Hey guys, thanks so much for the praise! When you’ve watched something over and over about a billion times, all you tend to see is all the stuff that’s wrong with it - it’s nice to know that somebody else got a chuckle out of it 
To answer some of the questions:
Just one question (I could ask many), How did you get everything looking so smooth?
This animation was created and rendered in 10.5 alpha, so we took advantage of the new surface sampling that Martin put in plus used porcelain with varying amounts of “Normal Weight”. Martin upped the surface tesselation to 4x4 in this iteration, and it makes a huge difference in how smooth, yet detailed a surface can look. Although I don’t love the idea of a material controlling the surfacing smoothness (seems clumsy to me), one thing that I think IS cool about porcelain is that you can put it on individual groups and vary the amount of “smoothing” you get from it by using the Normal Weight settings - kind of slick once you get used to it… I think it would be nice if porcelain was just a setting under the Group attributes…
Wouldn’t Hash’s new sprites have achieved the same fairy dust effect?
Well, they might have, but the last time I messed with them (a long time ago) the spriticle’s alpha didn’t make it into the image alpha, so you had a bunch of “squares” flying around. The other advantage of using post particles is the control I have over all aspects of how they appear - if they were incorporated into the image, and the art director said, “Hmmmm - I wonder if those particles shouldn’t be more blue…?” - I’d have to go back and re-render the scene. Since it’s done post (particles on their own layer), I can make the adjustments right there and answer his question. I’m a HUGE believer in doing as many things post as I possibly can - this “simple” animation had over 50 layers.
But if so many people dont beleive in AM why are people still using it or still posting about it??
Ah - it’s a total love/hate relationship. I know that other’s will have their reasons, but for me, AM is STILL the easiest package for rigging and animating - so much so that I almost can’t stand using anything else. It’s still pretty much my favorite for modeling and texturing, too, but LW is a close second (except for texturing - yech!). We have Maya, XSI, Max, LW and even Mirai here, but I’d rather animate in AM over any of them. Even after all this time, none of the other packages have managed to even come close to AM’s forgiving, simple workflow and tremendous ease-of-use… which is an amazing testament to how unaware the other developers are…
But I’d be curious to know, JoeW, how many people worked on the animation, including modeling, rigging, lighting and animating?
This is a good point - if you count everybody that had a finger in it, you’re looking at around 10 people. I’d say 5 of us worked on it full-time for about 2 weeks from concept to completion. Most people contributed to at least a few tasks (except the animators who pretty much just animated). I did the lighting, sufacing adjustments, effects, compositing, as well as some smaller animations (leaves) and modeling (I built and rigged the butterfly and some of the set parts - I know, “whoohooo” :). Most of the modeling and rigging was handled by 3 people. We had 4 people working on different aspects of the animations - some working on overall body movements, while others worked on facial animations and things like Tak’s hair (yes, it was animated by hand - eeek!).
I think that an individual could do something like this, but it would take them a lot longer (obviously). Another reason this took us SO long is that in addition to working through rendering problems and that fun stuff, we were constantly working on subtle changes here and there in the animation - tweaking hand positions, blinks, eye movements, expressions, etc. I think we went through about 6 iterations before we found something we were pretty happy with, and if it hadn’t been for the deadline we were under, we probably could have tweaked on it for another week.
The one fact that was driven home for me was how great it is to have a team working on something like this - even if we did argue like crazy about much of it
Sorry this reply was so late - we go Alpha on the game tomorrow, so we’ve been working some pretty crazy hours… it’s lookin’ really good though…
JoeW
