Emergency supplies emergency!

A new 3d animatied short from Tanadrine Studios is headed for Newgrounds in the near future.

While I will be posting updates on our progress primarily at delura.tanadrine.com, remember that we update our weekly comic HERE on NEWGROUNDS (in our art section), so if you enjoy sci-fi stuff, fav meh!

Full size image

No news for the time being, so I'll put this post here for now (to throw any commentary or questions if desired).

Lightwave isn't best known for its motion management functions, but here I go over how one goes about saving and applying animations across various character rigs. These are things I'd like to see become native tools in Lightwave.
www.youtube.com/embed/q7pyLdSIp4Y (embed won't work. Oh well).

Yeah... maybe not the most exciting of front page posts, but if anyone is curious about the brain-breaking process of making our series self sustaining while also fair to all of the artists involved, check out this blog post on our website

Feel free to leave your commentary here or on our website. You think the concept is smart? Dumb? Bullet-hole-ridden? Let it all out! :)

The point is... there needs to be a mechanism for making indie content support itself fully and completely over an extended period of time and I believe that it is an area with a TON of uncharted territory. Ad revenue is a nice thing, but it cannot stand alone.

Over the past 2 weeks i've been struggling to learn how to get a good compositing workflow going. Lightwave has no built-in tools for easily generating render passes, so I had to find and then learn how to use a plugin that enables this capability.

Of course, I then had to learn how to best utilize these render passes with Blender. It is easy, but there's a lot of hurdles you have to jump over before things work right (I find Blenders default settings less than smart).

So... in the interest of saving others the extreme frustration of clawing their way up the totem pole of knowledge, i've decided to put out this tutorial video. Perhaps someone else who may read this news post who uses 3d applications may find the Blender side of the tutorial useful? Blender as far as I know contains the only free compositing functions in the free software category.

This is actually way outside of the usual type of content I publish, but alas it was in the script.

Caption it! Damnit!

A new animated short of the series made by Toonwerks! I command you to watch it!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/618449

This is the name of this space-faring critter (WIP model shown) and the title of our upcoming animated short which I'm planning on having completed within the next 2 weeks.

This 1-minute short served multiple purposes, but I thought I'd have fun making it while learning and refining both our tools and the new modern workstation that was recently funded entirely by our loyal fans! Mainly, the short was made to:

- Crash-test the new character rigs in order to pinpoint any potential needed improvements. I don't feel just moving the character in place is enough to really know whether character animation concepts in 3d actually work in a production. Sometimes a character rig may seem nice at a glance... but it falls apart when trying to finish a project with it. Too much automation can actually hold character animation back!

- Try out some new character modeling methods... visuals have always been a weak point in Delura's overall production and I hope the new workstation will help us to bring things up to par in that department... if only to find ways to soften lighting, get cleaner texture maps, and improve the poly flow of character models.

- See how quickly an animated short could be produced using modern hardware. This short required about 3 days to animate, 1 day of lighting/FX, 1 day audio. This is actually slower than I'd like things to be; my previous character rigs allowed for 60 seconds of character animation in a day but they had to be re-constructed due to the transition from a 32-bit to a 64-bit operating system.

Anyhow, that's it for now. Expect some more Tanadrine Studios goodness on Newgrounds over the coming months! Ever since NG added the ability to upload video, I've absolutely loved it here... I mean my god the users actually give useful feedback (good and bad!) :)