I recently completed a project I have been working on for about the last four years. I worked on it on and off, and didn't get to spend as much time as I wanted on it due to college and work. But finally I was able to complete it. It is the second chapter of an animation series I started back in high school. The completed video is posted below, with more information about my process after that.
The animation was made entirely using Microsoft Paint. This was a very tedious process, and was not super enjoyable. I like animating, but Paint does not have a lot of features and caused a lot of frustration at times. I used Paint because that was what I had been using for the first chapter, which I created in high school. The first chapter is embedded below this paragraph. I think there is definitely a noticeable increase in quality between the first and second chapters. The second chapter had better quality frames, as well as having far more motion. The scenes of flying through the mountains took the longest to make, and were the most tedious, due to having to continuously redraw the mountain sides. I was very happy once I finished that portion, the rest was much more enjoyable in comparison.
In the future I think I would use Gimp to draw the animations, since it has support for layers, which would allow me to erase and change the foreground without messing up the background. This was my main frustration with Paint, since it took a long time to fix the backgrounds after I would move/redraw objects in the foreground. I think the only reason I stuck with Paint through the whole process was out of familiarity and consistency. Layer capabilities would definitely allow me to work faster.
I used Windows Movie Maker to arrange all the frames and create the animation without sounds. I then used Blender and used the video editor to add sounds, since it allows you to use multiple channels and has some pretty great features. Blender is a very powerful program, plus it's free. I have also created a short 3D animation with it in the past, and I hope to make more in the future. I wasn't even aware that it had a video editor, but I'm very happy that I learned that before working on the sound effects for this video. Although it is a pretty complicated program when you are just starting out, you get used to it over time and it has a lot of amazing capabilities. The video editor built into Blender is also probably the easiest part of it to use, and I picked it up pretty quickly.
I searched online for the majority of the sound effects, and found quite a few good effects on royalty free sites. The sources are listed in the video description. I was lucky to find a lot of sounds that fit pretty much perfectly with what I had in my mind. The best match was the sound I managed to find for the alien's gun firing and exploding. I'm very happy with how the sounds turned out overall.
The opening title and closing credits were made using Gimp. Gimp has a lot of great capabilities, and it worked very nicely for creating a decent looking title. I watched a tutorial and modified the result until it looked pretty nice. I also threw in a couple Monty Python and the Holy Grail references in the end credits if you manage to catch that.
I have a whole short series planned out for these videos, and I'd like to get to work on them eventually. They are very time consuming though, so it may be some time before I manage to complete the next video. I also have several other projects I'd like to work on in my limited free time, including finishing a Java/GWT application and possibly an Android app, and remaking the Chapter One video as a 3D animation in Blender, as well as working on additional 3D HeroClix map boards. If you're curious about these projects check out the other posts on this blog. Due to all of these projects, it would be nice if I could have an animation team for my videos. I do enjoy animating, but for me I think I get the most enjoyment out of telling the story and editing. That would be the ideal situation, but it's very wishful thinking since it wouldn't be a paying gig. But a guy can dream right?
Well thanks for reading this and watching my video! Let me know what you think of it and if you have any suggestions for improvement, I'm always grateful for constructive criticism. If you're interested in the projects I'm working on stay tuned/subscribe to this blog, I'll keep posting here when I make progress on my projects.
I have always enjoyed making movies and videos, and I have made a couple animations using Microsoft Paint and Movie Maker. I've wanted to try 3D animation for a while but just haven't had time for it. But recently I downloaded and started using Blender now that I have found a little more free time. I thought a good way to introduce myself to the program would be to make a short intro video for my Paint animation series. Blender is an extremely confusing and disorienting program when you first start it up. I've used several different 3D modeling programs for my civil engineering studies, such as MicroStation, AutoCAD, and SketchUp, but it is very different from all of these. So after watching lots of tutorials I managed to come up with the video below. Hope you enjoy, let me know if you have any questions!
Over the past month or so I have been working on a 3-D HeroClix map with a couple friends for fun. I thought I would post here what we did and how it turned out.
We came up with the initial idea quite a few years ago when we were getting into HeroClix. We thought the game was fun, but if the characters are 3-D why wouldn't the map be? So we started out trying to make it out of pieces of paper folded into box shapes as buildings. That project didn't last very long, since young kids don't have a very long attention span. So after a while we stopped playing HeroClix, but recently now that we're in college we got back into it. So this time we decided making a map would be fun, and we actually put some time and effort into it and got it finished.
We put some thought into the layout and I decided that since SketchUp has built in 3-D models it would be pretty easy to make the layout on there. After downloading SketchUp and googling around how to do a few things I completed the design, which didn't take that long. The program was very easy to use, especially after a lot of experience with CAD software thanks to studying civil engineering. The video below shows the resulting initial design:
After finishing up the design we got some materials. We became very familiar with Hobby Lobby over the next week or so, and got some really cool stuff from them. Later on we found out Wal-Mart had most of the normal stuff like glue and paint for much cheaper, but Hobby Lobby still had some stuff we needed like miniature bushes, trees, and grass. We started off using some thin foam from the Dollar Tree as a base, but after gluing some grass to it it started to curl up. We then tried some thicker wall insulation type foam from Lowe's, which would have worked great, except we found out that glue likes to eat through foam. So after wasting quite a bit of grass material and also quite a bit of foam we decided to get particle board from Lowe's. They cut it for us there to the size we wanted and it worked out great.
Finally we were actually making progress without having to start over. From then on it moved pretty smoothly. It turns out all the extra foam we got ended up being really useful, as we used it for walls and other craft pieces. Below you can see the video showing the initial design and final design compared:
I set up some of our HeroClix on the board to make it look cooler and give a sense of scale. Below is the pond square. We decided on making a map that is larger than the typical 2-D maps since we've been having more and more people play with us lately. We also wanted it to be able to be stored easily, so we made it 4 equal sized squares put together. We spray painted the edges of the maps concrete colored with some textured spray paint from Wal-Mart. This way it looks like they are all surrounded with a sidewalk, which makes them rearrange-able to any layout we want, easy to store, and we can build more map pieces later to add in without having to redo the whole thing.
Pond Square
For the pond we bought a pack of melt and pour water from Hobby Lobby. It was really easy to use, we just created a little foam barrier around where we wanted the pond to be, and then we painted the ground blue, melted the water, and poured it in.
Cap and Red Skull
For the bushes we used some bush material from Hobby Lobby. In order to make it easier to see where a square was we made them like a bush with an indentation in the middle. This also makes it look more like the character is hiding inside the bush too. The bushes were pretty difficult to work with since it took a lot of glue and they didn't really want to hold. We sprayed them with a ton of spray glue when we were satisfied with how they looked, and they hold together pretty well. It's a couple weeks later and I think they still haven't dried. Overall though they turned out to look pretty nice. The new sets with the wide bases don't fit in the bushes, but the older characters nestle in pretty nicely.
The benches were made out of some of the foam we got from the Dollar Tree, and they turned out pretty nicely too. They aren't glued down, and we use them as light objects and hindering terrain.
The next board is another park scene. This one has a tree in it, which we picked up from Hobby Lobby. The nice thing about these is the tree is removable from the base, so when we store these we can remove the trees to save space, and then just stick them back on later. The boulder is made out of some modeling clay we got from Hobby Lobby.
Charles Xavier and Magneto
Here is a view of Wolverine in the bushes.
Wolverine and Red Hulk
Park Square
Next is the parking lot square. We made a dumpster out of the foam and some curb stops out of the clay.
The cars I got from my dad for Christmas because he knows I'm a nerd, and they worked out perfectly for the map. They are slightly smaller than the proper scale, but it's still really cool to have the Batmobile, Joker's car, and a Gotham police cruiser on the map.
Dr. Doom, the Flash, and the Joker
Human Torch, Mr. Fantastic, and Dr. Doom
Joker and his Joker-mobile
Flash coming at the Joker
Parking Lot Square
Next up is the building. This was pretty obviously the most complicated and time consuming square to build, and we saved it for last. We had some pretty cool ideas to make it easy to use and pretty decent looking, and it turned out pretty nicely. We knew right away we wanted to make the walls removable so they could be knocked down like normal walls are. We accomplished that by making a track with long wooden sticks. They made a larger square with a slightly smaller square inside so that the wall pieces would fit in between them nicely and still stay standing. We also made the wall sizes half the height of the building so that we could have both a roof and an indoor area.
The building, with the Bat-copter on top
We used wooden pieces for the columns, and a plexiglass piece from Hobby Lobby for the roof so that we could see inside the building easier. The plexiglass was pretty flexible, so we added wooden pieces around the perimeter to make it stiff, which also makes it look more like a real building. The columns fit into foam pieces that are glued to the underside of the plexiglass. The columns also have small crosspieces attached to them that go between the column and the ground to help it stand up better. The columns and wall pieces can all be removed so that the piece can be stored easier. We also had the idea of adding in a rule where if you blow up all 4 columns the building comes down, dealing 5 or so clicks of damage to everyone in and on the building. We haven't played with this rule yet, but it might be fun to try.
Another rule we want to play with eventually is that a character could choose to smash through the roof and fall down into the building. The penalty would be to take a click of damage, but this could be a way to escape if they become surrounded. This could also work for a character shooting up at the ceiling to drop somebody down into the building next to them. We haven't tried playing with either of these rules yet either. but might eventually. The piece sitting on top of the roof is an air duct, to make the roof less open and more interesting. We also needed a way for the HeroClix to get onto the roof, and since the building is pretty high compared to the map scale just adding stairs would have taken up a lot of space and looked pretty silly. So I came up with an improvised fire escape, with a ladder and a couple stairs, which is both an intermediate perch that can be used to snipe from, or can just be used as a way to get to the roof.
Darkseid on the fire escape and The Batman standing watch
View down into the building from on top
The Batman standing watch
The Batman overlooking the pond
I wanted the building to be related to the superhero universe somehow, so I thought making it a SHIELD office building would be cool. All I added was a couple SHIELD logos to the floor, but I might make a sign for outside eventually. The inside wall pieces are made of foam and moveable, so we can change the arrangement of the inside portion if we wanted. This also makes them able to be knocked down by the HeroClix.
Inside the SHIELD Office
I also made some tables, desks, and couches to add to the building for hindering terrain and throwable objects.
An office
Entering the SHIELD office
Victoria Hand and Sharon Carter, at home in the SHIELD office
That is pretty much everything there is to tell about the map. We're very happy with how it turned out. We have played one game on it so far, 3 players with teams of 400 points. We ended up using and exploring the entire map during the game. We weren't trying to, but one of my friends was using Thanos, who is extremely powerful and very difficult to kill. He ended up winning after a very long game.
The next step is we want to add working street lights to the map since we have an idea for a night mode of the game, where a character that is in the dark being targeted by a ranged combat attack gets +1 to the defense value. That will be pretty fun, and it will make it look really cool. We have the LEDs, wire, and soder, all we have to do is wire it up and build it. After that we want to build a Stark Tower map piece, and I want to make a Joker's funhouse/fortress style map piece. I'm pretty burnt out of building these things now that this is finished, but after a little break from this we'll get the rest made. I'll post pictures when that happens.
