Film School:Digital Puppets:Scenery generation

Beginning 2008

This page is under construction today
This school is:
Wikiversity Film School - Narrative film production
This course is:
The basics of narrtive film animation with digital puppets
Lessons in Digital Puppet Animation Course
Introduction: Introduction to digital puppets
Lesson: Character animation with digital puppets
Lesson: Scenery Generation
Lesson: Compositing characters & scenery
Lesson: Dialog recording
Lesson: Film scoring
Lesson: Film editing



Step #2

Making the movie sets for digital puppets

All about the filmmaking courses

In the first basic filmmaking course (pre-production), the goal is to create an animatic movie from storyboards created using FrameForge 3D Studio for "Seduced by the Dark Side!". The purpose of the animatic is to determine the timing of the final animation. This month hopefully, the first animatic will be completed.

The next course uses DAZ Studio to create an animated version of the motion picture "Seduced by the Dark Side!"

DAZ Studio has very limited animation capability... but it is free. Because the animation will not look perfect, we cannot use regular humans for models. Instead, I have tried to find cartoonish figures such as the Penguins or the Bears or the Croc. These models are NOT free but the cost is under $20.

There are about 15 shots in this movie. Instructions need to be created for each of the shots using DAZ Studio and one of the computer models.


For the movie "Seduced by the Dark Side!", we need an old person and a young person. With the Penguins or the Bears or the Croc, it is possible to use these figures so that there is a young and an old person.

Have you found any free models which have a young person and an old person? These figures must look good together. Many of the free versions are only for a young person or only for an older person but not both. Some of the more realistic free models are too hard to create realistic animation for.

Most of the animation is very simple. But the final shot has a huge theater model. To do this, we will probably use Bryce 5.5 which is free (or I hope it still is free.)

Then we will composite the animation from DAZ Studio with still images created in Bryce. This save a huge amount of rendering time.


When you find interesting free 3D figures, please put a rendering or two of the figures at Storyboard Artwork Project/Stamps so I can see them (and so kids with TuxPaint can use them.)

Select from the following Digital Puppets

Percy and Son

Here is a single figure from 3D Universe which is ideal for this story.

Big Croc and Little Croc

Here is a single figure from 3D Universe which is ideal for this story.

Select from the following digital puppet animation programs

Bruce is free

DAZ's Bryce version 5.5 is free so that makes it the official program for this project

Vue

Vue is not free but it is a better scenery generation program than DAZ's Bryce. But free is free so we will use DAZ's Bryce 5.5.

Next build a movie set

The next page

Next we look at the program for combining the actors with the movie sets Next Lesson Description

Contact your instructor

Your instructor for this filmmaking class is Robert Elliott. You can email me by clicking here.