In the realization of the 'Jamo - the taekwondo fighter' animation I used Poser, Vue xStream and Adobe Premiere software applications. With Poser I created the character and his motions, then Jamo was imported into Vue to make an environment for him to exists in and finally Adobe Premiere to build the complete animation film with sound and titles.
I did not have any prior experience with any of the applications but they were all quite easy to learn and intuitive to use. In the following few paragraphs I'll explain what I did, where did I have particular challenges and how I went about them.
Poser! Working with this program was a bit of experience. I found the interface really good but this didn't help much making my charter to do what I wanted.
The program was trying to be smart when doing the framing between two key frames. If the key frames are far away from one another (eg. 40 frames) the interpolating frames might not be what you expect and the result won't be very nice. Sometimes even if you don't want to move the character at all between two frames and set identical poses at the two end frames you still may get crazy action in the middle. Never figured why that happened, my best explanation so far is ... hmm magic! To prevent this from happening I did one key frame on every 5 frames and at some places almost every one is a key frame. This way it took longer to make the animation but it looks nicer and the craziness is reduced.
The other problem was to restrict the joins in Jamo's body to behave as human joins. This was particularly hard, I got all kinds of weird twists, stretches and bends of the body parts. The way I dealt with this problem was to use direct manipulation at least as possible and to switch the control more to the properties pallete. Also knowing the nature of the movements is very important and I always analyzed every small motion before making Jamo doing it. Still from the final movie can be seen that it didn't come out perfect. There are some funny stuff happening to Jamo's arms and sholders but I couldn't do anything about
that.
Even if the movements are right their dynamics is also a big problem - how fast is the character moving, does it do the pauses at the desired locations etc. Fortunately there is is a great tool in Poser that will solve this problem - video footage behind the animated character. The video footage option was my best friend when doing the animation because it is very easy to time the 3D character actions with what the person in the video is doing and his/her positions.
Vue xStream was a great discovery for me! I was originally going to do my environment with Bryce but then I found out that I can't really import Poser animation there. The only thing that it would let me import was a single object/frame. The one way to get around this was to import all the Poser frames I had into Bryce. Well with my 1100 frames that would have been in the best case tedious! The other possibility was to create the environment, export it as an image and use it in Poser as a background to the animated character but in this case truly 3D animation can not be made.
Then I started looking for other applications and found Vue xStream. With this program importing a Poser animation was as easy as possible, import the Poser project and the character is already there ready for action. Besides the compatibility the program has many nice features. One can spend hours just playing with the different options and effects. There are also many objects that are installed and can be used. In my animation the lake house and the boath are some of those objects. The creation of the atmosphere, the grass and the flowers wasn't that hard to do either.
The one task that I had some problems with was the position of the camera and its path trough the space but besides that working with Vue xStream went really well. When everything was ready the animation was rendered from there.
The rendering took almost 15h just for the 46 seconds animation and it was only on a preview setting, it would have taken weeks probably to do it on a final quality!
Adobe Premiere helped me to assemble the final film that is posted in the 'Animations' section of this web site. I added the sound effects of the ocean waves, the splash and the sound that comes from Jamo's movements. The beginning and ending titles were also added with Premiere.
After all this my short animations was done and ready to see the world and the world to see it!