Michael Munkittrick
1
COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Your thoughts are deeply appreciated. My thoughts echo a lot of your points, especially those pertaining to Houdini as a long term project tool. Maya is mind-boggling and awe inspiring, but it’s also a complex tool with infinite possibilities. Great if you’ve got time and EEEK if you don’t.
Cinema 4D seems to be the most inspiring route due to all of the people who have mentioned it, but the one thing that I hear most is its integration with After Effects. Were that symbiosis removed, would CD4 still be as strong a contender in the line-up? Would its modeling tools stand up to those in Maya and Lightwave? Is there anything that I don’t see on their website that you could say to sell me on them?
I am going to need to evolve quite quickly in my market or else I’m going to get mowed under, but making the wrong 3D application choice would be just as detrimental. Anything else that crosses your mind, please share it as I need all the help that I can get.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
Thanks for the input. Thus far I have kind of likened Houdini as the Inferno of the 3D world; super powerful in the right hands and nearly useless in wrong hands. That being said, the list of professional level credits that Houdini boasts invites a lot of curiosity and exudes strength.
As far as XSI goes, I forgot to mention that I used it at one time as well, but the interface simply felt alien and I never got much farther involved after Avid assimilated them. I have heard that it’s a great application form a lot of people, but every time I see it in operation I get that “deer in the headlights” thing.
Truespace is actually one of the tools that I was looking at a few years ago for simple logo twists and extruded text and so on, but it has grown up quite a bit from what I can tell. It’s rendering toolset is still woefully under the bar as far as I’m concerned and the lack of an external render engine or plugins make it even more difficult to choose. The price is right and the product has good support, but it’s just too questionable.
And Luxo is absolutely incredible from the demo work on their site. It does remind me a lot of Lightwave but with the sophistication of Maya, and I’d be all over it, but there is no one within 100 miles of our office who could be called in to work on projects that require more manpower, thus it remains unusable for us at present.
So, Cinema 4D and Maya seem to be the front runners, but 3D Studio Max is only off the mark slightly. C4D’s After Effects integration is very, very cool and the fact that there are a huge host of people who claim to have jumped the ship with 3D Studio it must be a hell of a tool. Maya is a perennial favorite for a lot of Hollywood’s elite, but the learning curve with Maya is such that I would spend most of my waking hours learning it. It has a huge user base and a lot of ways to get support if needed, but to tell you the truth when they were annexed by the 3D Studio team I began to see the funnel effect.
So, now you can see why I have so much trouble choosing. I am convinced of a solution and then talk myself out of believing what I just ingested. I thank you again.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
[shadowgk] “Perhaps you might want to share with the rest of us the process you went through and how the sale was made?”
Nope. Not really, but let me say that the sale started with a simple meeting and had terms like “Our mutal friend ‘insert name here’ said that this was your specialty and that you’d be able to get me in touch with the right people”.
The initial pitch was to directly to people who had the ability to say yes or no at that moment, so I didn’t waste a lot of time getting in front of the folks who could make the decision. One of the biggest problems I faced a few years ago was getting to the guys who made decisions. After a few projects and quite a few business diners, I’m doing what I thought was too hard to accomplish without a huge effort.
The only advice I can sare that would prove useful is to make sure that someone knows what you’re capable of BEFORE you get in front of them. If there are questions about your abilities then every pitch you make will be peppered with questions that make the sale or negotiations skew toward them. The slightest doubt makes a window of escape for the potential buyer.
For the record, we didn’t sell our idea or the rights to it. We’re making it in-house with the hope that it will earn its place. We simply got sponsoship dollars and external fundeing that allowed for the work to move forward. In our case, that boost put us into the perfect place to make some nice profits and possibly create new pilots along the way. I’m writing a journal of the process and I expect to use it as the basis for one of my articles later this year.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
One of the most prized possessions my wife claims to have is the video I made for her on our wedding day. I took photos of myself and got a few from her folks to build a collage of our lives up to that day. I used photos of where I had lived, my trials along the way, my insecurities growing up and my favorite things and let friends and family do the voice-over so that it could be viewed as a third person account. I included photos of her from birth up until the day we met and as many of the more embarrassing pictures of myself I could find and made it a point to express how much of a wreck I was before her. The entire thing was about 6, maybe 8 minutes long and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house after it ended.
The best part was that I made copies for family members that they didn’t see at the wedding that had a copy of quite a few photos and a very brief video of our first dance that went out a month to the day after our wedding. To this day, my wife’s Mom tells me how much she loves that video. It’s sort of clich
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Keep your eyes open for a new plugin called “Reversion” that adds some backward compatibility albeit minimal, and obviously the newer features and funtions will not be present when going back. I’m not sure who created it but I saw it working at a AE users group a few months back. Aside from this potential option, there is no “reverse” in After Effects.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
I’m sorry guy, I didn’t mean to be confusing. “Javascript” is the specific code used to communicate with AE whereas “Java” is a programming environment. I sometimes forget that the two terms aren’t interchangable.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
I’m sorry guy, I didn’t mean to be confusing. “Javascript” is the specific code used to communicate with AE whereas “Java” is a programming environment. I sometimes forget that the two terms aren’t interchangable.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
No need to poke fun at all. Expressions are pretty serious business and the complete grasp of the concept, while mastered by few is still very much in its infancy with respect to After Effects.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that AE scripting isn’t actually specialized code and in fact can be pretty well explained by anyone who has some in depth knowledge of Java. The most complete resource by far is the web as there are far too many still incomprehendable uses for expressions and they will always make modifications…so unlike women, Java is complex (Just kidding ladies).
The first and most advisable option wouldbe to review the tutorials here at the COW as the authors are all very well versed in communicating ideas to the masses in a pretty easy to understand way. As a matter of further comprehension of the scripting capabilities of AE, you really need to look at each idea as it presents itself. The best, or at least the most efficient means of grasping AE scripting is real-world useage that you can directly place into a project that you construct yourself. Above all, understand that there is no “bible” for Java as it relates to AE as of yet, and while there are books titled “Java bibles” out there, they are all more numbers and confusion than my poor old mind can handle.
Keep plugging away.
PS – Forgive the mistypes as I’m on a broken keyboard tonight.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
No need to poke fun at all. Expressions are pretty serious business and the complete grasp of the concept, while mastered by few is still very much in its infancy with respect to After Effects.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that AE scripting isn’t actually specialized code and in fact can be pretty well explained by anyone who has some in depth knowledge of Java. The most complete resource by far is the web as there are far too many still incomprehendable uses for expressions and they will always make modifications…so unlike women, Java is complex (Just kidding ladies).
The first and most advisable option wouldbe to review the tutorials here at the COW as the authors are all very well versed in communicating ideas to the masses in a pretty easy to understand way. As a matter of further comprehension of the scripting capabilities of AE, you really need to look at each idea as it presents itself. The best, or at least the most efficient means of grasping AE scripting is real-world useage that you can directly place into a project that you construct yourself. Above all, understand that there is no “bible” for Java as it relates to AE as of yet, and while there are books titled “Java bibles” out there, they are all more numbers and confusion than my poor old mind can handle.
Keep plugging away.
PS – Forgive the mistypes as I’m on a broken keyboard tonight.
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA -
Ha! I know where you were going with that one. My wife felt that a title such as the unmentionable here would drag in the female viwers in droves…at least until they saw that “bone” actually meant bone. Funny stuff!
Michael Munkittrick
Gainesville, Florida USA