kim with that idea and together we came up with the story. A short time later, the first video was released. The videos that followed, some were my ideas the others were Kim's.

The first RPR videos were made with Moviestorm, it has a built in character creator tool which lets you adjust the facial features, choose clothes, hair etc. It works pretty much like any video game that lets you customise the way your character looks and was often compared to The Sims. When making characters for the RPR, I would stream my desktop to Kim so we could work together on creating them.

Over time I discovered how to mod Moviestorm to bring in my own costumes too, which was especially helpful during the 2012 Epic Week when we were creating 40 characters submitted by the community. Kim helped create the textures for those based on the character art available.

I later moved away from Moviestorm to iClone. The developers released a seperate piece of character creation software called Character Creator (I guess they wanted it to be pretty clear what it does?). It's the same idea as the Moviestorm one, but a lot more powerful and indepth. You can even adjust things like the length of fingernails or the curve of eyelashes. And again, when creating character models for the Hero and Princess, I worked with Kim to get them just right.

Battle scenes are usually the hardest thing to animate, especially when you need lots of characters on screen but the software can only support a handful at a time. They require a lot of planning to pull off effectively. On the opposite side of the scale, really small and subtle animations can be just as tricky. I do enjoy the challenges though.

And yes, you can have bloopers in animation. Voice actors may not be physically acting out the scene, but they are still performing and hilarity can follow when there's a slip up. And in 3D animation, sometimes the objects don't behave the way they should. Such as this physics test video